OBJECTIVE To present the Mediterranean diet (MD) pyramid: a lifestyle for today. DESIGN A new graphic representation has been conceived as a simplified main frame to be adapted to the different nutritional and socio-economic contexts of the Mediterranean region. This review gathers updated recommendations considering the lifestyle, dietary, sociocultural, environmental and health challenges t...

Vastly Underestimated To the Editor: Recent revisions to dietary guidelines for patients with vascular disease have again underestimated the importance of diet. In my view, this error is based on a misguided focus on fasting lipids. Because low-fat diets only reduce fasting cholesterol by about 10% on average, diet is thought to be unimportant compared with other interventions such as statin dr...

INTRODUCTION during the last decades, a quick and important modification of the dietary habits has been observed in the Mediterranean countries, especially among young people. Several authors have evaluated the pattern of adherence to the Mediterranean Diet in this group of population, by using the KIDMED test. OBJECTIVES the purpose of this study was to evaluate the adherence to the Mediterr...

PURPOSE Wine consumption has been related to a reduced cardiovascular risk. This effect has been attributed partly to the healthier diet of wine drinkers. We compared food habits according to alcoholic beverage preference in a Mediterranean population. DESIGN A cross-sectional study of a large sample of participants at high risk for cardiovascular disease. SETTING Primary care centers in a ...

The incidence of cancer overall in Mediterranean countries is lower than in Scandinavian countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This is mostly accounted for by the lower incidence among Mediterranean countries of cancer of the large bowel, breast, endometrium, and prostate. These forms of cancer have been linked to dietary factors, particularly low consumption of vegetables and f...

The aim was to assess inflammatory markers among adults and adolescents in relation to the adherence to the Mediterranean diet. A random sample (219 males and 379 females) of the Balearic Islands population (12-65 years) was anthropometrically measured and provided a blood sample to determine biomarkers of inflammation. Dietary habits were assessed and the adherence to the Mediterranean dietary...

Studies of diet and health focus increasingly on dietary patterns. Although the traditional Mediterranean diet is perceived as being healthy, there is little information on its possible benefit to young people. We studied whether closer adherence to the traditional Mediterranean dietary pattern was associated with overall and cancer mortality in a cohort of 42,237 young women, aged 30-49 years ...

The Mediterranean diet is receiving increasing attention in cardiovascular epidemiology. The association of adherence to the Mediterranean diet with the incidence of hypertension was evaluated among 9,408 men and women enrolled in a dynamic Spanish prospective cohort study during 1999-2005. Dietary intake was assessed at baseline with a validated semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire, a...

BACKGROUND Some of the main nutritional reasons for recommending a Mediterranean diet is to prevent metabolic diseases arising through free radical formation. A key constituent compound is beta-carotene which, amongst the carotenoids, displays the greatest provitamin A activity as well as possessing significant antioxidant properties. OBJECTIVES Principally, to determine the relationship betw...

Background: Adherence to a Mediterranean diet seems to be inversely associated with C-reactive protein (CRP) concentration. A 14-point Mediterranean Diet Adherence Screener (MEDAS) has been developed to assess dietary compliance. Objective: The aim of this study was to assess whether each of the MEDAS questions as well as their final score were associated with the levels of CRP in general Spani...