Eat Like Rural Greeks, Live Longer

And now: Zorba the dietitian.

According to research published in Saturday’s edition of the British Medical Journal, people in rural Greece who consume the traditional foods of the area - a diet relatively low in meat, dairy products and saturated fats but high in fruits, vegetables and grains, with moderate amounts of wine - live significantly longer than those who have strayed from their dietary roots.

Dimitrios Trichopoulos of the Harvard School of Public Health and colleagues followed a population of 182 elderly Greek villagers over a six-year period, and found that the ones who stuck with a traditional “Mediterranean” diet had half the death rate of those with more-westernized diets. Although the study focused on people over the age of 70, Trichopoulos said the health benefits may also apply to younger people.

The idea that a Greek diet is healthy might seem surprising to those who have sampled the sometimes-heavy fare offered at many Greek restaurants in America. But the rural diet differs significantly from that menu. The villagers ate little meat - in part, researchers found, because of the expense. Fat made up some 40 percent of their total energy intake, but the subjects generally ate twice as much of the healthier monounsaturated fat as saturated fats.

The researchers called wine consumption among the subjects “moderate,” but that too was relative: some men in the study drank as many as seven glasses of wine daily. Trichopoulos said wine glasses in Greece are generally smaller than those used in the United States, and estimated that this level of consumption would be equivalent to three or four glasses daily for Americans.

The study grew out of an effort by the International Union of Nutritional Sciences to chronicle culinary traditions worldwide. It is the first attempt to describe the health effects of a whole diet “prospectively” - that is, as part of an ongoing study of a group’s natural diet. Other health and diet studies have applied statistical methods to existing populations after the fact, or examined the impact of one element of diet, such as dietary fiber or high cholesterol.

While complimenting the study’s elegance and design, dietary experts cautioned Thursday that the findings might not be applicable to Americans looking to improve their health. The Mediterranean diet has long been recognized as healthy, said Arthur Frank, medical director of the Obesity Management Program at George Washington University, but switching to it may not deliver short-term benefits.