If you’ve heard of the Mediterranean Diet, it’s a pattern of eating that emphasizes fish, nuts, legumes, fruits, vegetables and olive oil — lots of olive oil.

A 2013 study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the diet can protect against heart disease. Now, researchers say that eating a Mediterranean Diet supplemented with four tablespoons per day of extra-virgin olive oil reduces the risk of breast cancer.

“We found a strong reduction in the risk of breast cancer,” says Miguel Martinez Gonzalez, an author of the study and a leading researcher on the preventive health effects of the Mediterranean Diet at the University of Navarra in Spain.

The study assigned about 4,000 women between the ages of 60 and 80 to follow either the Mediterranean-plus-olive-oil diet or a low-fat diet. They found that the women following this diet had a 68 percent lower relative risk of developing breast cancer during a five-year follow-up period compared with women on the low-fat diet.

Although there were factors that played heavy on the outcome, experts say the Mediterranean Diet is known to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and may also prevent breast cancer.

If you are not cooking with olive oil, I think now is a good time to start. When it comes to choosing extra virgin olive oil, fresh is best, so look for a harvest date on the bottle.

SHARE the love and pass it on.