June 27, 2018 – Corrected Mediterranean

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Anchor lead: You’re still okay if you’re following a Mediterranean diet, Elizabeth Tracey reports

The Mediterranean diet, with extra virgin olive oil or nuts, results in about a 30% reduction in cardiovascular disease risk, a recently retracted and republished study known by the acronym  PREDIMED concludes. Michael Blaha, a preventive cardiologist at Johns Hopkins, comments.

Blaha: I’m still a fan of the Mediterranean diet. It makes sense in terms of overall diet principles. But the famous PREDIMED study that showed that the Mediterranean diet reduced cardiovascular risk by about 30% has been called into question. There were some problems with that study in terms of patients that should have been randomized to one of the two study groups didn’t quite get randomized the way they should. But I guess a credit to the authors they went back and reanalyzed the data accounting for these problems in the study, and they saw the same results. I think we still can be comforted by the fact that the Mediterranean diet is likely to be a very heart healthy diet.   :32

Blaha says he’s also pleased to see the scrutiny and validation of this study by the scientific community. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.