The Biggest Health Debate Finally Settled: Diet vs Exercise

So the first thing to talk about in this video is diet completely on its own.

And the question is this.

Can changing nothing but the food on your plate without adding a single minute of exercise actually keep you or stop you from having a heart attack? Now, obviously, this is a bit of an extreme argument, but this is where arguments are often won or lost is at the extremes because obviously everything changes.

is a spectrum.

Can just what you put on your plate protect you better than exercise? Now, the best evidence that we have here comes from a big Spanish trial called Predimed.

And if you've watched a few of my videos, you will know that I talk about this trial all the time, every single week.

And you can Google Predimed and, you know, it is basically the best evidence that we have about how powerful diet is.

And this is what we call a randomized control trial, which is the strongest kind of evidence that we have because people are put into their groups by chance.

And if you want to read about this trial a bit more, then there is a link in the description, as always, so you can read around this subject if you like.

Now, they recruited around 7,500 older people in Spain at high risk of heart disease, so either type 2 diabetes or risk factors like high blood pressure or smoking, but none of them had had a heart attack yet.

Then they split them into three groups, you know, randomly by chance.

With one of the groups eating a Mediterranean pattern with plenty of extra virgin olive oil.

The second group eating a Mediterranean pattern with a daily handful of nuts.

And the third group were just told to follow a low-fat diet.

And the assumption for a lot of people is that the low-fat diet would protect them more against heart disease because that is what we've been told, that fat is bad for your coronary arteries.

And then they counted the things that genuinely mattered to you.

So heart attacks and strokes and cardiovascular deaths.

And they followed those people over the next five years.

And the result was that both of the Mediterranean groups had roughly 30% fewer of those really bad events, so heart attacks and strokes and deaths.

So out of every 100 heart attacks and strokes that we would have expected, around 30 of them just simply didn't happen.

And the only thing that changed was what people were putting on their plate.

How amazing is that? It just shows you how powerful food really is.

That is the size of effect that we would get excited about when it comes from a drug.

And here it came from olive oil and nuts and veggies and fish and beans.