Wellness The Mediterranean Diet Has Ranked #1 For Seven Years In a Row—What Makes It So Effective?
Time to move beyond your understanding of cucumber, feta, olives, tomato, and red onion—and onto what makes this eating pattern so powerful. By Abbey Stone
January 15, 2025 Photo: Tanja Ivanova / Getty ImagesTanja Ivanova All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
In its annual Best Diets ranking, U.S. News and World Report has awarded the top spot to the Mediterranean diet for the seventh year in a row. According to the publication, this style of eating—inspired by the eating habits of people living in the Mediterranean region—has such serious staying power because it’s easy to follow long-term and has been shown to support heart health, bone, and joint health, and help prevent certain diseases, such as diabetes.
But “diet” is really a misnomer, says Maya Feller, MS, RD, CDN , author of Eating From Our Roots and a member of U.S. News and World Report’s Best Diets expert panel . “It’s less of a diet, more of a lifestyle, an eating pattern,” she says. “[It] can be customized based on the individual’s likes, dislikes, personal preference, religious needs, and access.” Get GQ’s essential style, wellness, and shopping advice in your inbox
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“The Mediterranean diet is really a long-term dietary lifestyle…versus another kind of restrictive time-period diet,” agrees Maggie Berghoff , a functional medicine nurse practitioner and author of Eat to Treat . Rather than cutting out certain food groups or counting calories, “it focuses on [eating] a lot of healthy fats, healthy oils, and plant-based foods,” she says. What Is the Mediterranean Diet?
The Mediterranean diet started to gain attention as a healthy way of eating in the 1950s, when scientist Ancel Keys, PhD, of the the University of Minnesota School of Power discovered a correlation between eating habits, lifestyles, and cardiovascular health .
“What the research found was that people who […]
The Mediterranean Diet Has Ranked #1 For Seven Years In a Row—What Makes It So Effective?
