How to Get America on the Mediterranean Diet

The world’s healthiest eating pattern shouldn’t be a myth

The island of Crete where the Mediterranean Diet was “discovered” (photo by Paul Greenberg)

In 1953, not long before President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in office, the social scientist Leland Allbaugh published “Crete: A Case Study of an Underdeveloped Area.” The landmark analysis of the eating patterns of an isolated Greek population strongly suggested that a calorie-limited diet high in fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and olive oil and low in animal protein, particularly red meat, could lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes, decrease chronic disease and extend life.

Medical research over the last half-century has largely borne out this initial finding. Weight-loss fads and eating trends come and go, but the so-called Mediterranean diet has stood fast. “Among all diets,” Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health concluded in an email, “the traditional Mediterranean diet is most strongly supported for delivering long term health and wellbeing.”

Of course, even the Mediterranean diet can sound like just another trend — especially in our current political moment, when so many are dismissive of anything with a European flavor to it. Recent news doesn’t help, either: several years ago a study on the diet, originally published in 2013 in The New England Journal…