Eating a Mediterranean diet that includes lots of vegetables, fruits and legumes can help people with Alzheimer’s live an average 1.3 years longer than people who eat a more traditional Western diet, a new study has found.

The Mediterranean diet includes a high intake of vegetables, legumes, fruits, cereals, fish, monounsaturated fatty acids; a low intake of saturated fatty acids, dairy products, meat and poultry; and a mild to moderate amount of alcohol whereas a Western diet is higher in saturated fat and meats and lower in fruits and vegetables.

The study was conducted by researchers at the Columbia University Medical Centre in New York, who followed 192 people with Alzheimer’s disease for an average of four and a half years.

They noted that those people who most closely followed a Mediterranean diet were 76 per cent less likely to die during the study period than those who followed the diet the least.

“The more closely people followed the Mediterranean diet, the more they reduced their mortality,” said study author Nikos Scarmeas, MD, MSc, of Columbia University Medical Centre in New York, and member of the American Academy of Neurology.