Click on image to enlarge.

You Pay:	$6.99
Cost After Rebate:	$6.64
You Save:	5.01%

Category: Health/Fitness
Description: Scientists have discovered that traditional Mediterranean cuisine is one of the most healthful, nutritious diets in the world--one that can help everyone lose weight and enjoy lower rates of coronary heart disease and other chronic conditions, including diabetes and cancer. From tasty Moroccan vegetable stew to rosemary focaccia, from eggplant parmesan to lemon almond cake, The Mediterranean Diet offers a program that will make dieters everywhere--and food lovers in general--rejoice. Includes a 7-day eating plan chock full of savory meals; Essential in-depth nutritional information about each food category; A 3-day exercise plan; Luscious soup-to-nuts recipes designed to satisfy your individual tastes Lose weight and worry with every delicious meal!
eBook Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc./PerfectBound, 2004
Books By Dames Release Date: September 2004

5 Reader Ratings:

Great	Good	OK	Poor

Available eBook Formats [Secure Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/eReader (recommended)/Adobe - What's this?]:
Secure Adobe: Printing enabled, Read-aloud DISABLED
Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Imagine yourself sitting in a sun-drenched outdoor café on the banks of the Greek Mediterranean shore. The vast turquoise sea meets the brilliant blue sky, and everything around you seems influenced by sea and sky, from the aquamarine-painted tables and chairs of the café to the foamy-white buildings and small shops jutting out over the seawall where the Mediterranean laps and splashes. The warm sun on your shoulders and the cool sea breeze on your face enhance the spectacular view, as the fragrance of white flowers scaling a peach-colored trellis above your table mingles with the smells of salt and sea.

You feel yourself relaxing into your chair as you are gently serenaded by the musical dialect around you. You recall your morning trek across the vast white beaches, and images of ancient Greece envelop you. You can almost envision Socrates walking along the shoreline with tall Greek ships sailing in the far distance, the ruins whole, the early blossoming of Western civilization. Poseidon, that great god of the sea, is smiling at you, amused to see how easily the stresses of daily life have suddenly melted away.

Ah, the magical Mediterranean. With all its glorious old-worldliness, you feel connected with history. You feel completely at peace. And just when you think it couldn't get any better, you are awakened from your relaxed bliss by a waiter who brings you a bowl of fragrant, lemony soup the color of the sun, followed by a steaming plate of sea bass infused with oregano, olive oil, and lemon, surrounded by colorful roasted vegetables grown on the rolling hills just behind you.

With each bite you are catapulted further into the heaven that surrounds you. You cannot help but savor every mouthful. You've never tasted food so fresh, so wholesome. You feel renewed, even healed, down to your very soul.

Who can deny the sensual power of the Mediterranean? Anyone who has traveled to this area cannot forget its beauty, its history, and its charm. Sun and sea, relaxed lifestyle, and miraculous food—these things draw people to the shores of the Mediterranean from every corner of the globe.

Yet the seductive Mediterranean climate, cuisine, and way of life aren't the only reasons to focus on this region's approach to eating. Study after study have revealed that people eating a traditional Mediterranean diet are generally healthier, are longer-lived, and have a lower incidence of chronic diseases—particularly coronary artery disease—than people in other parts of the world.

The potential health benefits inherent in eating and living in the traditional Mediterranean way are the impetus for writing this book. Is it really possible to eat so well, savoring and relishing delicious food, and at the same time increase our wellness? In fact, it is both possible and surprisingly easy to accomplish. We need only look to the Mediterranean lands of Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Turkey, North Africa, and the Middle East.

The Mediterranean Region

The Mediterranean region encompasses all the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea, from the Strait of Gibraltar separating the rocky cliffs and crags of southern Spain and the seaport of Tangier in mountainous northern Morocco, to the Mediterranean's far western reaches along the shores of the Middle East. Between these extremes lies a broad sampling of European, Middle Eastern, and African countries, all Mediterranean, yet each unique in culture and character: pastoral southern France with its orange groves, vineyards, and rolling hills; scenic Italy with its snowy peaks and sultry beaches; the former Yugoslavia with its dramatic coastline; the tiny yet sensationally mountainous Albania; historical Greece with its hazy, sea-infused ambience and its scattering of islands; geologically volatile Turkey; the Middle Eastern countries of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, with their coastal planes backed by a sudden rise of mountains; and then, returning east, the northern ends of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and back to Morocco, an African panoply of cliffs, peaks, ports, plateaus, and scorching sands.

