I googled “mediterranean diet” today and one of my websites—The Advanced Mediterranean Diet—for the first time showed up on the first page of results. It’s usually on page three or four.
It won’t last but it’s a great way to end 2009.
[You know you’ve been wildly successful in business when your company name has turned into a verb: from Google to “I googled…”]
Thanks for your support!
Eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day for good luck in the coming year, at least if you live in the southern U.S. where I grew up. In the Deep South, add pork and collard greens.
In some parts of Italy they eat lentils instead, for financial prosperity. Lentils look a bit like coins.
In Greece, January 1 is St. Basil’s day. He was the forefather of the Greek Orthodox church. At midnight on New Year’s eve, the head of the household cuts vassilopitta (St. Basil’s cake). Whoever gets the piece with the embedded silver or gold coin will be lucky for the next year.
In Spain and Portugal, they eat 12 grapes, one grape at each stroke of the clock or bell at midnight New Year’s eve. Assuming you don’t choke, you gain 12 months of prosperity and luck.
Inhabitants in some regions of Portugal eat salt cod on New Year’s eve for good luck.
In Mexico, if someone gives you red underwear and you have it on at midnight New Year’s eve, you’ll experience love that year. Yellow underwear brings a good job, work, or prosperity. Carry suitcases outside and around your house at midnight, and you’ll travel in the coming year.
My children were born in Pensacola, Florida—the Deep South for sure. I’m picking up a can of black-eyed peas today.
Here’s wishing you a happy and healthy New Year!
Cooking doesn’t destroy much of olive oil’s healthy properties, according to registered dietitian Karen Collins in a recent guest post at CalorieLab.
I’ve been wondering about this since olive oil plays such a prominent role in the Advanced Mediterranean and Ketogenic Mediterranean Diets. I use room-temperature olive oil on my salads and vegetables, but also use it to sauté vegetables, eggs, and meat.
Olive oil is the major fat in the traditional Mediterranean diet. It has heart-healthy and perhaps anti-cancer action related to monounsaturated fat and phenolic compounds that have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.
Mark Hyman, M.D., blogged about diabesity at the Huffington Post December 24, 2009. He defines diabesity as a problem with glucose regulation associated with overweight and obesity. The glucose (blood sugar) physiology problem ranges from metabolic syndrome to prediabetes to full-blown type 2 diabetes.
“Diabesity” has been in circulation for a few years, but hasn’t caught on yet.
What interested me about his blog post was that he advocates the Mediterranean diet as both therapeutic and prophylactic. To quote Dr. Hyman:
The optimal diet to prevent and treat diabesity includes:
- Fruits
- Vegetables
- Nuts
- Seeds
- Beans
- Whole grains
- Healthy fats such as olive oil, nuts, avocados, and omega-3 fats
- Modest amounts of lean animal protein including small wild fish such as salmon or sardines
This is commonly known as a Mediterranean diet. It is a diet of whole, real, fresh food. It is a diet of food you have to prepare and cook from the raw materials of nature. And it has broad-ranging benefits for your health.
Food for thought, no doubt.
Reference: Hyman, Mark. The diabesity epidemic part III: Treating the real causes instead of the symptoms. The Huffington Post, December 24, 2009
Travis Saunders at the Obesity Panacea blog notes that average weight gain in adults over the Thanksgiving (U.S.)–Christmas–New Years’ season seems to be on the order of 0.8 pounds or 0.37 kg.
Data are from a 2000 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers weighed 195 Americans throughout the year. My quick search at PubMed.gov found no better or more recent studies.
I mention this because I had written somewhere that average holiday season weight gain is about five pounds (2.3 kg). I stand corrected.
PS: I still have copies of The Blue Zones to give away if you have an address in the U.S. E-mail me if you want one: steveparkermdATgmailDOTcom.
Here’s my review of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, a 2008 book by Dan Buettner. I give the book four stars on Amazon.com’s five-star system (”I like it”).
The publisher donated three copies of The Blue Zones as give-aways which I will mail to the first three readers who request one, as long as the shipping address is in the U.S. Win a book by emailing me at steveparkermdATgmailDOTcom. Expect three weeks for delivery. (Update Dec. 31, 2009: Sorry - no free books left.)
The lifestyle principles advocated in The Blue Zones would indeed help the average person in the developed world live a longer and healthier life. The book is a much-needed antidote to rampant longevity quackery. Dan Buettner’s idea behind the book was “discovering the world’s best practices in health and longevity and putting them to work in our lives.” He succeeds.
Mr. Buettner assembled a multidisciplinary team of advisors and researchers to help him with a very difficult subject. Do people living to 100, scattered over several continents, share any characteristics? Do those commonalities lead to health and longevity?
They studied four longevity hot spots (Blue Zones):
Research focused on people who lived to be 100.
