Professor de Gaetano said that it did not make sense that the NHS would pay for drugs but not for healthy food and that government should find a way to “contribute to the expense of the Mediterranean diet”.
Advertisement
The patients were among the participants enrolled into the Moli-sani project, a prospective epidemiological study that randomly recruited around 25,000 adults living in the Italian region of Molise.
The findings were presented at the ESC (European Society of Cardiology) Congress 2016 in Rome. Not only does this diet reduce inflammation which is seen in obesity and other chronic conditions, it reduces the chances of dying before one’s time among people prone to cardiac arrest or stroke.
A Mediterranean diet could be better than statins at reducing the risk of an early death for millions of Britons, research suggests. The cholesterol-lowering drugs were believed to lower the risk of cardiovascular illness by 24%. “What happens to people who have already suffered from cardiovascular disease?”.
A two-point increase in the Mediterranean diet score was associated with a 21 per cent reduced risk of death, the findings showed.
Further investigation showed that the lower risk of death was mainly associated with higher consumption of certain foods in the Mediterranean diet: vegetables, fish, fruits, nuts and olive oil. That’s still a sizable protective power but not almost as marked as what the Mediterranean diet seemed to provide in this study. Furthermore, this research didn’t directly compare statins to the Mediterranean diet. That can be explored in future research. Adherence to the Mediterranean diet was appraised with a nine-point Mediterranean diet score (MDS).
Seven million people in Britain live with heart disease.
“It could allow patients to get the benefits of statins but without the side effects”, he said, urging doctors and patients to think far more about lifestyle.
“The evidence for statin use in everyone who has had a heart attack who can tolerate them is unequivocal and comes from large scale randomised trials, which is a higher level of evidence than this observational study”, he said in a statement on Monday.
Advertisement
Despite these benefits, Bonaccio said there has been a general gradual shifting away from the Mediterranean diet in recent years. If you’re on a statin, don’t stop taking it, just add the diet.
