• Italiano
  • English
  • Svenska
  • Français
  • language selector

Gianluca Tognon

  • Homepage
  • About me
    • About
    • Research & Teaching
    • Publications
  • Services
    • Online coaching
    • Schools
    • Winning Tribes
    • Healthy hotels & Restaurants
  • Public speaking
  • Blog & Events
    • Nutrition
      • Diet & Health
      • Dairy products
      • Diet and Beauty
      • Sports nutrition
      • Healthy eating on the go
      • Children and school food
    • Food & Foodism
      • Eating for pleasure
      • Healthy recipesnew!
    • Food & Nutrition law
    • Diet & Environment
    • Epidemiology
    • Health coaching
    • Events
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Diet & Health
  • The history of the Mediterranean diet
17 February 2019

The history of the Mediterranean diet

The history of the Mediterranean diet

by Gianluca Tognon / Tuesday, 10 July 2018 / Published in Diet & Health
Mediterranean diet

How the Mediterranean diet became so popular worldwide

The lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea have been the scene of many cultures and civilizations and the Mediterranean diet is one of their most important achievements. Agriculture began with the cultivation of cereals and legumes in a region that nowadays includes the eastern Mediterranean countries (Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Iraq). Later, the Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Romans began to cultivate the three basic elements of the Mediterranean diet: olive trees for the production of olives and their oil, wheat for the preparation of bread, and grapevines, for the production of grapes and its main fermentation product: the wine.

A wide range of vegetable products was already consumed in Roman times, including onions, leeks, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, turnips, asparagus, celery and artichokes as well as numerous fruit varieties, including figs, apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches, apricots and citrus fruits. Chestnuts, walnuts and almonds, represent other products commonly consumed in those times.
An important development of the Mediterranean diet occurred when, in the eighth century after Christ, the Moors occupied the Spanish peninsula. These populations introduced rice, lemons, eggplants, saffron and other spices: all products that gradually spread to the entire Mediterranean basin. The occupation of the Moors ended in 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, returning to Spain with tomatoes and peppers, which are now an integral part of the Mediterranean diet.

However, the Mediterranean diet does not really exist. The Mediterranean Sea borders 18 countries that differ markedly in geography, economic status, health, lifestyle and, markedly, in their cuisine and diets.

The research about the Mediterranean diet

Why then has this concept become so popular and mainstream? Ancel Keys and his Italian colleague Flaminio Fidanza together with their colleagues involved in the 7 country study were central to the modern recognition, definition, and promotion of the eating pattern found in Italy and Greece in the 1950s and ’60s, and which is now popularly called “The Mediterranean Diet”. The Seven Countries Study included four cohorts from South Europe: Crete and Corfu in Greece, Dalmatia in Croatia and Montegiorgio in Italy.

In the 1960s the Greek diet had the highest content of olive oil and was high in fruit, the Dalmatian diet was highest in fish and the Italian diet was high in vegetables. Notably, these cohorts were characterized by low mortality rates from coronary heart disease. Therefore, the traditional diet characterizing these geographic areas has been postulated as one of the explanations of this lower incidence of disease. This type of diet had olive oil as its principal component of fat, it was high in unrefined cereal products, legumes, fruit and vegetables, moderate in fish and low in dairy and meat products. Finally, moderate amounts of wine were taken with meals.

After the seven-country study, many other researchers have followed the same stream and investigated the health effect of a dietary pattern in line with the major characteristics of the traditional diets observed in Greece, southern Italy and Dalmatia.

In particular, the Lyon Diet Heart Study was the first clinical trial to attempt to demonstrate the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet in reducing heart disease. Other trials include the Medi-RIVAGE study, the DIRECT study, the studies by Esposito and his colleagues in Italy and finally, the Spanish intervention study PREDIMED.

Notably, in 1995 the Greek epidemiologist Dimitrios Trichopoulou, developed the Mediterranean Diet Score, which has been modified several times and applied to a large number of observational studies as a practical tool to measure adherence to a Mediterranean-like pattern. The score, that I also used in some of my publications, gives an increasing number of points for high intakes of vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds, legumes, fish and unsaturated fats as well as for low intakes of meat and dairy products. What is considered a high or low intake is different in each study where the score is calculated, since it’s based on the population medians or, in some studies, on the highest or lowest intake tertile.

Although the term “Mediterranean diet” is probably not completely appropriate, since it can fit other traditional diets such as the Nordic healthy diet and others, a diet that favours vegetable products and fish over other animal food products, is considered today one of the most effective dietary patterns in terms of cardiovascular prevention. A potentially broader definition of the Mediterranean diet should include fermented dairy products and cheese as well, which are traditional foods in south Europe, although the debate about their health properties is still ongoing.

Finally, inspired by the studies on the Mediterranean diet, several researchers from North Europe have tried to apply the same concepts and identified a Nordic healthy diet, sometimes defined as Baltic diet, for which a scoring system has been developed, similarly to what has been done for the Mediterranean diet.

Tagged under: Mediterranean diet
Gianluca Tognon

About Gianluca Tognon

Gianluca Tognon is an Italian nutrition coach, speaker, entrepreneur and former associate professor at the University of Gothenburg. He started his career as a biologist and spent 15 years working both in Italy and then in Sweden. He has been involved in several EU research projects and has extensively worked and published on the association between diet, longevity and cardiovascular risk across the lifespan, also studying potential interactions between diet and genes. His work about the Mediterranean diet in Sweden has been cited by many newspapers worldwide including the Washington Post and The Telegraph among others. As a speaker, he has been invited by Harvard University and the Italian multi-national food company Barilla.

What you can read next

stress and sugar
Stress and sugar: a dangerous liaison
Lunch break with healthy food in a company
My 3-tier system to improve health and have more fun at your workplace
extra-virgin olive oils
How to recognize good extra-virgin olive oils

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search

Recent Posts

  • Statistical analyses

    The top 3 mistakes that make your statistical analyses invalid

    Statistical analyses: are you sure you know wha...
  • Lactose intolerance: how much do you know about it?

    Lactose intolerance is not so difficult to deal...
  • restaurant menu ideas

    Restaurant menu ideas: do you need help?

    Restaurant menu ideas: find new ones is a super...
  • vitamin k

    Vitamin K: How many sub-types are there?

    Vitamin K: not only one vitamin, but three! If ...
  • Protein in milk: are they healthy?

    Protein in milk has several functional properti...

Contacts

Gianluca Tognon
Askims Svedjeväg 28 Gothenburg, Sweden 436 42
Telephone: +46 727 335920
  • GET SOCIAL

© 2019 Tous droits réservés. Gianluca Tognon

TOP
Shares
Subscribe to get email updates
Get the latest content first.
We respect your privacy.