Does Eating a Mediterranean Diet Help You Live Longer?

Based on a new study by Immaculata De Vivo, an associate professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, has said that eating the Mediterranean diet helps you live longer. The diet keeps most of the dairy, meat and saturated fats limited. The diet contains rich vegetables, olive oil, unrefined grains, beans, peas, nuts, fruits and fish. This diet mostly helps you with weight and lowers your risk for chronic issues. Study shows that women who eat the Mediterranean diet have had longer telomeres.

Telomeres ‘…are part of your chromosomes, the thread-like structures that house your DNA. At the end of these chromosomes are telomeres, a kind of protective “cap” that keeps the structure from unraveling.’ Even with people who are healthy, there telomeres shorten with age also. Scientists have proven that ‘…some lifestyle choices such as smoking, being overweight or obese and drinking a lot of sweetened drinks can prematurely shorten a person’s telomeres.’

A team of U.S. researchers wanted to test this diet using women. ‘Each participant had a calculated diet score ranging from 0 to 9 points; a higher score signifies a closer resemblance to the Mediterranean diet. Each one point change in diet score corresponded with an average of 1.5 years of telomere aging.’ As a result, the way for this diet to work the best simply a-lines with the longer telomeres you have. The researchers found that ‘None of the individual dietary components was associated with telomere length.’, showing that the whole diet itself is the importance of the process.

Dr. Peter Nilsson, a professor of Clinical Cardiovascular Research at Lund University in Sweden, states that dietary pattern and telomere length has something to do with ‘… genetic background factors.’

With these tests and result scientists hope to figure out ‘…which components of the Mediterranean diet may be having a bigger impact on telomere length.’ Also, they hope to study this in men.

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