🥗 The Mediterranean Diet

Nikhil Sharma

1d • Stroke Prevention Tips

8ú modern sense.

It's not about:

❌ Calorie counting

❌ Cutting out entire food groups

❌ Drinking expensive green powders

❌ Surviving on lettuce

Instead, it's a pattern of eating traditionally seen in countries such as Greece, Spain, and parts of Italy.

It typically includes:

✅ Lots of vegetables

✅ Fruit

✅ Beans and legumes

✅ Nuts and seeds

✅ Whole grains

✅ Extra virgin olive oil as the main fat source

✅ Fish and seafood regularly

✅ Moderate dairy (often yoghurt)

✅ Limited ultra-processed foods

✅ Limited sugary drinks and sweets

✅ Less red and processed meat

✅ Social eating

One of the most important studies ever performed on diet was the PREDIMED trial.

Researchers studied over 7,000 people at high cardiovascular risk and put them on either:

🥄 A Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra virgin olive oil

🥜 A Mediterranean diet supplemented with mixed nuts

📋 A control low-fat diet

Crucially, the nuts and Olive oil groups received a supply of the nuts or oil every month so we can be confident they ate more of these than their usual.

After around 5 years of follow-up, the Mediterranean diet groups experienced roughly a 30% reduction in the combined risk of heart attack, stroke, or cardiovascular death compared with the control group. Stroke reduction was one of the strongest signals seen in the trial at nearly 40% reduction.

And this isn't just one study.

A major BMJ systematic review and network meta-analysis (essentially a study pulling together data from all the high quality research on the topic that could find to give very reliable results) examining randomised dietary programmes found that Mediterranean dietary programmes reduce death, heart attacks, and cardiovascular events in people at increased cardiovascular risk. Importantly, they also reduce stroke risk.

Why might it work?

The Mediterranean diet appears to improve many of the key drivers of stroke and cardiovascular disease:

🩸 Blood pressure

🧈 LDL cholesterol

🔥 Inflammation

🍬 Blood sugar control

⚖️ Weight management

🧠 Vascular health

In other words, it targets several of the major risk factors identified in studies such as INTERSTROKE and INTERHEART.

The goal, however ,isn't perfection.

It's moving your overall pattern of eating closer to the Med pattern:

🌱 More plants