The latest dispatch from the food wars: For those at high risk of heart disease, following the Mediterranean diet results in 30 percent fewer heart attacks and strokes. Focused on nuts, beans, fatty fish, fruits and vegetables – all washed down with olive oil and wine (separate glasses, please) – the diet is said to be more effective in combating cardiovascular disease than the low-fat regimens now in vogue.

Thus reports The New England Journal of Medicine to cheers from many, though not all, advocates of healthy eating. Understandably holding their applause are backers of low-fat diets, including the famed Dr. Dean Ornish of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, in Sausalito, Calif.

Clapping with one hand are skeptics like your author, who, although no medical expert, has read one too many authoritative reports on how to live forever, if not longer, only to see it subsequently blasted by another authoritative report.