What is the Mediterranean Diet?
Over the last three decades a lot has been written about how the French ate a diet high in fat and didn't have the problems with obesity that America has developed. The so-called French Paradox has been the foundation of a great deal of research, and that reasearch extended well beyond France to almost every country surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.
The research is founded in the early work of Ancel Keys. He recognized this phenomenon and his early research has been the cornerstone of what we now call the Mediterranean diet. While the name seems exotic, the style of eating really isn't all that unusual and is actually pretty simple. It is easily adaptable to our Western style diet.
It is higher in vegetables, beans and peas (legumes), fruits and nuts, and whole grains. They use olive oil as their main fat and eat much less highly saturated fats like butter, shortening and lard (butter is actually used sparingly and carefully for maximum flavor and texture). Instead of beef and poultry, they eat more fish. Most of the dairy products eaten are yogurts and cheeses.
This is not to say that the Mediterranean style diet doesn't include meat. It's just that the meat is lean and eaten much less often. All of this is combined with a moderate consumption of alcohol -- mostly with meals and mostly wine.
While I will quote a lot of research in this book, one of the best pieces of research we have was a large study of over 22,000 healthy adults in Greece (NEJM 2003;348:2599-2608). This was the first big study that showed that those eating a Mediterranean diet had much lower rates of dying from cancer and heart disease. Before this study we didn't have the same quality guidelines for how to eat. People were told silly things like don't eat eggs or butter or meat, but there were no good guidelines to tell you what actually worked to improve your health. The other bonus from this research is that it proved a link between diet and cancer, which up to then wasn't as conclusive.
The researchers followed the 22,000 participants and looked at the nine dietary components that I mentioned above - veggies, legumes, fruits and nuts, whole grains, fats and oils, fish, dairy foods, meats and alcohol.
The best part of this research is that it is so simple. The researchers gave a value of either 1 or 0 for each of the nine diet categories. If someone in the study was found to have eaten a diet higher in one of the dietary components they received a 1. The perfect score for a Mediterranean diet would be 9, while a tally of 0 is more along the lines of a Western diet. The results showed that those with better scores lived longer. Simple.
The best part is that small changes can have a huge effect on your health. A two point improvement - say from 5 to 7 - resulted in a 25% lower chance of death from heart disease. By just making small changes in your diet, you can have a major impact on your health. In the coming weeks I'll tell you about other research to support each of these nine areas and give you some practical ways to make these changes in your own diet.