Dietary Inflammatory Potential of Mediterranean Diet Versus A Typical Traditional Pakistani Diet

Abstract

Typical traditional Pakistani diets (TPD) are highly pro-inflammatory and there is an urgent need of making recommendations on diets that are anti-inflammatory. Mediterranean diets (MD) are well-known for their anti-inflammatory characteristics. The main objective of this work was to compare the inflammatory potential of two diets TPD vs MD. In this study, we 1) modelled an MD pattern and 2) assessed whether following a MD improved DII score more than a conventional TPD with additional recommendations with low-fat intake. The results broadly show that modelling an MD pattern is feasible using food items available locally. In addition, the results show the modelled MD pattern had a lower DII score. Furthermore, we found that following a MD for 6 months significantly improved DII score implying that MD led to a more anti-inflammatory diet potential, whereas the TPD did not. The results, as a whole, demonstrated that an MD plan has a high potential of lowering the dietary inflammation as demonstrated by a low (negative) DII score. In addition, the results of the clinical trial demonstrated that adhering to an MD pattern is practically a feasible dietary strategy for as much as 6 months as demonstrated in the current study. More research is needed on other segments of populations with diverse MD modelling options for different diseases.