MedWire News: Adherence to a traditional Mediterranean diet is associated with reduced obesity and abdominal adiposity, research shows.
The study, which investigated the relative impact of individual components of the Mediterranean diet on adiposity using different dietary scores, found that the Mediterranean dietary pattern was negatively associated with body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) in both men and women.
In total, 798 adults from rural Lebanon (aged 40-60 years) completed questionnaires, which included sections on socio-demographics, anthropometric measures, and dietary patterns.
Using daily food consumption data, the team categorized food groups as either positive (whole cereals, vegetables, legumes and fruit, olive oil, and fish) or negative (refined cereals, pastries, and liquid sweets), and constructed six different dietary scores to assess an individual's adherence to the Mediterranean diet.
Denis Lairon (Université de la Méditerranée, Marseille, France) and colleagues found that the proportion of obese women in the study population was nearly double that of men, at 33.7% compared with 17.0%, respectively.
The diet of the sample population only partially matched the traditional Mediterranean diet, with participants typically consuming refined cereals and pastries, fruit, vegetables, dairy products, and liquid sweets more than once a day, while wholemeal cereals, legumes, fish and sea foods, red meat, and poultry were consumed less than once a day.
Commenting on these findings, the team says: "The recent shift from a traditional Mediterranean diet to a more Westernized diet could explain, along with increased sedentary occupations, the observed trends in obesity and related metabolic disorders."
Further analysis revealed that the widely used composite Mediterranean Diet Score (MDS), where a higher score corresponds to greater adherence to a vegetable fat-rich dietary pattern, was negatively associated with WC, but not with BMI, in men and women. However, in both genders, the adapted Mediterranean (MED) score, which takes into account individuals' specific food habits in addition to their adherence to a Mediterranean diet, was consistently and negatively associated with both BMI and WC.
Specifically, the team found that a 2-point increase in the composite MED score (out of a total of 8), was associated with a decrease in BMI of 0.51 and 0.78 kg/m2, and a decrease in WC of 2.77 and 4.76 cm, for men and women, respectively.
Writing in the International Journal of Obesity, the researchers say: "The relationship between diet and adiposity was more effectively shown using the composite MED score, combining positive components of the diet with the most relevant negative components to this sample."
They conclude that adherence to a Mediterranean-type diet could reduce the rates of obesity and abdominal adiposity reported in this developing Mediterranean population.
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