Comparative Study Regarding the Adherence to the Mediterranean Diet and the Eating Habits of Two Groups-The Romanian Children and Adolescents Living in Nord-West of Romania and Their Romanian Counterparts Living in Italy.

BACKGROUND: The Mediterranean diet (MD) is associated with significant health benefits, including prevention of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Given the important migratory flow from Romania to Italy in recent decades, this study seeks to evaluate the differences between the nutritional habits of Romanian children and adolescents in Romania compared with those of Romanian children who moved to Italy or were born in Italy from both Romanian parents. METHOD: To assess adherence to MD, parents of Romanian children in Romania (RCR) and Romanian children in Italy (RCI) answered questions from an adapted version of the KIDMED test. RESULTS: The results show that the high KIDMED index among RCI is significantly higher than the same index among RCR (68.09 versus 17.76, p < 0.05). RCR obtained a higher KIDMED score on different items: they had a lower consumption of fast food and sweets but an increased consumption of nuts, yogurts, and cheese. CONCLUSIONS: RCI have a better adherence to MD, but, at the same time, they are more exposed to westernized diet and practice less physical activity. Nutrition education is an important tool for improving health outcome.

Helicobacter pylori and nutrition: a bidirectional communication.

Helicobacter pylori (HP) is a gram-negative flagellated pathogen acid-resistant bacterium; it belongs to the order Campylobacterales that is wide spread all over the world, infecting more than 50% of the world population. HP infection is etiologically associated with non-atrophic and atrophic gastritis, peptic ulcer and with 3 to 6-fold increased relative risk for developing gastric adenocarcinoma and mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MA LT) lymphoma. For this reason HP is recognized by the World Health Organization as a Class I human carcinogen. In the last years a lot of studies clarified the role of this pathogen in nutrition and metabolism; particularly, it has been shown that it is able to induce malabsorption of several nutrients like iron, cobalamin, vitamin C and vitamin E, with strong consequences on nutritional status. Interesting, this bacterium is able to produce different biological effects on hormones like ghrelin and leptin controlling both appetite and growth, mostly depending on the time of acquisition of the infection and of its treatment. In this review, the authors focused their attention on nutritional effects of HP infection and particularly on the role that diet, food, plants and specific nutrients can play in its treatment, considering that HP eradication rates, with standard triple-therapy, have fallen to a low level in the last years.