A dream world

Spain and France consume high amounts of cheese, another food item that the MD claims should be eaten in low levels. Data taken from a single 24-hour recollection as part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, or “EPIC,” showed the French ate more cheese than anyone, and Spaniards also drank quite a lot of milk.

That’s hardly a surprise, as the French and Italians dominate Europe when it comes to the registering of Protected Designation of Origin labels for cheeses. These southern European powerhouses were likely the driver for a 2007 average cheese consumption across Europe of around 30 grams per day.

Even outside culinary capitals like Spain, France, and Italy, other Mediterranean countries miss the mark when it comes to the MD. In Beirut, Lebanon, home to 40% of the population, olive oil and fish, two of the pillars of the MD, are consumed exceedingly rarely, with most adults in one large population study not even consuming two servings of fish per week. Lebanese also consume a lot of yogurt. These figures don’t change much if one leaves Beirut either, with the only change being that more and more food calories are replaced with bread and other grains, usually due to food insecurity such as in this study that looked at Lebanese Bedouins.

That’s likely how the MD came to be, looking at the diets of lower-income, rural communities who don’t have the money to afford more prized food items like jamon, or like cheese, which was found in a broad European study to be found 33% higher in the diets of people farther up the socio-economic ladder.

In a review of the recent history of dietary changes in Egypt, bread, not vegetables, is described as the fundamental part of any meal, and that all other foods are called ghomus, or “dips.” Egyptians eat food with bread, rather than bread with food, wrote nutritional researcher Hassan Wassef, who added that meat was eaten sparingly, normally in line with religious customs. Even still, richer families, as in other Mediterranean countries, tended to eat more meat.

Ann Noah et al. from the Human Nutrition Unit at the University of Sydney perhaps put it best when she wrote “there is no single ideal Mediterranean diet,” when interviewing Mediterranean immigrant households in Sydney, Australia. “Nutritionists who use the concept should qualify the individual country and the time in history of their model Mediterranean diet”.

The ultimate kicker to all this misconception is that Italy and Spain, with all their cheese and ham, enjoy 5th and 6th place in the world for average life expectancy. Furthermore, while Spain slips some 12 places, Italy takes number 4 in terms of median age of death, which is measured by calculating: what is the age at which 50% of the population die.

Most of the countries on the east and south of the Mediterranean have much lower averages for age of death, which again simply suggests development level, GDP, medical sector sophistication, and other economic factors, rather than some culinary-cultural heritage of eating olives and fish. The Japanese, South Koreans, Hong Kongites, and the Macanese, have a similar geographic position and culinary traditions as well, but there’s no ”South China Sea Diet,” so it seems strange that there’s a Mediterranean Diet. WaL

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