It's been nearly 30 years since researchers first recognized the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet, with its high consumption of vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, cereals, seafood and olive oil, along with a moderate amount of alcohol and relatively little meat or dairy. But apparently they've never tried to figure out which of those components deserves the credit. Now researchers from the University of Athens Medical School in Greece and the Harvard School of Public Health have examined the relative contribution of each of these foods and determined that moderate alcohol consumption seems to play the biggest role in reducing mortality.

Alcohol alone accounted for 24 percent of the total benefit, the researchers found. Most of that came in the form of wine consumed with meals. Researchers based at Harvard and the University of Athens looked at data collected from more than 20,000 Greek men and women who were followed for an average of more than eight years as part of a study of nutrition and health. They assessed participants’ adherence to nine components of the Mediterranean diet.

They found that overall, people who adhered more closely to the diet were less likely to die during the study. They also parsed the data to see which elements of the diet were most strongly associated with this benefit.

Here, in descending order of importance, are the keys: * A moderate amount of alcohol (usually wine) * A small amount of meat * Lots of vegetables * Lots of fruits and nuts * A high ratio of monounsaturated to saturated fats * Lots of legumes How much grain, dairy products people ate didn’t seem to make much difference in terms of mortality. The authors suggested that this might be because grains and dairy products are broad categories of foods, where different products can have different health effects (skim milk versus ice cream, for example).

Fish consumption also didn’t seem to have much of an effect — perhaps because fish plays a small part in the diet of the population included in the studies, which could make its health effects difficult to detect, the authors wrote. Previous studies have suggested that the Mediterranean diet - which includes many of cereals, vegetables, fruits and olive oil, moderate consumption of fish and alcohol, and few dairy products, meat and sweets - reduces the risk of metabolic syndrome. The study involved 1224 people aged between 55 and 80 years at high risk of cardiovascular disease.

They were divided into three groups: one group received advice on a diet low in fat, and the other two were taught quarterly on the Mediterranean diet. The second group received a liter of olive oil per week, and the third group received 30 grams of walnuts per day. In the beginning of the study about 61.1% of people were affected by the metabolic syndrome.

A year later, the prevalence of the syndrome was reduced by 13.7 percent in the third group, 6.7% in the second, and 2% in the control group. Nobody has changed their weight, but the number of people that had large size, or high triglycerides, or hypertension, decreased in the third group (those who have learned to follow a Mediterranean diet associated with nuts), compared to the control group. According to researchers, these results suggest that the Mediterranean diet enriched with nuts, improves certain aspects of the metabolic syndrome, including damage to cells caused by oxygen, insulin resistance and inflammation. "Traditionally, it is advised to use diets that are low in fats and high in carbohydrates, but they are not very tasty.

The results of this study show that a traditional Mediterranean diet, not limited in energy and enriched with nuts, which is rich in fat, rich in unsaturated fat and tasty, helps controling the metabolic syndrome," concludes Dr. Jordi Salas-Salvado and colleagues at the University of Rovira i Virgili. Sicily’s Healthy Mediterranean Diet, Traditional Cuisine on Italian island Sicily’s healthy Mediterranean diet is based on fresh produce and olive oil with only a little meat, mostly lamb or goat, or the acclaimed veal Marsala.

Favourite starters include caponata, a hot dish or salad of aubergine, capers, olive and celery, panella or chick pea fritters, and crocche, potato dumplings with cheese, parsley and egg. Artichokes and aubergines are popular in season as are the sweet glossy tomatoes of Pachino. Pizza alla Norma is named after Bellini’s opera and there’s plenty of pasta but fish comes top along the coast. Grilled swordfish, snapper, cuttle fish cooked in its own ink and sardines with fennel are delicious healthy choices.

Sicily’s Cheese and Wine Sicily offers a rich variety of cheese. Pecorino, made from ewe’s milk, and Caciocavallo are often grated on pasta dishes while Canestrato is served as a table cheese. Piacentinu from central Sicily comes from ewe’s milk flavoured with saffron and in the Ragusa province, Ragusano owes its taste to Modica cows grazing outdoors year round. Ricotta and Provola, which can be smoked, are found everywhere. Sicilian wines are generally strong and full bodied, sure to reduce cholesterol if claims are true.

They range from the fortified Marsala to Malvasia in the north east, the highly popular red Nero d’Avola and Etna wines. There are liqueurs made from almond and prickly pear and a fiery grappa distilled from grape must. Mediterranean Fruit and Sweet Sicilian Desserts Peaches, melons, grapes, pomegranates or apricots, summer fruit are abundant, bursting with vitamins as they ripen in the sun. Blood oranges are particularly delicious, fresh from street stalls and carts, or squeezed into juice as visitors relax on the café terrace. Among the favourite desserts are cannoli, or ricotta and sugar pastry tubes, cassata and pasta reale, the attractive marzipan sweetmeats coloured and shaped to look like fruit. Ice cream, they say, was invented by the Romans quenching their thirst with the snows of Etna and comes flavoured with jasmine, pistachio, hazelnut, mulberry and more. Flavoured crushed ice, or granita, is pure heaven on a hot day, and there’s Modica chocolate from Ragusa and honey from the Iblei mountains.