The original Mediterranean diet was that eaten by rural villagers
on the Greek island of Crete. The Mediterranean diet was nearly
vegetarian, with fish and very little meat, and was rich in green
vegetables and fruits. People living on Crete got more than one-third
of their calories from fat, most of it from olive oil, which is
rich in monounsaturated fatty acids. They also consumed wine every
day.
Unfortunately, something got lost in the translation when these
traditional diets were brought to America. What happens here is
we add a great deal of meat, also sugar, and a lot of cream sauces.
Jayne Hurley, RD, the senior nutritionist who helped conduct
the survey of Italian restaurants for CSPI, agrees. "We're
not saying Italian food is unhealthy," says Hurley. "But
the food we saw had been Americanized." While the traditional
diets used cheese and meat sparingly as a condiment, for instance,
our versions are typically loaded with them. Spaghetti, as served
in the United States, often includes a generous helping of grated
cheese and up to a pound of ground meat, says Nancy Harmon Jenkins,
a food writer and author of The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook.
"Traditional food can easily become corrupted from simple
ignorance of the cook," says Paula Wolfert, a San Francisco-based
author of several Mediterranean-style cookbooks. At one restaurant
she visited, Moroccan kebabs were made with pork. "The population
of Morocco is predominantly Muslim, and they don't eat pork products,"
she says. Kebabs are traditionally made from lamb, chicken, or
fish.
What's more, many breads and pastas are no longer prepared the
traditional way. Refined flours were never part of the original
Mediterranean diet, says K. Dun Gifford, president of the Oldways
Preservation and Exchange Trust, a food education and policy group
based in Massachusetts. The diet that Keys studied was one eaten
by poor farmers and laborers, who ate whole grain breads and pastas.
"White flour was more expensive than whole grain flour,"
says Gifford, who has earned a reputation as a crusader for back-to-the-basics
cooking. "We call it peasant bread, or rough country bread."
