While living longer and taking care of your heart are important to you, there’s no denying that you may be interested in the Mediterranean diet for its weight loss potential.
While living longer and taking care of your heart are important to you, there’s no denying that you may be interested in the Mediterranean diet for its weight loss potential. Although not a main goal of this eating approach, it may help stabilize your weight — without making you feel deprived. A study by researchers at Harvard University and Emory University followed a group of overweight or obese adults on the Mediterranean diet and a control group eating a standard American diet supplemented with fish oil, walnuts, and grape juice — foods that supply key nutrients in the Mediterranean diet — for eight weeks.
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A standard American diet is rich in foods that are high in saturated fat, added sugar, and salt. Compared with the control group, Mediterranean diet followers lost more weight, reduced their blood levels of inflammatory markers, and lowered their total cholesterol and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. The bonus: It wasn’t supposed to be a weight loss study to begin with (that was just a nice bonus) so both groups ate a similar number of calories.