If you’ve read very much in the nutrition science world, you’ve run across the Mediterranean diet. US News & World Report consistently ranks it among the best diets in the world. You’ve probably heard it reduces heart disease, supports brain health, and helps people live longer, and it’s true.
You probably haven’t heard of the Green Mediterranean diet, a newer, more plant-forward version that’s even more powerful. The Green Mediterranean Diet isn’t a trendy social media concept; it was generated by scientists doing rigorous clinical research.
Dr. Iris Shai and colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel developed it in collaboration with researchers at Harvard and Leipzig. When you see what it does in the body, it’s easy to be impressed. It’s a good diet.
In this article, we’ll explain what the Green Mediterranean Diet actually is. We’ll cover three key studies that show what it does and compare it to the Hallelujah Diet, looking at what’s similar and what’s different about how we optimize dietary intakes even further. The scientific research is catching up with us, but it’s not quite there yet.
What Is the Green Mediterranean Diet?
The green Mediterranean diet starts with the classic Mediterranean dietary pattern: abundant vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and olive oil, with very little red or processed meat. Then it builds on that foundation, making it significantly more plant-forward in three specific ways.
First, it completely eliminates red and processed meat. The regular Mediterranean diet allows modest amounts of fish and poultry and occasional red meat; the green version cuts out red meat.
Second, it adds Mankai duckweed, a floating aquatic plant (Wolffia globosa) consumed as a 100-gram frozen cube made into a green shake every day. Mankai is exceptionally high in protein, iron, and polyphenols, and contains detectable B12 compounds (produced by endophytic bacteria within the plant, though functional bioavailability has not been confirmed by methylmalonic acid assay). It is sometimes described as the most protein-dense plant food known. So it rivals spirulina in protein density.
Third, participants drink three to four cups of green tea daily, adding another 800 milligrams or so of polyphenols per day on top of the walnuts (28 grams per day) that both Mediterranean groups consumed.
The net result is a diet that delivers roughly 1,700 milligrams of polyphenols per day, compared to about 440 milligrams in the standard Mediterranean diet. This polyphenol load is central to the striking results.
Three Analyses Show Green Mediterranean Diet’s Strengths
1. Liver Fat: A 39% Reduction in 18 Months
The DIRECT PLUS trial was conducted by Dr. Anat Yaskolka Meir, Dr. Iris Shai, and colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The trial enrolled 294 adults with abdominal obesity and dysepidemia and randomly assigned them to one of three groups:
- Healthy Dietary Guidelines
- The standard Mediterranean diet with 28 grams of walnuts per day
- The green Mediterranean diet (walnuts with 3-4 cups of green tea and 100g of Mankai Daily) (Green Med)
All three groups also received physical activity guidance and gym memberships. From this DIRECT PLUS trial, three important papers came out. The first one was published in Gut in 2021.
Here’s the main result from that study. They measured liver fat using proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy, the gold-standard method. After 18 months, the healthy dietary guidelines group reduced liver fat by 12%. The standard Mediterranean diet group reduced it by 20%. The green Med diet group reduced liver fat by 39%.
That’s more than triple the benefit of healthy eating guidelines and nearly double that of the standard Mediterranean diet. All from dietary changes alone.
2. Visceral Fat: 14% Reduction vs. 7% in Standard Mediterranean Diet
Visceral fat is the fat that accumulates between your organs, and it matters a lot more than the number on the scale. This is the fat you really don’t want. It produces inflammatory hormones and is strongly associated with heart disease, diabetes, and dementia.
A second article from the DIRECT PLUS trial, which was published in BMC Medicine in 2022, led by Dr. Hila Zelicha and colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, measured visceral fat by MRI across all three groups. After 18 months, the green Mediterranean diet group reduced visceral fat by 14%, compared to 7% in the standard Mediterranean diet group and 4.5% in the healthy dietary guidelines group.
That 14% reduction is significant. Visceral fat is stubbornly resistant to dietary change in most interventions. A diet that moves it this much, without surgical intervention, is genuinely impressive.
3. Brain Health: Slowing Age-Related Atrophy by About 50%
This finding impressed me the most. The third article was a 2022 brain MRI substudy from DIRECT PLUS, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Dr. Alon Kaplan, Dr. Iris Shai, and colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Harvard, which followed 284 participants and used hippocampal occupancy score and lateral ventricle volume as markers of brain aging.
The green Med diet group showed approximately 50% less age-related brain atrophy than the healthy dietary guidelines group over 18 months. The standard Mediterranean diet was also protective, but the green Med diet outperformed it here. The researchers specifically noted that Mankai and green tea, the polyphenol additions unique to the green version, appeared to contribute to this neuroprotective effect above and beyond what the standard Mediterranean diet provided.
