What is the Mediterranean Diet?

The ancient Greek word diaita, from which the word diet derives from, means balanced lifestyle, and this is exactly what the Mediterranean Diet is; it is much more than a nutritional pattern. The Mediterranean Diet is a lifestyle, not just a food pattern that combines ingredients from local agriculture, recipes and cooking methods of each place, shared meals, celebrations and traditions, coupled with moderate physical activity, favoured by a welcoming climate, completes a lifestyle that modern science recommends us to adopt for the benefit of our health; making the Mediterranean Diet an excellent model for healthy living.

The Mediterranean Diet is a valuable piece of cultural heritage that from simplicity and variety has resulted in a complete and balanced combination of food based on fresh, local and seasonal food as much as possible.

It embraces all the people of the Mediterranean and consists of landscapes, crops, cultivation techniques, markets, elaborations, culinary spaces and gestures, flavours and fragrances, colours, social gatherings and celebrations, legends and devotions, joys and sorrows, as well as innovation as well as traditions.

It has been passed down from generation to generation for centuries, and has been closely linked to the lifestyle of the Mediterranean people throughout its history. It has evolved, welcoming and wisely incorporating new foods and techniques resulting from its strategic location and capacity of mixing and exchanging of the Mediterranean people. The Mediterranean Diet has been, and remains, an evolutionary, dynamic and vital cultural heritage.

Food is not, in the Mediterranean, merely nutrients. They summon. The words of Plutarch in his work Parallel Lives perfectly illustrate this with a simple sentence: “Men are invited not to eat and drink, but to eat and drink together”.

There is no doubt that in the Mediterranean, when we talk about the ingredients of the diet, the trilogy of wheat, vines and olive trees, beans, vegetables, fruit, fish, cheeses, nuts, we must also add an essential condiment, perhaps a basic ingredient: sociability.

The Mediterranean Diet is characterized by abundant plant-origin foods such as bread, pasta, rice, vegetables, legumes, fruits and nuts; the use of olive oil as the main source of additional fat, moderate consumption of fish, seafood, poultry, dairy products (yogurt, cheese) and eggs, as well as small amounts of red meat and a daily moderate intake of wine generally at meals. Its importance to the health of individuals is not limited to the fact that it is a balanced diet with a varied and adequate supply of macronutrients. To the benefits of its low content of saturated fatty acids and high content in monounsaturated fatty acids and in complex carbohydrates and fibre, we must add the wealth derived from its antioxidant substances