Elements of the MEDITERRANEAN DIET

The Mediterranean Diet is:

– a lifestyle and not just nutrition
– stimulates a strong consumption of fruit and vegetables, legumes, carbohydrates, physical activity, conviviality and interaction with and in the world
– easy to follow, you don’t have to weigh the food and it’s varied.

It reflects and respects an example of environmental sustainability, in fact it is the most sustainable diet in the world.

The choices we make at the table have a direct impact on the environment. The Mediterranean Diet represents a sustainable dietary model for current and future generations because it is based on a predominantly vegetarian diet, which favors fresh, minimally processed, seasonal and zero-mile products.

The Mediterranean Diet is the set of eating habits of the peoples of the Mediterranean basin, which have consolidated over the centuries and remained almost unchanged until the economic boom of the 1950s.
This set of habits consists mainly in the abundant consumption of:

• Bread
• Pasta
• Vegetables
• Salads
• Legumes
• Fruit
• Dried fruit

In addition, the characteristics of the include a moderate consumption of fish, white meat, dairy products and eggs. The consumption of red meat and wine is limited compared to diets in other areas of the world.
To ensure the intake of fats, the consumption of olive oil is widespread among the peoples of the Mediterranean, which contains higher quality fats, less harmful than animal fats, and in fact healthy for the body.

The Mediterranean Diet has the following fundamental characteristics:

• Low in saturated fatty acids
• Rich in carbohydrates and fibre
• High content of monounsaturated fatty acids (mainly derived from olive oil).

Dante, the Mediterranean diet is the universal diet of the planet.
Elements of the Mediterranean Diet

The great poet's theory of nutrition anticipates modern recommendations.
Read the full article

FAQ of the Mediterranean Diet

by the  Doctor Antonio Antonio Capurso / The Mediterranean Diet Foundation 

Italian cuisine has a higher value than the cuisines of other countries'

We cannot speak of an Italian cuisine because in Italy there are many cuisines, very different from each other. There is a cuisine of the north and a large part of central Italy, descending from a Celtic-Germanic culture, strongly characterized by a large use of animal fats and red meat; there is a cuisine of the south, derived from a Classical Greco-Roman-Byzantine culture, in which the use of vegetal ingredients (olive oil, legumes and vegetables) predominates; there is a cuisine of the Apennine ridge, from Emilia to Calabria, characterized by the cult of pork, and a cuisine of coastal Italy with a strong vocation for seafood. Finally, there is a cuisine of the territories where there are olive trees (the south and the coasts) that use olive oil in an essentially Mediterranean context, and the territories where olive trees do not grow, that is, the entire internal, non-coastal part of Italy, which have a mixed, continental food model but with a strong Mediterranean contamination (oil, legumes, vegetables). There is also a cuisine with a strong Arab influence, Sicilian cuisine, but that's another story. To conclude, Italian cuisine is very diversified, so it is difficult to talk about the "Italian Cuisine“; however, it should be added that in reality the different cuisines of our territory over the centuries have strongly contaminated each other, each absorbing the best of the other, ending up creating a widespread model of cuisine, in which a bit of all the products of these many cuisines are present. This model essentially descends from the culture of cuisine that the Arabs introduced to Sicily shortly before the year 1000, a culture characterized by a great imagination in the kitchen and by the exaggerated exaltation of flavors through a wise use of very different ingredients variously associated with each other; among other things, the Arabs also introduced dried pasta into our cuisine: vermicelli (spaghetti), the lagana (a sort of narrower lasagna) and the macaroni (a kind of rigatoni), and they taught us to season this pasta with an infinite number of ingredients, from seafood (mussels, clams, fish) to vegetables, meat, aromatic herbs and so on. This imaginative and captivating cuisine of ours, rich in flavours, this, yes, is decidedly better than the others.

Can the Mediterranean Diet be implemented anywhere?

Of course, just use the (vegetable) ingredients of the Mediterranean Diet and apply the recipes of this Diet. It can be, if anything, a more expensive diet, because the ingredients of this diet (extra virgin olive oil, vegetables, fish) if purchased far from the production sites cost much more. It is essential to remember that the Mediterranean diet is fundamentally a vegetarian diet, in which there are few products of animal origin, i.e. fish, cheese and little white meat, never butter and even less so lard, suet, or shortening. . A detail: olive oil (extra virgin) is never added to other fats but rather a substitute, i.e. it is the only fat in the Mediterranean diet, a diet that therefore strictly excludes the use of animal fats, with the exception of the fat contained in cheese.