Until recently, two of the Blue Zones—the Nicoyan Peninsula and Sardinia—were quite isolated, with relatively little influence from the outside world.
Mr. Buettner et al identify nine key traits that are associated with longevity and health in these cultures. Of course, association is not causation, which Mr. Buettner readily admits. He draws more conclusions from the data than would many (most?) longevity scientists. Scientists can wait for more data, but the rest of us have to decide and act based on what we know today. Here are the “Power Nine”:
Of these, I would say the available research best supports numbers 1, 4, 7, 8, and the social support system.
I doubt that hari hachi bu (eat until you’re only 80% full) will work for us in the U.S. It’s never been tested rigorously. The idea is to avoid obesity.
The author believes that average lifespan could be increased by a decade via compliance with the Power Nine. And these would be good, relatively healthy years. Not an extra 10 years living in a nursing home.
Appropriately and early on, Mr. Buettner addresses the issue of genetics by mentioning a single study of Danish twins that convinces him longevity is only 25% deterimined by genetic heritage. Environment and lifestyle choices determine the other 75%. I believe he underestimates the effect of genetics.
Over half the population of the Nicoya Peninsula Blue Zone are of Chorotega Indian descent, not from Spanish Conquistadores. Would a Danish twin study have much to say about Chorotega Indians’ longevity? We don’t know, but I’m skeptical. Also, the Sardinians and Okinawans would seem to have centuries of a degree of inbreeding, too, according to Buettner’s own documentation.
Do the Adventists tend to marry and breed with each other (like Mormons), thereby concentrating longevity genes? You won’t find the question addressed in the book.
Because I think genetics plays a larger role in longevity than 25%, I’d estimate that the healthy lifestyle choices in this book might prolong life by six or seven years instead of 10. But I’m splitting hairs. I don’t have any better evidence than Mr. Buettner, just a hunch plus years of experience treating diseased and dying patients.
These four Blue Zones do share a mostly plant-based diet of natural foods with minimal processing. Two of the populations—the Okinawans and Costa Ricans—didn’t seem to have any choice. Heavy meat consumption just wasn’t an option available to them. Rather than promoting a low-meat plant-based diet, it might be more accurate to conclude that “you don’t have to eat a lot of meat, chicken, or fish to live a long healthy life.”
In other words, it may not matter how much meat you eat as long as you eat the healthy optimal level of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. It’s a critical difference not addressed in this book except among the Adventists.
Even if you could live an extra two years as a vegan, I’m sure many people would choose to eat meat anyway. By the way, this book conflates vegan, lacto-vegetarian, lacto-ovo vegetarian, near-vegetarian, and vegetarian into one: vegetarian. They are not necessarily the same. It’s a common problem when considering the health aspects of vegetarianism.
By the same token, plenty of my patients have told me they don’t like any kind of exercise and they won’t do it, even if it would give them an extra two years of life. What many don’t realize is that from a functional standpoint, regular exercise makes their bodies perform as if they were ten years younger. There’s a huge difference between the ages of 80 and 70 in terms of functional abilities.
Why read the book now that you have the Power Nine? To convince you to change your unhealthy ways, and indispensible instruction on how to do so.
Disclosure: The publisher’s representative did not pay me for this review, nor ask for a favorable review. They offered me a review copy and three give-aways, and I accepted. I figure the cost of the books to the publisher was $16 USD total.
The Mediterranean diet is associated with a 33% reduction in stomach cancer, according to a study just published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Stomach cancer (aka gastric cancer) is uncommon in the U.S. Most cases are advanced and incurable at the time of diagnosis. So prevention is ideal.
European investigators studied 485,000 people over the course of nine years, during which 449 cases of stomach cancer were found. Surveys determined how closely the food consumption of study participants tracked nine key components of the Mediterranean diet. Compared with people who had low adherence to the Mediterranean diet, those with high adherence had 33% less risk of developing stomach cancer.
The Mediterranean diet has long been associated with a lower risk of cancer: specifically, cancers of the breast, colon, prostate, and uterus. We can add stomach cancer to the list now.
Reference: Buckland, Genevieve, et al. Adherence to a Mediterranean diet and risk of gastric adenocarcinoma within the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort study. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, December 9, 2009, epub ahead of print. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.2009.28209
Here are some Christmas gift book suggestions for someone trying to eat healthier via the Mediterranean diet.
The urge to simplify a complex scientific situation so that physicians can apply it to their patients and the public embrace it has taken precedence over the scientific obligation of presenting the evidence with relentless honesty.
-Gary Taubes, in Good Calories, Bad Calories, 2007
HeartWire on November 23, 2009, reported the discovery of atherosclerosis (hardening-of-the-arteries) in Egyptian mummies 3000 years old.
So it appears that atherosclerosis in not just a disease of modern civilization, as suggested by some.
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