Mediterranean Diet Lowers Risk of Dying from Heart Diseases

Eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables and nuts may help protect people from heart disease, cancerdefine, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, a new study that assessed the benefits of a "Mediterranean" diet has found.

A Mediterranean-style diet loaded with fruits, vegetables and olive oil can help reduce the risk of developing chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancerdefine and Alzheimer's, a team of researchers from the University of Florence suggests.

The Mediterranean diet containing high amounts of cereals, wine, fruits, nuts, legumes and whole grains, fish and olive oil, is already being recommended by physicians to prevent heart disease, strokes, cancer, allergic rhinitis and asthma symptoms; and now the researchers suggest that it can also protect against neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most frequent type of dementia in the elderly and affects almost half of all patients with dementia. Advancing age is the primary risk factor for Alzheimer's. Among people aged 65, 2-3% show signs of the disease, while 25-50% of people aged 85 have the symptoms.

Lead researcher, Francesco Sofi of the University of Florence and colleagues reached their conclusions after analyzing the findings of 12 international studies that included more than 1.5 million participants.

Sofi and his team of Italian researchers created a scale of one to nine levels corresponding to different food groups and tracked the eating habits and health of the study participants for follow-up periods of three to 18 years.

Sofi’s team found in their research that the study participants who strictly stuck to a so-called Mediterranean diet had a 9 percent drop in overall mortality, 9 percent decrease in death from heart disease, a 13 percent reduction in incidence of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease and a 6 percent reduction in cancer compared to those who did not fully endorsed the Mediterranean diet.

"These results seem to be clinically relevant for public health, particularly for encouraging a Mediterranean-like dietary pattern for primary prevention of major chronic diseases," Sofi said. "Our findings support a simple recommendation: eat in a more Mediterranean way because it reduces the incidence of chronic disease."

The researchers reported their findings in the online edition of the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

The researchers are currently working on a so-called adherence score for the diet that they hope might help people improve their eating habits. They suggest that keeping an 'adherence score' system could be an effective preventive tool for minimizing the patients’ risk of mortality and morbidity.

"Greater adherence to a Mediterranean diet is associated with a significant improvement in health status” the researchers suggest.

The Mediterranean diet is a nutritional model inspired by the traditional dietary patterns of the countries of the Mediterranean basin, particularly Southern Italy, southern France, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal and Spain.

Common to the diets of these regions are a high consumption of fruit, vegetables, bread, cereals, olive oil and fish; making them low in saturated fat and high in monounsaturated fat and dietary fiber.