Mediterranean Diet Can Cut Heart Disease

Studies have found that heart disease, the most common type of disease found in the United States, is largely related to diet. Researchers have found that the Mediterranean diet, consisting mostly of nuts, olive oil, fish, beans, and fruit, can decrease the chances of developing heart disease. Surprisingly, it is also beneficial to drink a glass of wine at dinner. At the beginning of this study, evidence for this diet was somewhat weak because they could not find a direct correlation between diet and heart disease; there were too many factors. Yet scientists did not give up because they found that people living in Mediterranean countries mostly had lower heart disease risk than in other regions around the world. They conducted an experiment where they assigned a specific diet to more than 7,000 people living near the Mediterranean. Half were assigned a low-fat diet, while the other half were told they could only eat the Mediterranean diet. After five years, studies showed that the diet, over other factors, was extremely important in lowering the risk of heart disease.