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Άντε τώρα Τετάρτη βράδυ να σου λέει «έχω όρεξη για γαρδούμπα» και να τρέχεις στη Βάρη στα καλά καθούμενα και να αναρωτιέσαι το τον ήθελα τον κληρονόμο.

I suspect non-Med people have a very different idea of what the Med diet actually is though…

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Can you enlighten me? That's one thing that had always confused me, always articles extolling the benefits of the diet but few detailing what foods and proportions they mean

I was lamenting to Hellenes who may have suffered their wives getting a pang for “gardumba” which is kinda like the Italians call involtini di fraggaglie di agnello — it’s mutton rolled up with offal and liver etc, using intestine as a wrapper and cooked over coals or in an old style baking oven. With potatoes, they love the potatoes.

So imagine she wants that on a Wednesday night and you have to drive out to the coast to the only tavern stupid enough to be open.

Enough to make a man wonder whether having an heir was a good idea.

Any diet that gets you to stop eating processed b.s. is a good one.

That actually sounds great. (The food that is.) I'd eat it.

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That's how you do it. You create a diet that almost no one in the Mediterranean actually eats, then you can just manipulate the diet so that the "Med" diet always meets whatever your goals are.

What it's supposed to be is lower fat, higher fish, lower "red" meat, usually involving copious amounts of olive oil for some reason. Has no basis in reality.

yeah I imagine there are good amounts and bad amounts of those .

I imagine I cant have olive oil deep fried fish every day and say its the Mediterranean diet

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Syrian and Lebanese food is truly incredible.

The Mediterranean diet in any context you will generally hear about is simply a largely vegetarian diet almost devoid of red meat, with primary protein being oily fish high in omega-3s and poultry. Primary source of fat is olive oil. That's all.

I guess there are specific vegetables and some kind of carbohydrates as well. Pizza(or something similar) is eaten in the Mediterranean but is that included? my point is that I suspect saying a "Mediterranean died" is very vague when I suspect people mean something more specific but I don't know what it is.

Whole grains are the carbohydrates.

But I think it's generally supposed to be vague because it's really just a different food pyramid. You don't need to eat specifically Greek or Sicilian or Moroccan food.

Part of the appeal of the Mediterranean diet is that there are a lot of cultures with similar food principles but very different flavors that you can pull from to still enjoy the food that is also improving your health.

Pizza is definitely not Mediterranean

Guess we’re having falafels and cucumbers every night once my wife is pregnant. (Not complaining one bit)

My guess is that would have the same results. Don’t eat processed foods, drink diet soda, and maintain a healthy weight.

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No, the Mediterranean diet refers to an approximation of what Ancel Keys and his team observed in the 60s in some parts of the Mediterranean (Crete, Greece, and southern Italy). That’s where the name comes from. It doesn’t refer to what people in the Mediterranean actually eat these days.

It’s also not necessarily a low-fat diet, since it’s quite high in olive oil.

If you look at the dietary guidelines from any developed country, it’s usually a close approximation of the “Mediterranean” diet just with a few different food choices depending on the culture (e.g. different types of grains or different types of oil).

sauce. Literally in the Wikipedia page

Check out the angiogenesis foundation, lots of info on this! How foods prevent and cure many things. https://angio.org/

Keys was a terrible scientist that sent us on the wrong trajectory in America, and across the globe. He maligned saturated fat, in part by showing that rabbits fed saturated fat would get heart disease - rabbits! How much meat is in a rabbit's natural diet?

The Greeks he studied were also very Orthodox Catholics, who regularly fasted. They fasted multiple times a month. That is a huge confounding variable that he chose to ignore.

Around the time that Keys argued red meat was killing Americans, other scientists were arguing that it was actually sugar and cigarettes causing heart disease. 70 years later, after a long low saturated fat period, look where we are today.

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I mean, pizza very much is Mediterranean. It’s wood fire baked flatbread covered in herbs, acidic fruit and preserved dairy.

Next thing you are going to tell me that pita and tzatziki aren’t Med food.

It’s not part of the Mediterranean diet.

It is if you make the crust out of whole wheat flour.

No. Mediterranean diet does not include processed foods, which pizza is.

How are you defining processed? You can make very authentic pizza with nothing but yeasted/sourdough fermented whole wheat flatbread, sliced tomatoes, ricotta, olive oil and basil. What in there is too processed for you?

Apparently, they've only ever had frozen or corporate chain versions.

Exactly. That’s like saying “Chinese food isn’t good for a plant based diet” because of your local Panda Express selection.