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(NaturalNews) The Mediterranean diet is the ideal diet plan for any natural health aficionado. It touts the array of fruits, vegetables and sea-based foods that are life promoting, while pooh-poohing the foods and drinks that are life demoting, a list far too copious to list here. I've written about the benefits of the Mediterranean diet in the past, but seeing as how there's a brand new study out advancing why it's a diet worth observing, I figured a refresher course might be in order.

As previously mentioned, a Mediterranean diet is one where fish is consumed regularly, red meat is consumed sparingly, fruits and vegetables are a part of every meal and the healthy fats from nuts, almonds and olive oil are never shied away from. And while carbohydrate-based foods aren't shied away from either, they're typically refined to whole wheat pastas and brown rice.

No body, no diet is perfect, but if researchers' analysis of the diet and its followers' health is any indication, it doesn't get much better than the Mediterranean diet. That's because strict followers of it are among those at the lowest risk for some of the highest disease risks in America today: heart disease, cancer, Parkinson's and various cancers.

Now, studies usually involve a large number of participants -- the large ones being anywhere between 500 and 10,000 -- and these large sample sizes help give greater credibility to the study themselves. But this study wasn't 10,000 large or 100,000 large. It wasn't even 999,999 large. This study included 1.5 million people! Italian researchers from the University of Florence compiled data from 12 similar studies that took place all over the world to get their own data set. Naturally, the compiled study periods varied in length, lasting anywhere from three years to as long as 18 years.

As part of their analysis, the researchers developed what they called an "adherence" indicator, which they used to determine how closely the participants followed the Mediterranean diet (I'm assuming the participants kept track of their meal plans in each of these studies). Comparing the participants who followed most closely to those who veered off the Mediterranean path somewhere down the line, those who stayed true to the Mediterranean diet had lower incidence rate of cancer (6 percent overall) heart disease (9 percent), Parkinson's disease (13 percent) and Alzheimer's disease (13 percent) compared to those not quite as vigilant in their dieting. What's more, the stick-to-itiveness of the Mediterranean crowd resulted in about a 10 percent lower death rate. Their results have been published in the most recent edition of the British Medical Journal.

The caveat to this study's finding, of course, is how vigilantly and with what kind of tenacity the adherents, well, adhered to the diet. But this isn't too surprising. After all, taking God-given ability out of the equation, the most successful in life -- whether it's on the court, on the track, in the office or on the ball field -- are those that put the most effort into the activity itself. The same applies to any diet plan. The healthiest are those who remain true to their commitment to live a long and healthy life. And as it's becoming increasingly clear, there are few lifestyles healthier than the Mediterranean lifestyle.

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