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The weightiest evidence that a dietary pattern changes blood pressure comes from feeding trials such as DASH: the researchers prepared all of the participants' meals (more fruit, vegetables, low-fat dairy and whole grains; less saturated fat and sweets), with sodium and body weight held constant, and blood pressure still fell (Appel 1997). The later DASH-Sodium trial showed that cutting sodium on top of the DASH diet lowered it further (Sacks 2001). How much each component contributes was not separated in these trials.
The cardiovascular evidence for the Mediterranean diet rests mainly on PREDIMED: among middle-aged and older adults at high cardiovascular risk, those assigned to a Mediterranean diet with extra-virgin olive oil or with nuts had fewer major cardiovascular events than the control group advised to eat a low-fat diet (hazard ratios 0.69 and 0.72). Because part of the randomization was flawed, the trial was retracted in 2018 and republished with the affected participants removed and extra analyses added, so it no longer counts as a clean randomized trial (Estruch 2018). Most of the remaining evidence pools observational studies (Dinu 2018).