The FastDay Forum

The term Mediterranean diet was used by Keys but it was used by Greek nutritionists before him. Yes, Keys made the pyramid of how we can adopt the diet in the modern days but the diet existed way back than the 1960s and it was different than the 60's.

In Greek studies, they are talking about two different things. One is the Med DIET (which is mainly what Keys is proposing) and the other one is the Med Way-of-Eating which is based on how people in the Med and Crete were eating in the very old days.
Their difference is that the diet is, well, a diet. It is aimed to losing weight while the WoE is just the way people ate to continue living.

I am not familiar with the diet, since it's a fashion of other countries (surprisingly, the popular diets in Greece are the American ones) but I find the Mediterranean WoE very healthy and I couldn't eat in any other way.

the word "diet" is used by scientists to mean "what you eat" it does not imply weight loss - that would be a "hypocaloric diet".

So Keys described the med diet as what his cohorts in the region (Crete and Corfu) were eating - http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/49/5/889.full.pdf

EURATOM surveys of food consumption in Italy are reported in http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/61/6/1338S.full.pdf highlighting regional differences within Italy.

The thing is that in the Greek language there are two different terms for diet and for what you eat.
Even in the Greek studies you will find Mesogeiaki Diaita (Mediterranean Diet) and Mesogeiaki Diatrofi (Mediterranean Way of Eating).

Cretan WoE is quite close to the Med WoE but it certainly not a diet since it included lots of butter and meat, mainly lamb. In the mountains of Crete, in the early 1900, people were eating lamb everyday, even twice a day!!! :-O

The thing is that in the Greek language there are two different terms for diet and for what you eat.

Yes, other languages are often more precise with separate terms where English nuances things with one word or phrase, but I haven't been reading anything in Greek or translated from, and anyway from the detail it's very clear they are using "diet" in the scientific sense to mean the food being eaten by the subjects.

"Way of eating" seems to be recent contemporary woman-speak for "I am not admitting to trying to lose weight" as in "I am not dieting, I have a new way of eating".

Since many studies on the Med diet are in Greek and the Greek language distinguishes the two (diet and way of eating) I have to be precise.
I know that WoE might be a way to not say diet in English but in Greek it is waaayyyyy different.
Another way to put it would be Med Diet and Med Nutrition. Trust me, the Med Nutrition is definitely not a diet!

I looked up the US recommendations, which are 20-35g of fat per day. This is 180 - 315 calories. Within that 5-10g of n-6 and about 1g of n-3 polyunsaturated.

UK numbers are 70g of fat per day for women and 95g for men, 50 and 60 of which should be unsaturated.

The French Food Safety Agency recommendations go for the lower end of that 5:1 rather than the the US's between 5 and 10:1. The problem is our intake is already way higher than that, and growing. Estimates of the diet we evolved with range between a ratio of 1:1 to 4:1 with high fish diet being around 1:1. A lot of the diseases we see in the modern world seem to be related to the change in diet, with studies showing higher the levels of omega 6 and/or lower levels of omega 3 being strongly linked to risk of these diseases. Part of the problem is that our immune system uses omega 6 and omega 3 for different types of immune response, with omega 6 used for the sort of immune responses that cause more inflammation. The UK Food Safety Association think it is just the level of long chain omega 3 that is the issue, not amount of omega 6 or the ratio between omega 6 and all omega 3s, but there seem to be studies on both sides.

The wiki article on omega 3 has a good overview of the issue with links to research journals.

The whole Paleo diet issue has come up in the thread already. Though this is also about what we eat, a big difference is how long we have had to adapt and evolve, we have had thousands of years to adapt to a dairy and high grain high starch diet, you can see the changes in our genome with multiple copies of genes for amylase to digests more starch, while the ability to digest lactose into adulthood has evolved a couple of times around the world though not everybody has the adaptation. But the change in the amounts of omega 3 and 6 in our diet is very new, we haven't had any time to adapt and like the sudden and massive increase of sugar in the modern world it seems to have a lot of diseases associated with it.

The thing is that in the Greek language there are two different terms for diet and for what you eat.
Even in the Greek studies you will find Mesogeiaki Diaita (Mediterranean Diet) and (Mediterranean Way of Eating).

Meso-geia-ki Diatrofi? Is that the Middle Earth Way of eating? And does it include second breakfast?

Total Omega-3 fatty acids
1644mg

Total Omega-6 fatty acids
21088mg


So olive oil doesn't have a great ratio (ignoring the 30g of saturated fat and 158g of monounsaturated that accompany the above)

Total Omega-3 fatty acids
1644mg

Total Omega-6 fatty acids
21088mg


So olive oil doesn't have a great ratio (ignoring the 30g of saturated fat and 158g of monounsaturated that accompany the above)

That is in a whole cup 216g of olive oil? If olive oil was you only source of fats it certainly wouldn't be ideal. But look at TML's Cretan diet full of butter and lamb from herds fed on grass and wild mountain vegetation. That will have an omega 6:3 ratio of 2 or 3 to 1. Although there is more omega 6 than omega 3 in olive oil, a whole cupful only give them 21g of omega 6. Switch that for corn oil and you get 116g of omega 6. Healthy sunflower oil would give you 143g of omega 6. Switch the herds from feeding off grass and wild herbs and fatten them up on cheap corn before they are slaughtered and the meat take on the fatty acid profile of the corn.

Mesogeios-Mediterranean

Mesogeios-Mediterranean

Sorry, I figured that, I just couldn't resist the Lord of The Rings link Of course Mediterranean means middle of the earth too but I am used to the word so I don't usually think of it roots

D_C

But look at TML's Cretan diet full of butter and lamb from herds fed on grass and wild mountain vegetation.

The Cretan diet observed by Keys etc was virtually meat free.

http://www.olivetomato.com/mediterranea ... nean-diet/

A meat-free Cretan Diet??? OH MY!!! That would be fun!

Crete is currently the most obese place of Greece because Cretans follow the Cretan Diet but they don't follow the WoL of their ancestors (Cretans were farmers and breeders and fishermen and they practically never sat down but to sleep). Since life has changed and more sitting down jobs are created, Cretans don't move all day but they eat the same things plus many that were introduced by the western world (burgers, pizza etc).
You won't believe how many young, obese people you'll see in Crete nowadays.

Sorry, D_C, I'm not a Lord of the Rings fan so I didn't get it. I thought that you were literally speaking, LOL!!!

But look at TML's Cretan diet full of butter and lamb from herds fed on grass and wild mountain vegetation.

The Cretan diet observed by Keys etc was virtually meat free.

http://www.olivetomato.com/mediterranea ... nean-diet/

TML's reference was for the diet in the mountains in the early 1900's, it's now a lot easier for mountain herders to get lambs to market where they can be sold much needed hard cash. So now they sell the sheep they used to eat. Even the Mediterranean diet isn't what it used to be. But the food they eat now is still rich in omega 3s even if the amount of meat is a lot less than it was. They have 2oz of beef 3 weeks out of 4 (when you factor in holidays). Not a lot but as long as it is local grass fed and free foraging cows it is going to be a good source of omega 3. So will eating free range chicken once a week and their free range eggs 2 or 3 times a week, along with cheese from their grass fed herds. Fish twice a week is excellent source of long chain omega 3s but so are the wild snails. A great source of food in their diet, and like snails, free to even the poorest, are wild greens like stamnagathi and purslane. We don't usually think of greens as a source of fat, but the fat they do contain may be 50 or 60% short chain omega 3, with 100g of purslane providing 0.3g omega 3. Walnuts are another excellent source.