Health Benefits of a Mediterranean Diet

Edited By Jonathan D. Kantrowitz

Published by Tsadek Press

Copyright, Jonathan Kantrowitz 2014

8.5 x 11, 167 pages

$12.95

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This book (along with its companion volume Health Benefits of Fruits and Vegetables) includes an incredible collection of research reports on the almost unbelievable health benefits of eating a Mediterranean style diet, including longevity benefits as well as prevention of cancer, heart disease, cognitive decline and dementia.

In addition to the benefits of a complete Mediterranean style diet, this book includes dramatic reports on the benefits of component parts of the diet, including consumption of fish, olive oil, nuts, whole grains and fiber.

Table of Contents

Health Benefits of a Mediterranean Diet

Longevity                                                                              

Heart Attack and Stroke                                                    

Cancer                                                                                  
Diabetes                                                                                
Miscellaneous Benefits                                                      
Eye Disease Benefits                                                                      
Diabetes Benefits                                                                
Bone Health Benefits                                                                     
Mercury in Fish and Fish Oil                                            
Heart Disease                                                                                  
Tree Nuts in General                                                         
Pistachios                                                                             
Walnuts                                                                                
Miscellaneous Nuts                                                            
Heart Disease and Stroke                                                  
Overall Health and Mortality                                            

Cognitive Decline/Dementia Benefits                             

Health Benefits of Fish and Fish Oil

Mortality Benefits    `                                                          

Heart Attack and Stroke Benefits/Dangers                     

Cancer Benefits and Risks                                                 

Cognitive Benefits                                                              

Inflammation, Mood and Anxiety Benefits                      

Miscellaneous Benefits                                                      

Health Benefits of a Fiber Rich Diet

Cancer                                                                                  

Diabetes                                                                                

Mortality                                                                              

Overall Health                                                                     

Health Benefits of Nut Consumption

Tree Nuts in General                                    

Pistachios                                                             

Walnuts                                              

Miscellaneous Nuts                 

Health Benefits of Olive Oil

Cancer                                                                                                                

Heart Disease and Stroke                                                                     

Health Benefits of Whole Grains

Heart Disease and Stroke                                                  

Overall Health and Mortality                          
___________________________________________________________
Sample reports:

Mediterranean Diet May Help Women Live Longer, Healthier Lives

Middle-aged women who follow a heart-healthy Mediterranean diet may live a healthier, longer life, a new study suggests.

"Women with healthier dietary patterns at midlife were 40 percent more likely to survive to age 70 or over," said lead researcher Cecilia Samieri, a postdoctoral fellow who conducted the study while at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. She is now a researcher at INSERM and Universite de Bordeaux, in France. INSERM is the French equivalent of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The women who ate healthier not only lived longer, but they also thrived. They were less likely to have any major chronic diseases and more likely to have no impairment in physical functioning, mental health or thinking skills. The research did not, however, prove a cause-and-effect link between better eating and longer life.

Samieri said she considers the 40 percent boost substantial. Those who closely followed the Mediterranean diet were more likely to live past age 70 without heart disease, diabetes or other chronic diseases. They also were more likely to be classified as "healthy agers" than those who didn't follow the diets closely or at all. However, Samieri said, "only 11 percent of our participants were classified as healthy agers overall."

The study was published Nov. 5, 2013 in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. It was funded by the U.S. National Cancer Institute and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

For the study, Samieri and her colleagues evaluated the diet and medical records of more than 10,000 women who participated in the much larger Nurses' Health Study. The women were in their late 50s or early 60s between 1984 and 1986, and were free of major chronic diseases. About 15 years later, they again provided information on their diet and their health.

The Mediterranean diet is characterized by greater intake of fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains and fish; lower intake of red and processed meats; moderate intake of alcohol; higher amounts of monounsaturated fats, mostly provided by olive oil from Mediterranean countries; and lower amounts ofsaturated fats. Saturated fats are found in baked goods, fatty meats and other foods.

Although the study did not look at men, Samieri said, previous studies on diet and healthy aging have found no gender differences, "so it seems reasonable to believe that the benefit would be similar." She added, however, that the assumption remains to be proven.

Although Samieri did not study the effect of how long someone was on a diet, she said adopting it earlier rather than later is probably better.

What's the key to the diet seeming to give more years? Samieri said the analysis suggests that the overall healthy diet patterns had a greater impact rather than any individual food.

Other studies also have found that healthy diets such as the Mediterranean diet are linked to better long-term health, but this new study is only observational, said Connie Diekman, director of university nutrition at Washington University in St. Louis. That means "cause and effect cannot be conclusively linked," said Diekman, former president of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Eating more vegetables, fruits, nuts, pulses and olive oil, = people live longer

Some food groups in the Mediterranean diet are more important than others in promoting health and longer life according to new research published on bmj.com.

Eating more vegetables, fruits, nuts, pulses and olive oil, and drinking moderate amounts of alcohol, while not consuming a lot of meat or excessive amounts of alcohol is linked to people living longer.

However, the study also claims, that following a Mediterranean diet high in fish, seafood and cereals and low in dairy products were not indicators of longevity.

While several studies have concluded that the Mediterranean diet improves chances of living longer, most recently the study described here, this is the first to investigate the importance of individual components of the diet.

Professor Dimitrios Trichopoulos at the Harvard School of Public Health explains that they have surveyed over 23,000 men and women who were participants in the Greek segment of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC).

Participants were given dietary and lifestyle questionnaires when they enrolled onto the study and they were subsequently followed up for around 8.5 years with interviews. Their diets were rated from 0 to 10 based on the level of conformity to a traditional Mediterranean diet.

