Mediterranean Diet, Heavy on the Olive Oil, Can Reduce Risk of Chronic Disease

According to a new review con­ducted by researchers in the U.S., a Mediterranean diet with no restric­tion of good fats like olive oil was asso­ci­ated with a lower risk of car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, breast can­cer, and type 2 dia­betes.

The review and meta-analy­sis gath­ered data from Ovid Medline, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Library from 1990 through April 2016.
See Also:Olive Oil Health Benefits
The review­ers iso­lated and ana­lyzed 90 papers that met all the inclu­sion cri­te­ria. The pur­pose of the study was to sum­ma­rize the lit­er­a­ture com­par­ing a Mediterranean diet with unre­stricted fat intake with other diets regard­ing their effects on health out­comes in adults.

After ana­lyz­ing the data, the results showed that a Mediterranean diet with no restric­tion on fat intake may be asso­ci­ated with reduced inci­dence of car­dio­vas­cu­lar events, breast can­cer, and type 2 dia­betes mel­li­tus com­pared with any other diet.

Observational data also revealed that total can­cer inci­dence and mor­tal­ity, and col­orec­tal and lung can­cer inci­dence, were lower in per­sons with the high­est adher­ence to the Mediterranean diet com­pared with those with the low­est adher­ence.

Interestingly, researchers included in the def­i­n­i­tion of the diet an unlim­ited intake of fat. ​“I think the main mes­sage of the study is that adher­ence to a Mediterranean diet can result in decrease in car­dio­vas­cu­lar events and can­cers and that the diet does not have to be low in fat,” said Hanna Bloomfield, the lead researcher and pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine.

Recent stud­ies have shown that a low-fat diet may not be the best choice for pre­ven­tion of chronic dis­ease but also for weight loss. The mes­sage for decades to con­sumers and patients has been that low-fat diets are health­ier when, in fact, research is show­ing quite the oppo­site, espe­cially when the fat is healthy fat.

“If you’re try­ing to eat a healthy diet, one of the impor­tant things you should do is include olive oil as your main cook­ing oil or salad oil and eat a lot of fruits and veg­eta­bles of dif­fer­ent col­ors,” Bloomfield added.

The authors noted that the ben­e­fits of a diet that did not restrict healthy fats can lead to a new focus on the role of fat and dietary health.

• Annals of Internal Medicine


• The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology