The Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean diet is not a diet plan in the true sense of the word. It is more a collection of eating habits of the Mediterranean people, which have been found to be healthy and good for combating cardiovascular disease as well as obesity.

As you might know already, there are at least 16 countries along the Mediterranean Sea. The Mediterranean diet is a term used to describe the food patterns followed by people from these countries.

While the diets in each of these countries differ from each other in terms of specific content, they are all similar in the basic type of ingredients that they comprise.

The merits of the Mediterranean diet were first highlighted by Dr. Ancel Keys, who was himself based in Salerno, Italy. However, this attempt at popularizing it remained largely unsuccessful, and interest in this diet plan was reignited only in the 1990s, when the focus across Europe and America was on obesity and what one could do to control or curb it.

Dieticians and health experts are prescribing this set of food habits as a regular diet itself, as researchers have found that people from this area have a lesser percentage of food and diet-related ailments compared to other people across the world.

Reduced cancer risk

Studies have shown that people following the Mediterranean diet have lesser chances of getting heart disease and cancer than other people.

What is important to note here is that the people from this region consume an equal amount of fat as their other European and also American counterparts. In fact, almost 40% of the calories come from fat content in the case of the Mediterranean diet. However they don't show the same propensity towards developing cardiovascular ailments as the other Europeans and Americans.

This has led doctors to question how this possible, given that they consume the same amount of fats and other products as the other people, and work on what could make this diet so effective against cardiovascular ailments.

Let us now discuss the different ingredients of the Mediterranean diet.

The Mediterranean Diet Plan >>