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Let us begin with an interesting little experiment. Take a minute and write down the first 10 things that cross your mind when hearing the term “mediterranean”. According to Google, your list should look something like this: sun, sandy beaches, vacation, Italy, Spain, islands, Greece, great food, Mediterranean diet and financial crisis. Now, start eliminating from your list those options that in your opinion could not represent a fallacy. Well, certainly not the sun and the gorgeous sandy beaches! What about the food you tasted when you visited one of the regional countries? Didn t think so. Financial turmoil is an unpleasantly realistic situation indeed, so what is left after all? What about the renowned Mediterranean diet? Could that be it?
Looking at the picture on your left (select for enlargement), we have a major difficulty understanding how a geographical area extending from Spain all the way to the shores of Syria and including a total of 23 countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Malta, Monaco, France, Andorra, Spain) could possibly be characterized by one and only specific food consumption pattern, common to all those so different in other terms (culture, history, mentality, religion etc) ethnicities. Well, it could not and categorically it is not. So, how was the term Mediterranean diet created and what does it really stand for?
Back in 1950s the medical community started looking for potential connections between food consumption and the manifestation of lethal cardiovascular diseases. During that quest and through a big number of relevant scientific studies, a strong correlation was eventually confirmed. The most influential of those studies, the renowned 7-Country Study, discovered that among cohorts from 16 different areas in 7 different countries (Finland, Greece, Italy, U.S., Japan, Yugoslavia and the Netherlands) around the world, the domestic population of the Greek island of Crete in central Mediterranean basin suffered the lowest rates of death due to coronary disease and other cardiovascular incidents. Cretans followed a significantly different diet from the rest of the participating cohorts, even when compared to the domestic population of the also Greek island of Corfu and to their close neighbours in Italy (Rome, Montegiorgio and Crevalcore). The tables available in the pictures on your left, have been taken from the “Food consumption patterns in the 1960s in seven countries”[1] study. We have marked the consumptions of those populations that originate from the Mediterranean area, namely the Italians, the Greeks and the Yugoslavians. Obviously, the food consumption patterns around the Mediterranean basin are significantly different! Interestingly, the Cretans who suffered the lowest death rates due to coronary disease, followed by the Japanese, consumed massive quantities of fruits and olive oil. Simultaneously, alcohol and pastries were practically absent from their daily diet. On the contrary, the Italians had a much more moderate consumption of olive oil, a very high intake of alcohol and meat and a rather low consumption of fruits. For their part, Yugoslavians consumed small amounts of fruits while they drank a lot of milk and ate rather moderate quantities of meat.
After that very brief analysis, a simple but very persistent question rises. Which of the three food consumption patterns above represents the so-called Mediterranean diet? Because it cannot be all three of them since they exhibit obvious and significant differences. The answer is none! And that is simply because there is no such thing as “Mediterranean diet”. There is Cretan diet, Italian diet, Yugoslavian diet, Moroccan diet and so on, however those cannot be seen as a single set. So, what is the case with the “Mediterranean diet” after all?
Mediterranean diet can most leniently be described as an unsubstantiated generalization. In its core, it is a marketing trick exploited by clever marketers in order to take advantage of scientific findings confirming the definite, positive impact on health that a very specific diet pattern originating from an area situated in the Mediterranean basin, namely the island of Crete, proved to have in the past. According to the pioneering 7-Country Study, among several others, the traditional diet followed by domestic populations in Crete proved to act as a shield against coronary disease and other cardiovascular incidents. The second best performance towards that direction was achieved by a diet followed in Japan, which last time we checked was nowhere close to the Mediterranean.
So, going back to our experiment and our list of potential Mediterranean fallacies we can confidently say that we have a winner. Mediterranean diet is simply a marketing concept and that is the only way one should have it in his or her mind. There are diets indeed which originate from the greater Mediterranean area and largely promote a healthy lifestyle, with the most important of them being the traditional Cretan diet. Ηowever, none of them includes pizza and spaghetti covered in fatty sauce.
[1]“Food consumption patterns in the 1960sin seven countries” Daan Kromhout, Ancel Keys, Christ Aravanis, Ratko Buzina, Flaminio Fidanza, Simona Giampaoli, Annemarie Jansen, Alessandro Menotti, Srecko Nedeljkovic, Maija Pekkarinen, Bozidar S Simic, and Hironori Toshima, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition May 1989 vol. 49 no. 5 889-894 |
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