Is the Mediterranean Diet Healthful?
Best-selling author Nina Teicholz dug deeper into the background, and takes us through it in her book The Big Fat Surprise. Reality provides a shaky picture: highly uncertain theories were hyped during the ’90’s, through numerous “scientific” conferences funded by players with economical interests in the matter.
Later studies have indeed confirmed that a more traditional Mediterranean diet appears healthier than today’s Western (junk) diet. But the same might also apply for the traditional Mongolian diet – or any traditional unprocessed diet. The main difference could be that only one region has sponsored luxury conferences about our diets in a romantic setting.
In our interview Nina Teicholz tells more about the background to how the Mediterranean diet became holy, and what science really shows. You can watch the introduction above. You can find the full interview on the membership pages (free for a month):
Is the Mediterranean Diet Healthy? – full interview
More with Nina Teicholz
On the membership pages there are also our interviews about the fear of fat, vegetable oils and the questionable scientific basis for fear of meat. Plus a presentation she gave at this year’s PaleoFX conference.
The "Mediterranean Diet" as publicized by Ancel Keys and his successors was pretty much invented: a compound of what people in Crete were eating during the Lenten fast, and various other elements from around the Mediterranean, purged of everything Keys thought was evil.
In fact you'll find that diets vary enormously around and near the Mediterranean, as do health outcomes.