The benefits of a Mediterranean diet
Many believe that diet and lifestyle are contributing factors to your health experience, but it is your genetics that will ultimately determine your fate. Some people even neglect their own nutrition, believing that their health in later years is already decided regardless of what they eat or how active they are.
However, new evidence suggests the determining force of our genetics is not absolute.
A study conducted at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University and the CIBER Fisiopatología de la Obesidad y Nutrición in Spain has yielded what looks to be a significant leap forward for nutrigenomics, or the study of how nutrition and gene function affect our health and risk of getting chronic and degenerative diseases.
The study followed 7,000 men and women over five years as they were given either a Mediterranean diet or a low-fat control diet and then monitored for cardiovascular disease, stroke and heart attack. Within the sample about 900 individuals had genetic variations that typically put them in a higher risk category for heart disease, which is usually preceded by type two diabetes.