he Mediterranean diet is the traditional diet of populations living around the Mediterranean sea in Europe and North Africa. Evidence is accumulating from epidemiology, animal studies and intervention trials that regular consumption of the diet is beneficial to the health. In particular, the diet is protective of cardiovascular disease, possibly because research has shown that it can improve insulin sensitivity and thus reduce the risk of developing metabolic syndrome. However, research has also shown that those consuming the Mediterranean diet have a lower risk of developing certain cancers. The reason the Mediterranean diet is beneficial to health is likely the high content of whole grain carbohydrates, unprocessed meats, fatty fish, dairy and plant based foods, as well as the regular consumption of wine.
The benefits of the Mediterranean diet has resulted in the creation of a score that can be used to assess the similarity between an individual’s diet and that of the traditional Mediterranean diet. This is often used as a research tool to investigate the association between disease and diet. For example, one group of researchers1 investigated the relationship between the Mediterranean diet score and disease in a population of subjects who resided in Northern Sweden. In the study 77,151 subjects had their diets assessed by a frequent food questionnaire and medical records used to assess their disease outcomes. The results showed that the Mediterranean diet score was inversely associated with all cause mortality in both men and women. In addition, men also had an inverse association between their Mediterranean diet score and total cancer mortality, with a particularly strong inverse association for pancreatic cancer.
These results therefore support other studies that have shown beneficial effects for the Mediterranean diet on cancer and cardiovascular disease risk. Only the alcohol and fruit content of the diet were significantly protective of mortality, suggesting that the foods in the diet may have synergistic effects that are not significant in isolation. This supports recent findings to show that diet quality as a whole rather than individual foods are the real determinants of disease outcome. This shift in the perception of nutritional research has been apparent in the last 5 years or so, and highlights the difference in the mechanism of action between nutrients and drugs. While drugs may have measurable short-tern effects, many nutrients are only effective when in combination with other nutrients, and protective effects only become apparent over decades of consumption. Increasing the Mediterranean diet score is therefore a long-term strategy to improve health.
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