Continuing the conversation about diet with experts (click the image for the source), who are asked what single change they would recommend:

Jeffrey Flier: With Caveats, Consider a ‘Mediterranean Diet’

This is a tough question to answer, for many reasons. Here are three:

1) Diet is extremely complex.

2) Dietary advice is best directed to a specific individual as it relates to their health, genetic makeup, culture and personality, rather to an “average” individual for whom such details are unknown.

3) There is much that we do not know, and this lack of information is not accurately reflected in the tsunami of dietary advice that flows into the public domain from a variety of sources. Add to these challenges a question that requests a single dietary change, and we have an onerous task.

Given these caveats, if I were to recommend a single dietary change to the average American, it would be to adopt some variation of a “Mediterranean diet,” which was recently shown in a New England Journal of Medicine study to improve key health outcomes. Given that a Mediterranean diet also happens to be delicious, I would make this recommendation with a concomitant plea that individuals should work closely with their health-care providers and nutritionists to tailor a diet that attempts to address an individual’s unique personal, medical and social situation.

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