Many studies have found that the Mediterranean diet reduces heart disease, but a new review, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, examined the effects of the Mediterrean diet on the risk factors of cardiovascular diseases.
The researchers reviewed and analysed the results of 50 studies in the English language with more than 500,000 participants, they also evaluated the quality of each study. They found that eating the Mediterranean diet reduced the development of the metabolic syndrome as well as all the individual components such as high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high blood fat, low levels of good cholesterol and large waist circumference - these are the risk factors often precede the development of cardiovascular diseases.
They concluded that thier findings have considerable public health importance but noted several limitations in the study, eg the considerable heterogeneity among the studies which could affect the results - only 8 studies addressed the effects on all the metabolic syndrome risk factors, of which 2 were RCTs, 2 cohort studies and 4 cross-sectional studies.
Source: Kastorini CM, Milionis HJ, Esposito K et al. The Effect of Mediterranean Diet on Metabolic Syndrome and its Components: A Meta-Analysis of 50 Studies and 534,906 Individuals. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 2011; 57:1299-1313
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