Mediterranean diet vs plant-rich diet — which has stronger evidence?

These overlap heavily in practice — the Mediterranean diet is itself a plant-rich pattern, just with specific inclusions (olive oil, fish, moderate wine) layered on. What separates them on the evidence is trial design: the Mediterranean diet is anchored by PREDIMED, an actual randomized controlled trial that found reduced cardiovascular events in high-risk adults, on top of decades of cohort data like the Greek EPIC study — a combination of RCT and long-term cohort evidence that few dietary patterns can claim, and it shows: Mediterranean diet has among the highest evidence and impact scores of any topic on Vitaebase. Plant-rich diets more broadly have strong, consistent cohort support (UK Biobank, Nurses' Health Study) but no equivalent randomized trial. Practically, you don't have to choose — following a Mediterranean pattern already gets you most of what a plant-rich diet offers, with the added benefit of being the more rigorously trial-tested version.