The mediterranean diet

In February 1952, the famous professor Ancel Keys came to Naples to do a research about the food consumptions and to make a comparison between the data collected in Naples with those collected in the U.S.A. concerning the risks of the cardiovascular diseases. Just a few months later he was able to state as follows:
„The Neapolitan diet has a low fat content. Only rich people suffer from heart attacks“. Some years later he went to Crete, where he observed that although the average diet was based on 40% calories coming from fat, there was almost total lack of the heart diseases.
Out of these considerations the famous Seven Country Study was developed. This study represents a comparative research about diets of 14 samples living in seven different countries (Finland, Japan, Greece, Italy, Holland, U.S.A. and Yugoslavia). 12.000 cases from 40 to 59 years old were examined. From 1960 on the scientists compared the daily diet followed by the examined samples with the incidence of ischemic heart diseases such as infarct and thrombosis. The goal of this research was finding out the precise information about the ideal diet, so that the risk of suffering from the above mentioned illnesses, which represent the main death causes in the Western World, may be prevented or lowered.

The collected data are clear: the Mediterranean people, who normally live on pasta, fish, fruit and vegetable and who use Olive Oil as dressing, suffer from heart diseases less than other people (e.g. the Finns), who use many saturated fats such as butter, lard, milk and red meat daily. The conclusions of the study were also supported by other epidemiological researches. For instance, in Japan the local dietary habits were compared to those belonging to the Japanese people who immigrated to the U.S.A. and to the Hawaii Isles and who started following a „Western“ diet. Such conclusions pointed out a connection between a diet which is poor in saturated fats and a lower infarct risk in an incontestable way. Moreover, on the average both Italians and Greeks live longer than the Finns and the Dutch people. The Mediterranean diet is not poor in fats, on the contrary, the quantity of calories coming from fats is high on an average, but such calories come from olive oil. On the basis of this result the Mediterranean diet turns out to be more balanced than many other slimming diets, which are often advertised as solvers of any diet problems.