[Evidences on the relationship between Mediterranean diet and health status]

Mediterranean diet (MD) is an eating pattern that has been worldwide promoted as a model for healthy eating and has been reported to contribute to a favourable health status and to a better quality of life. Over the last years, despite evidences on the beneficial effects of the single components of MD have been reported, research interest has been focused on the whole dietary pattern rather than on a single nutrient, since individual analyses of nutrients and food can ignore important interactions between components of a diet and, more importantly, because people do not eat isolated nutrients. Therefore, dietary scores estimating the adherence to the MD have been operationalised and have been found to be associated with a reduction of overall mortality, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension and obesity. Furthermore, a high degree of adherence to MD has been found related to lower concentrations of inflammation, endothelial dysfunction and coagulation markers. In a recent meta-analysis on over than 1,5 million of persons we were able to demonstrate that a higher adherence to Mediterranean diet is associated with a significant reduced risk of incidence and mortality from all causes and from cardiovascular, neoplastic and neurodegenerative diseases.