The Atlantic Diet

Executive summary

* "The Atlantic Diet" made recent news headlines. The paper behind it was a re-look at a diet trial called the GALIAT trial, which was registered in 2015. The GALIAT diet described the way of eating in northern Portugal and a region in northwest Spain.

* The Atlantic Diet was described as the abundant consumption of real (not processed), local, fresh, seasonal foods, including fruit, vegetables, bread, cereals and pulses, along with fish and milk products.

* The trial was a 6 month intervention with 250 families. Everyone from the same family did the same diet – either the GALIAT/Atlantic diet or the control diet. This meant that the trial was not randomised and there were differences between the control and diet groups. These were not all adjusted for.

* The recent paper aimed to look at whether the diet made a difference to the development of metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome has five component parts.

* The paper claimed that 1) the diet reduced the risk of developing metabolic syndrome and 2) the diet group participants had fewer of the five metabolic syndrome components.