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Mediterranean
diet helps ward off strokes, cancer: Study
PARIS
- The so-called Mediterranean diet cuts the risk of
heart disease, cancer and neurodegenerative conditions
such as Alzheimer’s, according to research released
Friday.
Piecemeal evidence over the last three decades has shown
that a diet rich in grains, fruit, vegetables and olive
oil but stingy on meat and dairy -- washed down with
a modest daily dose of wine -- promotes health.
But a meta-study published in the British Medical Journal
is the first to sift through all this data in an attempt
to quantify the overall benefits.
“Our findings support a simple recommendation:
eat in a more Mediterranean way because it reduces the
incidence of chronic disease,” the lead researcher,
Francesco Sofi of the University of Florence, told AFP
by phone.
Pouring over a dozen scientific surveys conducted since
1966 and involving more than 1.5 million people, Sofi
and a team of researchers in Italy created a scale of
one to nine corresponding to different food groups.
Someone who consumed all the healthiest foodstuffs and
largely avoided the harmful ones -- a theoretically-perfect
Mediterranean diet -- would score a perfect nine, he
explained.
The study found that a bump of two points anywhere in
the scale -- moving, say, from zero to two, or from
six to eight -- corresponded to a “significant
reduction in overall mortality,” Sofi said.
When broken down by disease, such a shift in dietary
habits lowered the risk of death from cardiovascular
disease by nine percent and from cancer by six percent.
The study also evaluated a recent set of findings on
the impact of diet on neurodegenerative disease, and
concluded that going Mediterranean decreased the incidence
of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s by 13 percent.
These results are “clinically relevant for public
health,” and suggest that getting one’s daily
calorie intake from these food groups could play an
important role in preventing major chronic diseases,
Sofi said.
Despite growing evidence of its benefits, some specialists,
up to now, have been reluctant to fully endorse the
Mediterranean way.
“We need more studies to find out whether the diet
itself or other lifestyle factors account for the lower
deaths from heart disease,” the American Heart
Association says on its website.
Ironically, most of the more than dozen countries ringing
the Mediterranean Sea are slowly abandoning their traditional
foods in favour of more meat, saturated fats and processed
foods, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture
Organisation (FAO).
“The European diet has become too fat, too salty
and too sweet,” Josef Schmidhuber, an economist
at the FAO, said earlier this month in a statement.
The traditional balance of foods found in southern Europe
and Northern Africa “is declining into a moribund
state,” he said.
Historically, more than half the fat calories in a Mediterranean
diet come from monounsaturated fats -- mainly olive
oil -- that do not raise blood cholesterol levels the
way saturated fats do.
Sofi hopes that his scoring system might help people
improve their eating habits.
“Adherence to the score could be a good way to
measure the quality of a diet,” he said. He is
currently doing more research on what the optimum quantity
of each food group would be for a balanced diet.
“Then we would be in a position to recommend eating
a specific amount of, say, fish or fruits,” he
said. (AFP)
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