The Mediterranean Diet: May 2011

How to Lose Weight With The Greek Mediterranean Diet

1. Subdivide your daily food intake into 4-5 sitting. This division helps you digest foods more efficiently and better utilize the main nutrients present in your food.

2. Eat proper amounts of pasta. This is a product capable of acting as the main ingredient of meals.

3. Accompany foods with bread. Try to choose multi-grain bread or traditional Italian bread or rolls and avoid as much as you can speciality breads, that are often prepared with the addition of oil or butter.

4. Include “all-in-one-meals” like pasta with vegetables or legumes in your daily routines. They are typical of Italian cuisine and provide you with the same nutrients as a three-course meal while being also lower in calories.

5. Use olive oil as your preferred fat. It's an extremely digestible fat capable of assisting in the digestion of other fats. Recent studies also suggest that olive oil is the key to the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet, due to its content of phenols, a family of weak acidic that repress genes which cause inflammation, so decreasing the risk of heart disease and arthritis.

6. Eat alternative meats such as chicken, rabbit, pork, turkey. They carry similar nutritional values to red meats, but are less fatty by nature.

7. Eat plenty of fish, with special attention to blue fish like sardines and anchovies. They have elevated nutritional value and low fat composition.

8. Limit the use of salt, replacing it with traditional Mediterranean herbs and spices to increase the flavor of foods.

9. Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits, which guarantee the proper consumption of fiber, minerals and vitamins (especially carotene, vitamin C, Vitamin B6 and folate).

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Sunday, 29 May 2011

Nuts boost health benefit of Mediterranean diet

Adding nuts to a traditional Mediterranean diet rich in fruit and vegetables appears to provide extra health benefits, Spanish researchers said on Monday.

A daily serving of mixed nuts helped a group of older people manage their metabolic syndrome, a group of related disorders such as obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and abnormal blood sugar, Jordi Salas-Salvado of the University of Rovira i Virgili in Spain and colleagues said.

"The results of the present study show that a non-energy-restricted traditional Mediterranean diet enriched with nuts, which is high in fat, high in unsaturated fat and palatable, is a useful tool in managing the metabolic syndrome," they wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The findings add to existing evidence of the health benefits of a Mediterranean diet that emphasises vegetables, fish and healthy fats such as olive oil over red meat and alcohol. Studies have linked the diet to reduced risk of diabetes, asthma and a range of other conditions.

Monday, 16 May 2011

The Key to the Mediterranean Diet: Wine

It’s been clear for a while now that adhering to The Greek Mediterranean Diet can lower risk of dearth(in the short to medium term, anyway).

But the diet has many components, and it hasn’t been clear which elements of the diet are responsible for this benefit. An analysis published in the BMJ aimed to find out.

Researchers based at Harvard and the University of Athens looked at data collected from more than 20,000 Greek men and women who were followed for an average of more than eight years as part of a study of nutrition and health.

They assessed participants’ adherence to nine components of the Mediterranean diet. They found that overall, people who adhered more closely to the diet were less likely to die during the study. They also parsed the data to see which elements of the diet were most strongly associated with this benefit. Here, in descending order of importance, are the keys:

A moderate amount of alcohol (usually wine)
A small amount of meat
Lots of vegetables
Lots of fruits and nuts
A high ratio of monounsaturated to saturated fats
Lots of legumes

Tuesday, 3 May 2011

Mediterranean diet linked to fertility

Women who closely adhere to a Mediterranean-style diet rich in vegetables, vegetable oils and fish have a higher chance of becoming pregnant after infertility treatment..
The researchers did not assess pregnancy outcomes, so the diet's relationship to the ultimate success of fertility treatment is not clear. The Mediterranean and health-conscious diets had many similarities, but there are a few potential reasons why the former might affect fertility treatment success. One is the high intake of vegetable oils in the Mediterranean diet. The omega-6 fatty acids in these oils, the researchers note, are precursors to hormone-like substances in the body called prostaglandins. Prostaglandins, in turn, are involved in the menstrual cycle, ovulation and pregnancy maintenance.
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The Mediterranean Diet

Mediterranean Diet Food Pyramid

How to Lose Weight With The Greek Mediterranean Diet

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