How To Really Follow the Mediterranean Diet

It’s not hard but it’s not what you think

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

Year after year researchers identify the Mediterranean Diet as the most effective eating pattern for preventing cardiovascular disease and other chronic ailments. Soon after researchers release their results, the media blizzards the public with affirmations of how effective the diet is. And yet, almost no one tries to offer up a simple way to change eating patterns in a way that matches the habits of people that had some of the highest longevity and lowest rates of cancer and cardiovascular disease in the world.

Over the course of the last decade I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Crete where the diet was originally “discovered” by Rockefeller Foundation social scientists in the 1940s. I’ve also done not a small amount of follow up research with contemporary scholars of “the diet.” What I learned in the course of my studies is that while much of the Cretan tradition can be vague, quixotic and even a little arbitrary, there are specific changes we can make to our American reality that can bring us more in line with the Mediterranean ideal.

Here then is a six point distillation of all that research that provides something of a road map for a better eating pattern.