Mediterranean Diet May Cut Diabetes Risk

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Sticking to the Mediterranean diet — rich in olive oil, grains, fruits, nuts, vegetables and fish, and low in meats and dairy — may lower the risk for diabetes.

Scientists followed 13,380 healthy Spanish university graduates for an average of four and a half years, tracking their dietary habits and confirming new cases of diabetes through medical records. The study was published online May 29 in The British Medical Journal.

The researchers ranked the strictness of adherence to the diet on a 10-point scale, and found that those with the highest scores reduced their relative risk of diabetes by 83 percent compared with those with the lowest.

The authors acknowledge that the number of cases of diabetes they found was small, which limits the statistical power of the finding, and that the nutritional information is based on self-reporting, which is not always reliable.

Still, the large sample and the finding of a dose-response relationship between stricter adherence to the diet and lowered risk of diabetes give the study strength.

“There are good fats, like those in olive oil, that are quite healthful,” said Miguel A. Martínez-González, the lead author and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Navarra. “We have to change this belief that a low-fat diet is the key to good health.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/he...th&oref=slogin

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You know the Australian Aborigines were studied and they didn't get cavities or diabetes. I don't know how they are doing now they may be like Native Americans now and suffering greatly from diabetes.

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I recently was reading a book about 18th century medicine and learned that before the 17th century, Europeans did not have any dental cavities.

This was because Europeans only learned of sugar during the 1300s when the Portuguese started having contacts with cultures like India where sugar had been discovered centuries before. Until the 1600s, sugar was still so expensive to import to Europe (literally worth its weight in gold) that the common person could hardly afford it.

However, during the colonial period when European countries could establish huge sugar plantations especially in Central and South America, sugar became cheap enough to be used as a confectionery item. And that's when cavities started becoming a serious problem.