"Improving on the Mediterranean Diet & Do Flexitarians Live Longer?"
The traditional Mediterranean diet can be considered as a mainly,
but not exclusively plant-based diet,
and certainly not a whole food plant-based diet,
as olive oil and wine can be considered essentially fruit juices.
Even if one is eating a vegiterranean diet,
an entirely plant-based version,
there are a number of problematic nutritional aspects
that are rarely talked about.
For example, lots of white bread, white pasta,
not a lot of whole grains.
Alcohol can be a problem,
the caloric density with all that oil can be high,
as well as the salt intake.
Let’s go over these one by one.
In this anatomy of the health effects of the Mediterranean diet
while the single most important component was the high consumption of plant foods.
In contrast, high cereal consumption,
meaning high grain consumption did not appear to help.
This may be because most grains modern Mediterranean dieters eat
are refined, like white bread,
whereas the traditional Mediterranean diet
was characterized by unprocessed cereals—
in other words, whole grains.
And while whole grains have been associated with lower risk
of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer,
refined grains may increase the risk of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and other chronic diseases.
For example in the PREDIMED study, whose who ate the most white bread,
but not whole grain bread, gained significant weight.
Alcohol may also be a problem.
As a plant-centered diet, no surprise,
adherence to a Mediterranean diet is associated with lower cancer risk,
but not with lower breast cancer risk.
With all the fruits, veggies, nuts, seeds, and beans, and low saturated fat
you’d assume there would be lower breast cancer risk,
but alcohol is a known breast-cancer risk factor, even moderate amounts.
But if you create a special adapted version of the Mediterranean diet score
that excludes alcohol, the diet DOES appear to reduce breast cancer risk then.
The wonderful grape phytonutrients in red wine can improve our arterial function
such that if you drink de-alcoholized red wine,
red wine with the alcohol removed,
you get a significant boost in endothelial function,
the ability of our arteries to relax and dilate normally, increasing blood flow,
but if you drink the same red wine with the alcohol added back,
it abolishes the beneficial effect,
it counteracts the benefit of the grape phytonutrients.
So better just to eat grapes.
Similarly, there are components of olives—
the antioxidant phytonutrients, that may help endothelial function,
but when consumed as oil even extra virgin olive oil,
it may impair arterial function.
So even if white bread dipped in olive oil
is the very symbol of the Mediterranean diet,
we can modernize it by removing oils and refined grains.
Another important, albeit frequently ignored, issue
in the modern Mediterranean diet is sodium intake.
Despite evidence linking salt intake to high blood pressure, heart disease and strokes,
dietary salt intake in the U.S. is on the rise.
Right now we get about 7 to 10 grams a day,
mostly from processed foods.
If we were to decrease that just by 3 grams,
which is about 1000 mg of sodium,
half of a teaspoon of table salt,
every year we could save tens of thousands of people
from having a heart attack,
prevent tens of thousands of strokes,
and tens of thousands of deaths.
There is a common misconception that only certain people
should reduce their salt intake
and that for the vast majority of the population salt reduction is unnecessary,
but in reality, the opposite is true.
But there is much we can learn from the traditional Mediterranean diet.
The defining characteristic of the Mediterranean diet
is an abundance of plant foods.
And one thing that seems to have fallen by the wayside,
no real Mediterranean meal is replete without lots of greens,
a key part of not only a good Mediterranean diet,
but of any good diet.
What accounts for the benefits of a Mediterranean-style diet?
An anatomy of health effects was published and the single most important component
was the high consumption of plant foods.
In contrast, fish and seafood consumption, the only animal foods
promoted in the Mediterranean diet did not seem to help.
In fact, if you look at four of the major dietary quality scoring systems,
which have all been associated with extending lifespan,
lowering heart disease and cancer mortality,
They all share only four things in common:
more fruit, more vegetables, more whole grains, and more nuts and beans.
They are all built on a common core of a diet rich in plant foods,
whereas opposite food patterns, rich in animal foods, poor in plant-based foods
(in other words, the Western diet), are associated with higher risks.
So we need to optimize the food environment
to support whole grains, vegetables, fruit, and plant-based proteins.
That’s one of the things all the so-called Blue Zones have in common,
the longest living populations, not only social support and engagement, daily exercise,
but nutritionally they all center their diet around plant foods,
reserving meat mostly for special occasions.
And the population with perhaps the longest life-expectancy in the world,
doesn’t eat any meat at all, the California Adventist vegetarians.
So if the primary benefits of the Mediterranean diet
are due to all the whole plant foods,
what if you went back to the famous PREDIMED study
and created a pro-vegetarian scoring system?
We know vegetarians live longer,
but because a pure vegetarian diet might not easily be embraced by many individuals,
maybe it would be easier to swallow if we just tell people
more plant-based foods, less animal-based foods.
But would just moving along the spectrum towards more plants
actually enable people to live longer?
They thought of this food pattern as a “gentle approach” to vegetarianism,
figuring that if it improved survival it would be an easily understandable message
for health promotion - more plant foods, less animal foods.
So you get points for eating fruit, vegetables, nuts,
grains, beans, olive oil, and potatoes,
but get docked points for any animal fats, eggs, fish, dairy,
or any type of meat or meat products.
Of course, that means you get a higher score
the more potato chips and French fries you eat.
That’s why I prefer the term whole food plant-based diet
since it’s defined by what you eat, not by what you don’t eat.
When I was teaching up at Cornell I'd have “vegan” students
apparently living off of French fries and beer;
Vegan does not necessarily mean health-promoting.
But did it work?
Regardless of healthy vs. unhealthy,
if you give points to people for any kind of plant food, processed or not,
and detract points for any kind of animal product consumption,
do people with higher scores live longer?
Yes.
The maximum pro-vegetarian score is 60,
but even just scoring 40 or more was associated with a 40% drop in mortality.
In fact, there were so few deaths in the highest category of adherence
to the pro-vegetarian diet, they had to merge the 2 upper categories for their analysis.
This is evidence that simple advice to increase the consumption
of plant-derived foods with reductions in the consumption of foods
from animal sources confers a survival advantage.
A live-a-longer-life advantage.
This modest change is realistic, affordable, and achievable
because a sizable proportion of their population was already eating that way.
So one can get significant survival benefit without a radical shift
to the exclusive consumption of plant foods,
a more gradual and gentle approach more easily translatable into public policy.
For example, a 41% drop in mortality rates in the United States
would mean saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.