Good News For Drinkers

As you know, I am a fan of the Mediterranean diet - ever since I spent time in Crete as a 20-something adventurer. It seems to be a constant in a changing sea of diets, but what was never clear was what in the Mediterranean diet was the driving force for health and longevity. The fish perhaps, with its wonderful omega 3's? Or was it the greens, with the alkalizing effect, antioxidants and phytonutrients?

Nope. it's the booze.
Here's the report from the British medical journal, but here's the summary.

Researchers at Harvard and Athens University studied the lives and diets of no less than 20,000 Greek men and women over eight years.

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

How much grain, dairy products people ate didn’t seem to make much difference in terms of mortality. The authors suggested that this might be because grains and dairy products are broad categories of foods, where different products can have different health effects (skim milk versus ice cream, for example). Fish consumption also didn’t seem to have much of an effect — perhaps because fish plays a small part in the diet of the population included in the studies, which could make its health effects difficult to detect, the authors wrote.

Hallelujah!