Mediterranean diets and cardiovascular disease.

Coronary heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the Western world. Among these countries, however, there is a marked discrepancy in the prevalence of heart disease in spite of similar traditional risk factor profiles. This is undoubtedly due to differences in lifestyle, the most important of which are diet and exercise. Both epidemiologic data and clinical trials suggest that the beneficial impact of specific dietary and lifestyle changes on cardiac event rates could be greater than that achieved by any of the drug or revascularization trials to date.