By Calder Viney
Hippocrates, an ancient Greek physician once said “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Though this was said hundreds of years ago, today it remains true. Dieting is without a doubt the key to physical health and in today’s society, we are losing sight of that. In 2015 23.4% of deaths in America were caused by heart disease alone [1]. The reflection on our diet can have a major impact on our current and future health. A fad that hit America in the 1980s, under the name “Mediterranean Diet”, claimed to have the answers to not only living without cardiovascular concerns but living longer.
Unlike most “healthy diets”, the “Mediterranean Diet” included many ingredients that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) declare as risky, especially for cardiovascular health, when consumed frequently. Red meat and alcohol are among the ingredients which are consumed daily in the “Mediterranean Diet”. The NIH found in a study that an increase in ingestion of red meat is directly associated with total cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, and overall mortality [2]. Moreover, the NIH found that even small doses of alcohol on occasion can cause “changes in circulation, inflammatory response, oxidative stress, and programmed cell death, as well as anatomical damage to the CV system” [3]. This museum will explore how although requiring almost daily consumption of ingredients deemed unhealthy when ingested regularly, the Mediterranean diet reduces the chances of cardiovascular disease and increases life expectancy.
Included in this exhibit are three primary sources that defend this thesis – included are a case study and two oral interviews. The case study, called “Benefits of the Mediterranean Diet: Insights From the PREDIMED Study”, separated 7447 men and women at high cardiovascular disease risk randomly into three diets. The three diets included: A Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO), a Mediterranean diet supplemented with nuts, and a control diet (advice on a low-fat diet), and tested the effects on clinical events of cardiovascular disease. The Mediterranean diet used for the first two groups requires high consumption of red meat and daily consumption of wine. The results concluded that with the two Mediterranean diets the risk of clinical events of cardiovascular disease decreased. The first of the two oral interviews was with a Greek woman who lived her whole life eating primarily a Greek diet that matched with the Mediterranean diet used in the case study above. In the interview she explained how her relatives, who similarly lived on the Greek diet, all lived to be 90+ years old and were all active in their old age, having little to no trouble with their hearts. The second of the two oral interviews was with a man who spent the first 20 years of his life on the average American diet of the mid-20th century and then changed to a diet that fits the outline of the Mediterranean diet from the study above when he married. In the interview, he informed me of how heart disease runs in his family. He explained how numerous family members had heart diseases. However, as of now, he has not had any serious cardiovascular diseases.
[1] “CDC Report Shows Increased Rates of CVD Death in 2015.” American College of
Cardiology, 8 Dec. 2016, www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2016/12/08/10/28/cdc-report-shows-increased-rates-of-cvd-death-in-2015.
[2] “Risk in Red Meat?” Edited by Harrison Wein, National Institutes of Health, U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, 2 July 2015, www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/risk-red-meat.
[3] Piano, Mariann R. “Alcohol’s Effects on the Cardiovascular System.” Alcohol Research :
Current Reviews, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 2017, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513687/.
