Mediterranean Diet Linked to Longevity

Would you like to live for a long time? If so, when you are making dinner tonight, pile on the vegetables, have some pasta with an olive oil dressing and leave out the the meat.
A further research study has linked the Mediterranean diet to longevity. This study has revealed that specific aspects of the diet, like the high consumption of olive oil and vegetables and little meat could be strongly linked to longevity.
Researchers studied Greek participants in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition , particularly the 23,349 men and women who had not previously been diagnosed with cancer, diabetes or heart disease .
Researchers scrutinised their diets for 8.5 years upto June 2008. Each participant’s diet was rated according to how closely it was to a traditional Mediterranean diet.
Over those 8.5 years, the researchers recorded 652 deaths among 12,694 participants who had lower Mediterranean diet scores of 0-4, and, 423 deaths among the 10,655 participants who had higher scores of at least 5. Those with the higher scores were more likely to be alive at the end of the study.
Specific features of the diet were more linked to this phenomenon than others, low consumption of meat and related products, lots of vegetables, fruit and nuts, high legume consumption and a high monosaturated to saturated fat ration.