Mediterranean diet: 30% fewer cardiovascular diseases

Eating walnuts, beans, fish, fruit and vegetables, and consuming olive oil and wine with meals can prevent around 30 per cent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease.

This is what emerges from a study lasting almost 5 years and published in recent weeks in the New England Journal of Medicinewhich focused on the effects of the Mediterranean diet on the risk of heart problems.

The benefits appear so evident that the research analyses were reportedly halted, as reported by the New York Times, because it would have made no sense to continue, amounting only to a waste of resources.

The study was conducted in Spain on a sample of 7,447 randomly selected people divided into 3 groups. In all cases these were subjects who were overweight, smokers, diabetic or otherwise at risk of heart disease, who were placed partly on fat-free diets and partly on Mediterranean diets. The study showed that the balanced consumption of foods based on olive oil accompanied by walnuts, beans, fish, fruit, vegetables and wine can deliver greater benefits than a fat-free diet.