In the 1950s, Ancel Keys lead a team of researchers that studied the diets of 13,000 people in seven countries over 10 years. They concluded that the diet of people around the Mediterranean – Greece, Italy, southern France, Spain, Turkey – had the healthiest diet.
The Mediterranean diet is not necessarily low in fat. Greeks topped the Seven Countries diet study for the consumption of fat, but the fat was olive oil and they had the lowest rate of heart disease. The Finns consumed less fat, but theirs was saturated fat in meat, butter, milk and processed fats, and they had the highest rate of heart disease.
The Greeks were also the biggest consumers of vegetables – easier to do, when the vegetables are glistening with olive oil – and the Finns consumed the fewest vegetables.
Other features of a Mediterranean diet are lots of bread and other grains, fruit, legumes, nuts, fish, yoghurt and some red wine. Meat, dairy food, cakes and pastries were eaten only occasionally, and people got a great deal of exercise – usually in the form of walking and physical work.
Increasing affluence since the 1950s has seen cream and fast foods creep into the diet, but a study of 22,000 Greeks published in The New England Journal of Medicine just this year, confirmed that nationality still had a 33% lower risk of death from heart disease and a 24% lower risk of death from cancer, compared to those on other diets.
The good effects of the Mediterranean diet cannot be shot home to one component – you must adopt the whole package. An attitude that rates food as important seems to matter too. People in Mediterranean countries devote time to preparing food and even more to eating it at leisure, sitting around the table rather than the television, and enjoying food with friends and family.
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