Mediterranean Diet Food Pyramid

Mediterranean Diet Food Pyramid

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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Chitika

SpiderMetrix

Monday 24 October 2011

Mediterranean diet 'aids fertility'


Men who eat a diet rich in fruit, vegetables and fish could boost their chances of becoming a father, according to a new study.
A Mediterranean-style diet, which also contains leafy vegetables, pulses and whole grains, can enhance sperm motility by 11%.
This could be especially important for couples who are trying to conceive naturally due the need for sperm to be "strong swimmers".
The research comes as a separate study found that men who take moderate exercise can also positively impact their sperm motility. Both studies were presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) conference in Orlando.

In the first, experts from universities including the Harvard School of Public Health, examined the diets of more than 180 men aged 18 to 22. They split those who ate any Mediterranean-type items into four sub-sets, from those with the highest intake of these nutrient-rich foods to those with the lowest. Those in the highest group had an increased sperm motility of 11% compared to the lowest.
Audrey Gaskins, from Harvard's Department of Nutrition, said: "I think motility is most important for couples who are trying to conceive naturally. It's our hope that a small increase could lead to a small increase in fertility rates."
Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer from the academic unit of reproductive and developmental medicine at the University of Sheffield, said the influence of a man's diet on semen quality had been of interest for some time. He said the latest study "nicely illustrates that a good diet is of benefit when trying to conceive".
In the second study, from experts at Yamaguchi University in Japan, 215 men attending an IVF clinic completed a questionnaire about their exercise habits and gave semen samples.
The group reporting moderate exercise had the highest average sperm motility as well as a significantly lower percentage of men with less than 40% sperm motility (14.3%). In the lowest exercise group, 30.8% of men had sperm motility under 40% and 27.1% of men who exercised intensely had sperm motility under 40%.
Dr Dolores Lamb, president-elect of the ASRM, said: "Exercise is a component of an overall healthy lifestyle, which contributes to reproductive health. This study which uses frequency, intensity, and duration to quantify the amount of exercise a subject gets, shows that a moderate exercise routine may be recommended to modestly improve semen parameters in men with no known conditions that impair their reproductive capacity."

Saturday 8 October 2011

Mediterranean Diet tied to fewer Birth defects

Women who eat a better diet leading up to pregnancy are less likely to have babies with birth defects, including brain and spine problems as well as cleft lip and cleft palate, according to a U.S. study.



Researchers found that fewer babies were born with defects such as neural tube defects when mothers-to-be more closely followed either a Mediterranean diet -- high in beans, fruits, fish and grains, and low in diary, meat and sweets -- or the U.S. food guide pyramid guidelines for a healthy diet.
The findings were published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
"A lot of birth defects, including neural tube defects, occur very early in pregnancy, before women even know they're pregnant," said Suzan Carmichael from Stanford University, who worked on the study.
"These messages are important for women who are at any risk of becoming pregnant."
The bottom line for women who are pregnant, or may get pregnant, is eating a variety of foods, including a lot of fruit, vegetables and grain, and taking a vitamin supplement that contains folic acid, she added.
Low levels of folate during pregnancy were linked to brain and spinal birth defects in the late 1990s, and pregnant women are recommended to take a prenatal vitamin with folic acid and iron.
Carmichael and her colleagues wondered if eating a healthy, balanced diet could have the same protective effect as getting extra vitamins and minerals through supplements. They used data from the National Birth Defects Prevention Study to compare about 3,400 women who had a baby with a neural tube defect or a cleft lip or palate, and 6,100 women whose babies didn't have a birth defect.

Birth Defects

Each of those women completed a phone interview in the two years after her baby was born.
Researchers asked the new mothers how frequently they had eaten a range of foods, from beans to candy, in the few months before they became pregnant. Then they calculated how closely women had followed the so-called "Mediterranean diet" ir the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Guide Pyramid.
After taking into account how much the women weighed, whether they took vitamins and if they smoked and drank, Carmichael and her colleagues found that those who more closely followed either healthy diet were less likely to have babies with any of the birth defects they studied.
In particular, women with a diet closely matching the USDA Food Guide Pyramid were half as likely to have a baby missing part of its brain and skull -- a birth defect called anencephaly -- than women whose diet was farthest from those guidelines. They were also 34 percent less likely to have a baby with cleft lip and 26 percent less likely to have one with cleft palate.
Epidemiologist David Jacobs, from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, said the findings suggest that a healthy diet can lower the risk of birth defects in the same way that has happened through folic acid fortification.
"If you are a woman about to become pregnant or think you might become pregnant, it's all the more reason for you to take care of yourself and seek out better foods," Jacobs, who wrote a commentary accompanying the study, told Reuters Health.
Luz de Regil, from the World Health Organization's Department of Nutrition of Health and Development in Geneva, cautioned that with the current evidence about the benefits of prenatal supplements, a good diet isn't enough.
On a global scale, especially in places where diets aren't as good, folic acid is still a priority for preventing birth defects, she told Reuters Health.
"If a woman is trying to get pregnant, a good diet should be a complement to the use of folic acid supplementation, not a substitute," said de Regil, who wasn't involved in the study.
"Having a baby (and) a good pregnancy is a result of many things." SOURCE: bit.ly/ovBiCs