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Dear Colleagues and Friends,
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This study examines the adherence to the Mediterranean Diet (MD) and its relationship with multi-morbidity, defined as the presence of two or more chronic conditions at the same time, which can potentially reduce quality of life. There is abundant evidence of the benefits of the MD, which is abundant in extra virgin olive oil, fruits, legumes and vegetables. To conduct the study, a representative sample of Cyprus citizens was recruited and information related to diet, physical activity, smoking and clinical conditions, among others, was collected. They observed an association between physical activity, living in rural areas, and a high adherence to the MD (compared with sedentarism and living in urban areas). Also, the risk of multi-morbidity was 32% higher in those participants with a low MD adherence, independent of their age, gender, smoking habits or physical activity. These findings suggest that those people with overall better lifestyle habits, are expected to have less incidence of chronic multi-morbidities.
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Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is a glucose disorder recognized during pregnancy. Since the incidence of this disease is increasing, a group of Tunisian researchers decided to investigate whether the dietary pattern could influence the risk of developing GDM. For this study, adherence to the MD was assessed in 2 groups of 60 women each, with and without GDM. Their results showed that those women who adhered more to the MD (in both groups) had lower fasting and plasma glucose levels after 2h of load, compared with lower MD adherence scores. Furthermore, those women without GDM consumed significantly more legumes, vegetables, fish, monounsaturated fatty acids (MFA) and vitamin D, which is very characteristic of the MD. On the contrary, the GDM group intake of saturated fatty acids was significantly higher and MFA consumption very low compared to the healthy group. These findings suggest that following a MD during pregnancy may help reduce the risk of developing GDM.
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The large PREDIMED project investigates the influence of the MD on several diseases. In this article, the authors focus on mental health, more specifically depression. Depression is an illness affecting more and more people worldwide and is influenced by lifestyle habits such as diet. Researchers used the Prime Diet Quality Score (PDQS) to define a high-quality food pattern and assess the prevalence of depressive symptoms among participants. A high punctuation in the PDQS score was associated with less depressive symptomatology, suggesting that a healthy diet could protect against depression.
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