My Thoughts on the Mediterranean Diet

Video Transcription:
In this video, I’m doing an update on the status of the Mediterranean diet, because I just read another article and this diet is still being studied. Like I had mentioned in a previous video, it’s one of the top healthy diets overall for anybody.

The study that came out is talking about things that are pertinent to diabetes so the aspect of this diet that is so beneficial are 3 things:

• insulin resistance
• lipoprotein metabolism
• inflammation.

All 3 of those are involved in diabetes so the Mediterranean diet uses liberal amounts of healthy olive oil, it favors the fruit and the vegetable groups, legumes, nuts, seeds, fish, and low fat dairy products. Of course, you know the Western diet is meat heavy and the Mediterranean diet is not and so it says to limit processed meats as well as sweets, (which everybody should do).

The effect of the diet on diabetes has been studied by the lead author, Dr Amed, at Harvard. They studied over 25,000 women and it was a women’s health study between Sept, 1992 and May, 1995. Over this time period, 2300 women developed type 2 diabetes out of 25,000. They followed all of them though for over 20 years, in fact it was 19.8 years. That’s a very long follow up for a study.

What they found was that women that had the highest adherence to the diet - 30% of them had lower risk of developing diabetes. Now if you take the stuff that is involved in diabetes, those 3 things that I mentioned earlier, the individual markers that accounted for that decrease was 65% for decreasing BMI, a 53% for an increase in high density lipoproteins and then a 52.5% decrease for inflammation so the majority of the 65% decrease for BMI was for BMI above 25. So if your BMI 23 - 25 that’s not the group they are talking about. They are talking about heavier people that get the bigger advantage

The diet is great for heart disease and diabetes, but it's also for those with  non alcohol fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which stands for non alcoholic fatty liver disease and that goes a long way with diabetes because of those 3 things that we mentioned already.

So since the insulin resistance starts years before hand, their whole summary was basically saying that we need to target these people that have insulin resistance because early education for these people would probably do the most good.

I just wanted you to know that the Mediterranean diet is still the best diet that you can be on, no matter what you are trying to achieve, whether its weight loss, or better health.

Have you tried the Mediterranean diet?