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The Mediterranean diet is characterized by an adequate consumption of fruit and vegetables, fish, cereals, olive oil, and moderate consumption on meat and dairy products. The olive oil is an excellent source of oleic acid that has multiple beneficial effects on human health. The level of oleic acid in plasma phospholipids reflects its dietary intake and endogenous metabolism. In some diseases the level of OA is altered independently on its intake. Currently, cardiovascular diseases and cancer are the most common causes of death worldwide. This chapter evaluates status of OA in Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean region and impact of the Mediterranean diet and oleic acid on cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Fatty acids (FAs) are long hydrocarbon chain molecules with a terminal carboxylate group, originating from the organism or food. Their nomenclature, structure, and properties depend on the length of hydrocarbon chain, degree of unsaturation, and position of double bond(s). The process of FA synthesis occurs in the cytosol, whereas the process of β-oxidation of FA takes place in the mitochondrial matrix. Saturated FAs are synthesized by the enzyme system FA synthase, while synthesis of unsaturated FA involves elongase and desaturase activity. The final products of FA β-oxidation are acyl CoA, FADH 2 , and NADH.

Contrast enhancement plays a fundamental role in image processing. Weighted thresholded histogram equalization (HE) is a well-known method for contrast enhancement, frequently used at the preprocessing stage in many image processing systems. Optimization of the weighting constraints is a hard optimization problem, and swarm intelligence metaheuristics have been successfully used for solving such problems. In this chapter we present an application of the bat algorithm (BA) to an image contrast enhancement problem. The proposed method improves performance of the weighted thresholded HE method by using the BA for optimizing weighting constrains. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated via quantitative and visual analysis. Discrete entropy of the image was used as an objective criterion for measuring image contrast enhancement. The experimental results show that, for the variety of test images, the proposed method enhances contrast effectively while preserving brightness and natural appearance.