You thought I was going to let National Heart Month slip by without saying anything about it, didn’t you. How silly. I’ll admit, it’s kind of down to the wire, but how could I not stand up and shout when yet another study is extolling the virtues of my beloved Mediterranean diet.
The study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, was part of the large PREDIMED multicenter trial. The study randomly assigned participants to a Mediterranean diet supplemented with olive oil, a Mediterranean diet supplemented with nuts, or a control (regular) diet. (Randomized clinical trials are the research gold standard, FYI.)
The researchers looked at how many heart attacks (myocardial infarction), strokes and deaths from cardiovascular disease occurred during the study period. The two groups following the Mediterranean diet had about 30 percent fewer of such outcomes.
As Gina Kolata (one of my favorite science writers) mentions in her article for The New York Times about the study, “Mediterranean Diet is Shown to Ward Off Heart Attack and Stroke“:
The study ended early, after almost five years, because the results were so clear it was considered unethical to continue.
Now, where did I put those almonds?
