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The dumbing down or Americanization of the Mediterranean diet

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Does the Mediterranean Diet Even Exist? - NYTimes.com

Does the Mediterranean Diet Even Exist?

You have to go to Roadster Diner.

Roadster is a chain of 1950s-Americana restaurants. Its original motto, “There goes my heart,” evokes both Elvis and his artery-clogging diet. The Roadster in my Beirut neighborhood had a life-size statue of a grinning black man with huge white teeth singing into a microphone. Unlike the strenuously authentic Lebanese restaurants beloved by tourists and visiting food writers, Roadster’s nine retail franchises across Lebanon are always packed with locals.

In Europe and the United States, the so-called Mediterranean diet — rich in olive oil, whole grains, fish, fruits and vegetables and wine — is a multibillion-dollar global brand, encompassing everything from hummus to package trips to Italy, where “enogastronomic tourism” rakes in as much as five billion euros a year. Studies at Harvard and elsewhere correlate the Mediterranean diet with lower rates of heart disease, diabetes and depression. In America, health gurus like Mehmet Oz exhort followers to “eat like a Greek.” But according to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Mediterranean people have some of the worst diets in Europe, and the Greeks are the fattest: about 75 percent of the Greek population is overweight. So if the Mediterranean diet is not what people in the Mediterranean eat, then what is it?


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Before there was a Mediterranean diet, there was WWII and the food shortages that went along with it. When the fighting was over, Haqvin Mamrol, a researcher in Sweden, showed that mortality from coronary disease declined in Northern European countries during the war. This was, he believed, the result of wartime restrictions on milk, butter, eggs and meat. At about the same time, a Minnesota scientist named Ancel Keys, who had been studying the effects of starvation on a group of volunteer subjects, moved on to study the diets of Midwestern businessmen. He found that these well-fed Americans were more prone to heart disease than were men in war-deprived Northern Europe. Keys postulated that saturated fats led to high levels of cholesterol and from there to cardiovascular disease. To prove it, he initiated a long-term study in seven countries, including Italy and Greece. He concluded that we should cut down drastically on saturated fat and turn to vegetable oils instead. Keys and his wife wrote two best sellers that changed the way Americans ate.

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Does the Mediterranean Diet Even Exist? - NYTimes.com
 
I wish the mods would move all of your vegan BS threads to the CT forum. I really like this Food forum but you're crapping it up with all your vegan nonsense.
 
I wish the mods would move all of your vegan BS threads to the CT forum. I really like this Food forum but you're crapping it up with all your vegan nonsense.

Oh come on. It's a free world and vegan food is food and feed for the Food Forum. And actually, I have seen a few things that looked tasty enough to be good side dishes for a T-Bone.
 
Oh come on. It's a free world and vegan food is food and feed for the Food Forum. And actually, I have seen a few things that looked tasty enough to be good side dishes for a T-Bone.

I like the recipe threads, those are great. It's the constant assault on meat-eating that gets old.
 
So don't click on those thread. duh.

so boring you spent all sunday on those threads. LOL

You know, if you toned down the militant aspect of your posts, you wouldn't get nearly as much flak on here. Hell, you might even get someone to change their diet. I'm sure you've heard the old adage about catching more flies with honey than vinegar, right?
 
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