If there's one word I hate it's diet. It is a perfectly sensible word in itself. All it should mean is the food we eat. But it has come to have medical connotations - a way of eating specifically designed to improve your health. There are diets to reduce weight, diets to protect against heart disease, diets for diabetes, for high blood pressure, for sportsmen and women, for anorexics and bulimics - and the foods chosen for them are usually measured, weighed, calorie-counted and analysed in detail. Diets may be all right in theory, but they all have a serious flaw. It's almost impossible for people to stay on them.

That's because they are artificial, and mainly stress the foods you CAN'T eat, rather than the wide range of foods that you CAN eat. Worse than that, "going on a diet" is on a par with taking a medicine - it isn't done for pleasure, but for a particular medical purpose. And that's a very bad reason on which to choose your food. For above all, the food you eat must be enjoyable - and hardly any diets can be classed as that. So I'm pleased to see that the British Heart Foundation have been approaching how we should eat in a more positive way. And they have proved that following their advice on eating healthily saves many people from early death due to heart attacks and strokes.

The Foundation looked at three sets of positive advice on eating wisely - and gathered scientifically proven evidence on what they did. The first was advice on eating more fish: the second was eating more fruit and vegetables; the third on eating a more Mediterranean diet. The results are frankly spectacular.

The "eat more fish" advice came from the finding more than 20 years ago that the Inuit (formerly called Eskimo) have a very low rate of heart attacks - and they virtually live on fish and marine mammals. It was reasoned that the fish proteins might help the heart. (It was also reasoned that we probably could not persuade people to eat a lot of seal and whale meat!) The main evidence for eating fish comes from a trial in which 2,033 men with a recent heart attack were asked to change their eating habits in one of three ways - to eat less fat, to eat more cereal, or to eat at least two portions of oily fish a week. The fish included mackerel, herring, kipper, pilchard, sardine, salmon and trout. People who could not tolerate fish were given fish oil capsules.

The men asked to eat more fish ate more than three times as much fish as the men in the other groups. And there were 29 per cent fewer deaths in the fish group than in the other two. It was calculated that for every 30 men treated for two years just by eating more fish, one death would be avoided. That good result was similar to the ones in trials giving advice on eating more fruit and vegetables.

One study reports a one-third (thrity-four per cent) reduction in risk of a death from coronary disease with an increase of 60 grams a day in vegetables. That's just one portion! In the same study there was a twenty-three per cent reduction in deaths in the group taking just 80g (again one portion) of extra fruit each day. But the best advice is to go the whole hog and be an honorary Italian, Greek or Spaniard.

Eating Mediterranean style is a real pleasure for most of us, but it can also be the way to save our lives. Roughly it involves eating more bread and pasta, more green and root vegetables, more fish, less meat (less red meats and more poultry), never a day without fruit, and using oils rather than dairy products in cooking. After 27 months of a trial in which the usual British fare was compared with a switch to Mediterranean foods, it had to be stopped. Because there were 70 per cent fewer deaths in the people enjoying the Mediterranean way of eating!

This was no fluke. The trial subjects were 605 middle-aged men and women with a recent heart attack. There were 20 deaths in the "usual eating habit" group and only eight in the "Mediterranean" group. These results are as good as those of the modern drug trials in preventing heart attacks, so I'm all for them.

Of course, if you have had a heart attack you should still take your daily aspirin and your recommended prescription drugs, but look upon eating Mediterranean style as a pleasure that could just save your life.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.