THE largest study of the Mediterranean diet shows that people aged 60 who stick to it can expect to live a year longer than those who don’t.

The principle applies whether you live in Hull or Heraklion: the closer you can aspire to the diet of southern Italy or Greece, the better your chances of living longer.

The Mediterranean diet — high in fruit, vegetables and legumes, low in meat and dairy products, enlivened with a glass or two of wine a day and dressed with olive oil — has been the dietician’s favourite for a generation or more. But most studies on its benefits have been local, small, or based only on the Greek population.

A major European study, the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, provided the chance for a look at the diet’s effects in nine countries — Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Between 1992 and 2000, the study recruited more than half a million healthy volunteers in 23 centres and took a detailed record of their diet, way of life and health. Since then they have been monitored in an effort to link diet to health.

The methods used are far more rigorous than those in most dietary surveys, with much more accurate assessment of what is actually eaten. Because the study is prospective — that is, it looks forward — it does not rely on people’s recall of what they ate ten years ago.

For the latest paper, published in the online edition of the British Medical Journal, a team led by Antonia Trichopoulou, of the University of Athens, and including Sheila Bingham, deputy director of the Dunn Human Nutrition Unit at Cambridge, identified 74,607 men and women aged over 60 from the survey’s database.

All were healthy, with no evidence of heart disease, stroke or cancer at the outset of the study. They were followed up for an average of just over seven years, by which time 4,047 had died.

The team compared the death rates of the participants with their dietary patterns. Adherence to the Mediterranean diet was measured on a nine-point scale, with high scores representing those that matched it best, and low scores those furthest away from it.

The results showed that an increase in the score was linked to lower overall mortality. For every two-point increase in score, deaths fell by 8 per cent; for a three-point increase by 11 per cent; and for a four-point increase by 14 per cent.

The effect is strongest in Greece and Spain where, the authors suspect, a Mediterranean diet is more truly Mediterranean than it is elsewhere.

In northern countries, where olive oil is less commonly found, the team used a different measure of fat consumption, putting a high value on polyunsatured fats. They call the result the modified Mediterranean diet.

In this country those in the top third of diet scores had a 20 per cent lower death rate than those in the bottom third. The team concludes: “The modified Mediterranean diet is beneficial to health across populations.

“Adherence to a diet relying on plant foods and unsaturated lipids [fats] and that resembles the Mediterranean diet, may be particularly appropriate for elderly people.”

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