As part of the interview process, participants were also asked about their smoking status, levels of physical activity and whether they had ever been diagnosed with cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

The authors maintain that when high intake of vegetables, low intake of meat or moderate alcohol intake were excluded from the rating system, the benefits of following a Mediterranean diet were substantially reduced. They also note that there are clear benefits in combining several of the key components, for example high consumption of vegetables and olive oil.

Professor Trichopoulou, lead author of the study, concludes that the main reasons why the Mediterranean diet can lead to living longer are moderate consumption of ethanol (mostly in the form of wine during meals, as traditionally done in the Mediterranean countries), low consumption of meat and meat products, and high consumption of vegetables, fruits and nuts, olive oil and legumes.

“Prudent” diet (higher intake of fruits and vegetables; associated with a lower heart attack risk

The typical Western diet — fried foods, salty snacks and meat — accounts for about 30 percent of heart attack risk across the world, according to a study of dietary patterns in 52 countries reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Researchers identified three dietary patterns in the world:

• Oriental: higher intake of tofu, soy and other sauces;

• Prudent: higher intake of fruits and vegetables; and

• Western: higher intake of fried foods, salty snacks, eggs and meat.

The Prudent diet was associated with a lower heart attack risk than the Oriental, researchers said.

“The objective of this study was to understand the modifiable risk factors of heart attacks at a global level,” said Salim Yusuf, D.Phil., the study’s senior author.

Previous studies have reached similar conclusions about the Prudent and Western diet in the United States and Europe. This study broadens those findings and identifies a unique dietary pattern that researchers labeled “Oriental” (because of a higher content of food items typical of an Oriental diet.) The dietary pattern recommended by the American Heart Association is similar to the Prudent diet described in this study.

“This study indicates that the same relationships that are observed in Western countries exist in different regions of the world,” said Yusuf, professor of medicine at McMaster University and director of the Population Health Research Institute at Hamilton Health Sciences in Ontario, Canada.

Researchers analyzed the INTERHEART study, which documents the association of various risk factors and the risk of heart attack in about 16,000 participants in 52 countries. Here, they analyzed 5,761 heart attack cases and compared them to 10,646 people without known heart disease (controls).

The researchers created a dietary risk score questionnaire for heart attacks patients, based on 19 food groups and adjusted it for dietary preferences for each country. Trained medical personnel interviewed the heart attack patients and the control group. The questionnaires included healthy food items (such as fruits and vegetables) and unhealthy food items (such as fried foods and salty snacks).

“A simple dietary score, which included both good and bad foods with the higher score indicating a worse diet, showed that 30 percent of the risk of heart disease in a population could be related to poor diet,” said Romania Iqbal, Ph.D., lead author of the study.

After adjusting for known risk factors, researchers found:

• People who consumed the Prudent diet of more fruits and vegetables had a 30 percent lower risk of heart attack compared to people who ate little or no fruits and vegetables.

• People who consumed the Western diet had a 35 percent greater risk of having a heart attack compared to people who consumed little or no fried foods and meat.

• The Oriental pattern showed no relationship with heart attack risk.

Researchers said that while some components of the Oriental pattern may be protective, others such as the higher sodium content of soy sauces, may increase cardiovascular risk, neutralizing any relationship.

It’s expensive and time-consuming to establish a large and long-term study examining the relationship of diet and heart attack in every region of the world. So the approach of this study is the only feasible way to examine the relationship to diet and heart disease from multiple populations in a relatively short time at an affordable cost, Yusuf said.

Data from this study helped confirm that changes in dietary intake, including the consumption of more fruits and vegetables, can help reduce the risk of having a heart attack in populations worldwide, he said.

“At the same time, an unhealthy dietary intake, assessed by a simple dietary risk score, accounts for nearly one-third of the world population’s attributable risk,” Yusuf said.

Mediterranean diet gives longer life

A Mediterranean diet with large amounts of vegetables and fish gives a longer life. This is the unanimous result of four studies to be published by the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg. Research studies ever since the 1950s have shown that a Mediterranean diet, based on a high consumption of fish and vegetables and a low consumption of animal-based products such as meat and milk, leads to better health.

Scientists at the Sahlgrenska Academy have now studied the effects of a Mediterranean diet on older people in Sweden. They have used a unique study known as the "H70 study" to compare 70-year-olds who eat a Mediterranean diet with others who have eaten more meat and animal products. The H70 study has studied thousands of 70-year-olds in the Gothenburg region for more than 40 years.

The results show that those who eat a Mediterranean diet have a 20% higher chance of living longer. "This means in practice that older people who eat a Mediterranean diet live an estimated 2 3 years longer than those who don't", says Gianluca Tognon, scientist at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg.

These results are supported by three further as yet unpublished studies into Mediterranean diets and their health effects: one carried out on people in Denmark, the second on people in northern Sweden, and the third on children.

"The conclusion we can draw from these studies is that there is no doubt that a Mediterranean diet is linked to better health, not only for the elderly but also for youngsters", says Gianluca Tognon.

Mediterranean diet associated with lower death rate over 5 years

Eating a Mediterranean diet and following national recommendations for physical activity are each associated with a reduced risk of death over a five-year period, according to two reports in the of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Both studies use data from the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study, which began when questionnaires were returned from 566,407 AARP members age 50 to 71 in six states between 1995 and 1996.

In one study, Panagiota N. Mitrou, Ph.D., then of the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Md., and now of the University of Cambridge, England, and colleagues used a nine-point scale to assess conformity with the Mediterranean diet in 380,296 of the participants (214,284 men and 166,012 women) with no history of chronic disease. Components of the diet included vegetables, legumes, fruits, nuts, whole grains, fish, ratio of monounsaturated fats, alcohol and meat. During five years of follow-up, 12,105 participants died, including 5,985 from cancer and 3,451 from cardiovascular disease. Those with higher Mediterranean diet scores were less likely to die of any cause or of cancer or heart disease.