According to a new paper released in JAMA Network Open, women who adhere to a Mediterranean diet are a 30 percent reduced risk of type 2 diabetes.
Conducted at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the study consisted of over 20,000 female participants as part of the Women’s Health Study, initiated up until late-2017.
Questionnaires regarding dietary habits and blood samples were derived from the participants at the start of the study.
“This cohort study was conducted among 25, 317 apparently healthy women,” the co-authors of the study wrote in the JAMA-based publication.
“The participants with missing information regarding all traditional and novel metabolic biomarkers or those with baseline diabetes were excluded. Participants were invited for baseline assessment between September 1992 and May 1995.”
Out of the more than 20,000 participants involved in the Women’s Health Study, close to 2,000 went on to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The participants who consumed more of a Mediterranean diet were at a substantially lower risk of developing diabetes, the findings showed.
“In this cohort study, higher Mediterranean intake scores were associated with a 30% relative risk reduction in type 2 diabetes during a 20-year period, which could be explained in large part by biomarkers of insulin resistance, BMI, lipoprotein metabolism, and inflammation,” the authors of the study explained in the publication.
The use of a Mediterranean-type diet has been suggested to be effective for lowering the risk of other health conditions, however, more research is needed to further validate such assertions.
“Whether a Mediterranean-type dietary intervention in a US population can reduce risk of cardiometabolic disease remains to be tested in future clinical trials.”
