Combine the Med diet with exercise to superboost your health

The Mediterranean diet is good—but adding exercise to the mix makes it even better.

Combining the two does more to protect you from developing type 2 diabetes than just following the diet on its own.

The combination can reduce the risk by as much as 31 percent, say researchers from the University of Navarra in Spain, who tested the two approaches on a group of 4,746 people, aged between 55 and 75, who weren’t diabetic but were overweight and had metabolic syndrome, a precursor of diabetes when insulin resistance starts to build.

Half ate the Mediterranean diet, consumed around 600 fewer calories a day, and walked briskly or did strength training, and the rest just followed the diet.  After six years, the researchers estimated that those who followed the combined approach had reduced their diabetes risk by 31 percent.  They also lost more weight and reduced abdominal fat more effectively. On average, the intervention group lost 3.3 kg and reduced waist circumference by 3.6 cm. The control group lost only 0.6 kg and trimmed waist size by 0.3 cm.

More than 530 million people around the world suffers from type 2 diabetes, which can lead to heart disease.  The Spanish researchers reckon that combining the Mediterranean diet with exercise could prevent three cases out of every 100 from ever happening—which would mean nearly 16 million fewer cases globally.

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