The new diet advice is just like the old advice
A lot of diet research is being reported this week, but its conclusions are those you have heard before.
Fruits, veggies, nuts, and complex carbohydrates containing protein work best.
(The picture of roasted pork with herbs is from the non-profit Mediterranean Diet Foundation of Spain. They even have a recipe.)
Simple carbohydrates like white flour, with a high glycemic index, turn out to be especially bad for women.
This means sweet potatoes are better than white ones, and oats are better than wheat. The Glycemic Index was developed in Canada, originally for diabetics, and the Australian GI group has a cookbook for sale. (Here it is at Amazon.com.)
Sabina Sieri of Milan, best known for finding a link between breast cancer and diet, studied almost 48,000 dietary questionnaires and found a correlation between high GI diets and heart disease in women, but not in men. Her results are in the Archives of Internal Medicine. She is fluent in English, so if I'm wrong on any of this I'm sure she'll let me know.
A separate study, on a link between Alzheimer's and diet, offers similar advice.
Yian Gu, an Alzheimer's researcher at Columbia University, found diets high in omega fatty acids, Vitamins E and B12, and folate, can reduce the risk of getting the disease by up to 40%. She studied several thousand folks over 65 to draw her conclusion.
We're talking about eating things like nuts, fish, tomatoes, poultry, broccoli, fruit, dark green vegetables like kale and olive oil. This is sometimes called a "Mediterranean Diet" but since pizza began in Naples that may be misleading. (Using olive oil in your pizza dough does not count.)
You know what to do. Quick-dissolving carbs are little better for you than sugar. Complex carbs and veg-based proteins take longer to digest but keep you healthier.
And the dietary link between the heart and the brain, between coronary health and all sorts of health, is only growing with time.
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com