The Mediterranean diet is a much-talked-about diet for a variety of reasons. Considered one of the healthiest diets by experts, this eating pattern promises nutrition, heart benefits and longevity. A recent study also reveals that it can help menopausal women stay healthy and shed some extra weight.

Menopause and weight gain

Losing weight can be a struggle if you’re a woman. Unlike men who are blessed with a fast metabolism, you need to work twice as hard to shake off some excess weight. And if you’re finding it hard to do that in you’re mid-twenties or early thirties, then wait util you’re in your late forties and menopause sets in — you’re going to find it much more difficult.

Menopause brings a lot of bodily changes that cannot be avoided. Fluctuating hormone levels are the cause of these, and they are sadly unavoidable. Hormonal fluctuations will make you moody and give you things you don’t want, like hot flashes, trouble sleeping, slower metabolism and yes, even more unwanted weight.

According to Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford from Harvard Medical School, menopause brings with it a stubborn kind of weight gain, one that can resist even the most diligent efforts to reverse it. “Women often assume that they are the source of the problem when it comes to anything regarding their weight. [But] these aren’t related to something they are doing.”

According to experts, women tend to accumulate fat around their hips and thighs when they’re young. But during perimenopause — the years of menopausal transition — hormonal changes trigger a shift in their fat distribution, and women end up collecting weight in their abdominal area — a change that also comes with potential health risks. Abdominal fat accumulation is linked to an increased risk of heart problems, such as heart attack and high blood pressure.

“It’s very frustrating to women,” says Stanford, adding that apart from experiencing hot flashes and other discomforting symptoms of menopause, women also go through a whole change in shape. And it’s not just the waist that expands once menopause sets in, women also accumulate fat — the kind of fat that won’t easily budge — elsewhere.

The Mediterranean diet to the rescue

Losing weight once you’ve hit menopause can be a tall order, but luckily, researchers from Italy and the U.S. have found a solution to stubborn fat and weight gain that come with age. In an article published only recently, they described how a low-calorie traditional Mediterranean diet helped 89 women, half of whom were menopausal, successfully lose weight.

Initially, the researchers measured the women’s body weight, body mass indices, fat mass and blood cholesterol levels. They then prescribed them individual diets to follow for eight weeks that were based on a traditional Mediterranean diet and were tailored to their nutritional needs. The women were all in their late-forties, and half of them were fertile women over 45 years of age.

The researchers reported that at the end of the intervention, all the women saw improvements in their fat mass and blood pressure measurements. Apart from a greater reduction in the low-density lipoprotein — the bad cholesterol — levels of menopausal women, the Mediterranean diet granted the participants the same benefits. The researchers also noted that a higher proportion of plant protein than animal protein in their diet benefited the women in terms of body weight and fat-free mass.

“These data suggest that a high adherence to a traditional MD [Mediterranean diet] would enable menopausal women to lose fat mass and maintain muscle mass with no significant difference to younger women. Fat mass reduction provides menopausal women with improved cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors,” the researchers concluded in their report.

The discovery of the Mediterranean diet and its health benefits

As its name implies, the Mediterranean diet has its roots in the Mediterranean region — that is, the area that lies along the margins of the Mediterranean Sea. The health benefits of this diet were discovered in the early fifties by Ancel Keys, an American researcher from the University of Minnesota who wrote a paper about his discovery in the 1970s.

Keys observed that the residents of small towns in the south of Italy were much healthier than those living in New York, despite the large discrepancy between their wealth. He hypothesized that the foods the Southern Italians ate might be behind their apparent advantage. To prove his hypothesis, Keys conducted the Seven Countries Study, which included Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Japan, Yugoslavia and the United States.

For his study, Keys looked at the relationship between lifestyle, nutrition and cardiovascular disease among different populations. At the end of his study, he concluded that people who followed the Mediterranean diet and lifestyle had the lowest blood cholesterol levels and the lowest risk of heart disease. Subsequent studies listed the following components of the Mediterranean diet as the likely contributors to these people’s good health:

• Olive oil
• Whole-grain bread and pasta
• Fresh fruits and vegetables
• Herbs
• Garlic
• Red onions
• Other plant-based foods, such as nuts, seeds and legumes

Fish was also among the foods typically consumed by Mediterranean people, albeit not as regularly. But apart from the generous use of olive oil, Keys and other researchers who followed up on his study highlighted the moderate consumption of meat as the most important feature of the Mediterranean diet. Other notable things about the diet were the abundance of fresh vegetables and the consistency of having fresh fruits for dessert.

Since Keys’ famous discovery of the Mediterranean way of eating, many more studies have explored this diet’s benefits. There is now substantial evidence that the Mediterranean diet lowers the risk of chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome. The latter is defined as a cluster of conditions that contribute to a higher risk of heart disease, stroke and Type 2 diabetes. The most common benefits associated with following the Mediterranean diet are increased high-density lipoprotein or good cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure and decreased blood triglycerides and blood sugar.

Menopause is an inevitable part of aging for women. While you may not have a say on how menopause changes your body, you do have a choice on how to respond to those changes. You can minimize the health risks associated with these physical changes by modifying your lifestyle and diet.

One of the best ways to manage weight is to exercise regularly and to eat healthily. The Mediterranean diet is the perfect diet to help you adjust to the changes that menopause brings because it can help you lose weight while supporting your heart and metabolic health. It’s never too late to switch to a healthy diet, and the Mediterranean diet offers the same benefits regardless of your age.

Sources:

MDPI.com

Health.Harvard.edu

MayoClinic.org 1

MayoClinic.org 2

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov