Avoiding Diabetes - Eat like a Greek

latimes.com/health/la-he-mediterranean-diet-20111121,0,382891.story

latimes.com

Eat like a Mediterranean — but how?

Lentil Salad

Here's what the research says — and doesn't say — about the Mediterranean diet.

"no diet in the world has been studied more thoroughly or associated with more positive outcomes. But questions remain. Scientists still can't say for sure how the diet does everything it seems to do — or if some parts of it do more than others. (For example, is the red meat you don't eat more important than the olive oil you do?) And if you're looking for precise rules on exactly how much to eat of exactly what foods, you won't find them here — because they don't exist."

"Around the middle of the 20th century, scientists noticed that people living in Mediterranean areas had longer, healthier lives than people in many other parts of the world — even though smoking rates were high and healthcare wasn't that great in some of those countries. Some of the first hard evidence supporting this observation came from the so-called Seven Countries Study, published in 1970: It found that Greece — as exemplified by the island of Crete — had lower rates of cardiovascular disease and cancer than the other six countries in the study: the United States, Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, the former Yugoslavia and Japan."...MORE