…but they have some good ideas as to the healthy components, according to a report in MedPageToday. A snippet:
Through a subtractive statistical technique, the EPIC investigators calculated that the biggest chunk of the health advantage — 24% — came from moderate alcohol consumption (predominantly wine).
The other relative contributions were:
- 17% from low consumption of meat and meat products
- 16% from high vegetable consumption
- 11% from high fruit and nut consumption
- 11% from high monounsaturated-to-saturated lipid ratio (largely due to olive oil consumption)
- 10% from high legume consumption
Here’s my definition of the Mediterranean diet.
Reference:
Sofi F, et al “Ideal consumption for each food group composing Mediterranean diet score for preventing total and cardiovascular mortality” EuroPRevent 2013; Abstract P106.
Advanced Mediterranean Diet 
There was a conference held by whole foods, and a guy was talking about the Mediterranean diet and he said something along the lines of, “what part of the Mediterranean are we talking? There’s so many countries in that region that to follow their diet is impossible. Is it the diet of italy? the diet of spain? the diet of egypt?” It also goes to show you that when people talk about the paleo diet, it is also quite impossible to know just which paleo people we are talking about, because the ones in the northern hemisphere definitely didn’t eat the same way as the ones in the south. And they MOST definitely didn’t have a wide variety of foods like we do today, so for us, it would be impossible to eat like the paleolithic people. These diets are fads, and hopefully people will soon realize that the key is WHOLE foods. fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and seeds.
Hi, Omgirl. When physicians and dietitians talk about the healthy Mediterranean diet, the typically mean the one heavily influenced by southern Italy and Greece of the 1950s-1960s.
-Steve