The “Mediterranean” diet is all about eating plenty of fruits, vegetables and nuts may help to reduce the incidence of asthma and respiratory allergies according researchers who report their findings in a study that will be published in the upcoming issue of Thorax.

The researchers studied almost 700 children, ranging in age from 7 to 18 years old, from four different rural areas on the island of Crete. This Greek island has been found to have children with very little cases of asthma and respiratory allergies. However skin allergies are still relatively common.

The researchers had the parents of these children, fill out a detailed questionnaire about their child’s allergies and asthma, as well as their dietary habits. The researchers determined the “Mediterranean” diet by a set of 12 food requirements. These included eating fruits, vegetables, whole-grains, legumes, nuts, and olive oil on a regular basis.

According to a study that was recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, high blood pressure can be reduced by eating chocolate may be more effective that drinking green or black tea.

Participants that had cocoa products for at leat a two week period had a reduction of blood pressure similar to a person that would be prescribed medication. The lower blood pressure could reduce a person’s risk for having a heart attack by 10 – 20 percent.

The researchers believe that cocoa may be more effective because it contains procyanids which are not present in teas. Both tea and cocoa do contain polyphenols which is been found to be beneficial at preventing cardiovascular disease. Polyphenols are also found in many fruits and vegetables.

Dieting these days is simply assumed to be an ongoing lifestyle activity to fit into our lives alongside our work, our social obligations and everything else which makes up the bedrock of our ongoing routines.

This is what it has come to. Continual dieting is there alongside the conversational commonalities of everyday life, on a level with marital/partnership status, car ownership and whether or not one keeps a cat.
It is high time to look again at what is driving this dieting thing as an activity of everyday normalisation, with it frequently not even being mentioned any longer in the context of a temporary behaviour very specifically related to an outcome of permanently reigned-in weight.

All of this matters so much because the tendency is now to treat as an accepted banality an issue which has in fact become a largely unnoticed but major tension point between state encroachment and personal choice. Worse than that, it is not just about liberty, it is also about bad science and poor advice.