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Media Release

June 9 2009

Diet the key to disease prevention

Example of the Mediterranean diet based on what people on the island of Crete ate in the 1950s.View the Channel 10 report on YouTube.

A healthy Mediterranean diet could greatly reduce the risk of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, certain cancers and diabetes, according to the Director of UniSA’s Sansom Institute for Health Research.

Professor Kerin O’Dea researches ‘therapeutic nutrition’, which is using diet to prevent and treat chronic conditions.

“One of the things I’m interested in is if you are overweight and have unhealthy weight, which is central fat around the abdomen; can diet help you change that?” she said.

“Diabetes is often triggered by a high proportion of fat around the abdomen, so if we can lose fat from the stomach where it is metabolically unhealthy obese, to the hips and thighs where it is metabolically healthy obese, it’s producing a healthier distribution of body fat and lowering the risk of heart disease.”

Prof O’Dea has conducted research into hunter-gatherer diets versus Mediterranean diets and says it’s the highly refined western diet “we’re not keen on”.

“The Mediterranean diet is a model which I think is a very good one to apply to western societies like ours, because it has lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, and it does have some meat and fish but not large amounts and that’s the kind of thing I would support,” she said.

“When you look at socially disadvantaged populations, they tend to maximise calories per dollar and if you do that, you tend to eat fat, sugar, flour, refined foods … whereas the healthy foods, the ones we advise people to eat, are much more expensive per dollar, such as lean meat, fish, fresh fruit, vegetables and nuts. So when people are disadvantaged, they have less choice, so we have to take that driver of food choice into account.”

The Mediterranean diet is based on what people on the island of Crete ate in the 1950s and includes plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables.


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