Brain shrinkage is a “normal” part of aging, but the rate at which it happens is influenced by diet and lifestyle. Slowing it by half is not a small thing.
Green Mediterranean Diet vs. Hallelujah Diet: What’s Similar
Looking at what the green Med diet actually prescribes, there’s a lot of common ground with the Hallelujah Diet.
On the positive side, both diets emphasize abundant vegetables and fruits, legumes, organic whole grains, nuts and seeds, and olive oil.
On the negative side, both diets cut out processed foods, added sugar, refined carbohydrates, and red and processed meats.
If you were to lay the two dietary patterns side by side, you would find a lot in common. A person following the Hallelujah Diet according to our guidelines would meet many of the same nutritional targets as those in the Direct Plus trial.
Improvements to the Green Mediterranean Diet
But there’s still room for improvement on the Green Med Diet. Here are four key areas.
Raw foods
The Hallelujah Diet emphasizes mostly raw vegetables and fruits, which retain more heat-sensitive enzymes, vitamins, and phytonutrients than cooked foods. The green Mediterranean diet is, for the most part, a cooked-foods diet.
Fresh vegetable juicing
We encourage juicing as a way to deliver concentrated micronutrients directly into the bloodstream without the burden of fiber. Since the juicer does a lot of the extraction of nutrients for you, you get more out of your produce. And you can consume the nutrients from more produce using a juicer. The green Mediterranean diet uses whole foods and doesn’t include juicing.
No animal products
The green Mediterranean diet cuts out red meat but still allows fish. Many fish are unclean, carrying a toxic load of heavy metals, PCBs, and other “forever chemicals.” The Hallelujah Diet is plant-based throughout, with the exception of purified fish oil supplements for EPA and DHA.
Targeted supplementation
The DIRECT PLUS diet included walnuts but no supplements. The Hallelujah Diet adds BarleyMax for concentrated chlorophyll and phytonutrients, fish oil for long-chain omega-3s, curcumin for anti-inflammatory support, vitamin D3 with K2, vitamin B12, iodine, and liposomal vitamin C. These fill in gaps that even an excellent whole-food diet leaves open.
No alcohol
The standard Mediterranean diet credits moderate alcohol, and the green version doesn’t specifically address it. The Hallelujah Diet excludes alcohol entirely.
Lessons to Learn from the Green Mediterranean Diet
The emphasis on polyphenol quantity is something worth noting. The green Mediterranean diet researchers deliberately maximized polyphenol intake, and the results improved substantially. The best dietary sources of polyphenols are spices and dried herbs like cloves and oregano, berries, dark chocolate and cocoa, extra virgin olive oil, coffee and green tea, legumes, nuts, intact whole grains, pomegranates, artichokes, red onions, and purple cabbage. Emphasize these foods daily to increase your polyphenol intake.
The green Mediterranean diet uses the Mankai duckweed the way we use BarleyMax. While duckweed is an interesting plant, BarleyMax has a long history and research showing benefits for many systems of the body. Including a concentrated green superfood is a great idea that is incorporated into the Green Mediterranean diet. Maybe they learned it from us?
A Hallelujah Diet Perspective
In my comparison of the Hallelujah Diet with other nutrient-dense diets, I’ve immediately recognized that the Mediterranean diet has a lot of room for improvement. There are some vegetables in the diet, but there’s room for a lot more. The researchers in the DIRECT PLUS trial found a way to dramatically increase green intakes, achieving much better results.
They were able to reduce liver fat by 39%, visceral fat by 14%, and slow brain atrophy by roughly half over the 18-month trial period. These are great results, and I don’t want to take anything away from what they have accomplished.
The Green Mediterranean Diet is one of the best-studied dietary patterns in the world right now, and it points in the direction we’re already heading. I think we’re a little further along the way with more raw foods, fresh vegetable juice, the elimination of animal products, and targeted supplementation to close the gaps.
Whether you have followed the Hallelujah Diet for a long time or if you are just starting out, this research gives you confidence that you are going in the right direction. God has placed self-healing in our bodies, and we can unleash it to a great extent just by what we eat.
References
1. Yaskolka Meir A, Rinott E, Tsaban G, et al. Effect of green-Mediterranean diet on intrahepatic fat: the DIRECT PLUS randomised controlled trial. Gut. 2021;70(11):2085-2095. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33461965/
2. Zelicha H, Kloting N, Kaplan A, et al. The effect of high-polyphenol Mediterranean diet on visceral adiposity: the DIRECT PLUS randomized controlled trial. BMC Medicine. 2022;20(1):327.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36175997/
3. Kaplan A, Zelicha H, Yaskolka Meir A, et al. The effect of a high-polyphenol Mediterranean diet (Green-MED) combined with physical activity on age-related brain atrophy: the DIRECT PLUS trial. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2022;115(5):1299-1308. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35021194/
