The research on nutrition has been rife with contradictions, which may be one reason that Andrew Mente, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the Population Health Research Institute, conducted a systematic review of studies - dating back to 1950 - that dealt with the relationship between diet and cardiovascular disease. The results, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, suggest that a diet high in trans - fatty acids and foods with a high glycemic load - in other words, a typical western diet - may be harmful to your heart, while a diet rich in veggies, nuts, and monounsaturated fatty acids - a Mediterranean pattern of eating - may be associated with a lower risk for heart disease.
If all this sounds a bit familiar, it's because the Mediterranean diet has been making news in the U.S for over a dozen years. In 1995, Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard University's School of Public Health presented research that extolled the cardiovascular benefits of a diet typical to people in Greece and southern Italy (that is until the early 60s, when the US began exporting it's way of life--and way of eating--worldwide). Fifty years before Willet's presentation, Ancel Keys, an American doctor stationed in Salerno Italy, found that people in the Mediterranean had strikingly low rates of heart disease.