Surely such a vast array of countries and cultures must dine on an equally vast assortment of foods. Although each country bordering the Mediterranean Sea does indeed have its unique culinary characteristics, the region maintains many common, and many more mutually influenced ingredients, recipes, and cooking techniques. Pasta may come in the form of ziti in Italy and couscous in Morocco, and of course the ubiquitous olive oil, sea salt, durum wheat, and the most vibrantly fresh and irresistible vegetables and fruits characterize the entire Mediterranean with their unique, striking flavors. Not insignificantly, Mediterranean countries also share an attitude toward food and how it should be eaten.

The Evolution of a Shared Cuisine

The magnificent diet of the Mediterranean region has been evolving for thousands of years. The history of the region, coupled with its distinct (though widely various) climate and the pervasive influence of the sea, has shaped the choice of foods and the types of cooking so characteristic of traditional Mediterranean culture. Bread, olive oil, and wine—which continue to play a significant role in the Mediterranean diet today—accompanied meals in ancient times. The cultivated vegetables and other plant-based foods so central to the diet date back to Neolithic times. According to archeological evidence and depictions and descriptions of food and meals in the art and literature of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, ancient populations probably relied primarily on plant foods, with only occasional indulgence in meat and seafood.

More recent studies of the Mediterranean diet, from the 1950s and 1960s, reveal eating habits and preferences similar to the ancient diet: a primarily plant food–based diet that included minimal processing, whole grains, olive oil as the primary fat source, and animal products (with the exception of cheese in some areas and yogurt in some areas) consumed only a few times per month. The groundbreaking Rockefeller Foundation study of the Cretan diet around 1950 stated that "olives, cereal grains, pulses, wild greens and herbs, and fruits, together with limited quantities of goat meat and milk, game, and fish have remained the basic Cretan foods for forty centuries… no meal was complete without bread…[and] Olives and olive oil contributed heavily to the energy intake." This study, originally undertaken to determine how the people of Greece could improve their diets after World War II, concluded that the diet couldn't get much better.

While the Mediterranean diet today strays from its original roots somewhat (due to the "McDonald's invasion" and other nutritionally tragic "modern" influences, such as the growing popularity of heavily processed convenience foods), the Mediterranean diet in the first half of the twentieth century, with appropriate modifications to make it more suitable and convenient for contemporary eating, lives at the heart of this book.

To Eat À La Mediterranean

Let's look more closely at this traditional diet and its various common components. Eating the traditional Mediterranean way is largely a seasonal and regional affair. While each country has its unique customs, every country produces foods locally or regionally and serves them soon after harvest. In spring, the freshest new vegetables are harvested and eaten, often within a few miles of where they were picked—wild greens, thin zucchini, green beans, spinach, spring peas, finocchi, cherries, and wild mushrooms. Summer marks the arrival of an abundance of tomatoes, eggplant, peaches, cantaloupe, watermelon, figs, peppers, and onions. Outdoor markets offer the freshest fruits and vegetables. The pale, bland produce so often available in American supermarkets would be virtually unrecognizable next to the vibrantly colored and succulent array of regionally produced plant foods. The perfect dessert? Fresh fruit, of course. Throughout the summer, most Mediterranean countries enjoy an overflow of the best garlic, onions, and tomatoes.

At the end of the summer, the grape harvest and wine pressing begin. Persimmons and pomegranates follow, and then olives are harvested and pressed to yield the oil so essential to Mediterranean cuisine—and, as we'll discuss later, an important component of the heart-healthy, traditional Mediterranean diet.

Beyond the magnificent year-round harvest of fruits and vegetables and the reliance on olive oil as the principal source of fat, the Mediterranean people shared other dietary similarities. Meat was more luxury than staple, and although many Mediterranean dishes are flavored with meat, those that feature it are usually reserved for special occasions. Lamb and veal are more common than beef because grazing land is scarce in the Mediterranean, and chicken or seafood are more likely to feature prominently in main courses when meat is featured at all.

Bread has always been a staple, even in Italy, where that more famous Italian starch, pasta, is consumed so readily. Traditional Mediterranean bread, especially in rural areas, is dark, heavy (some loaves could weigh almost five pounds!), and full of whole grains, unlike the soft, refined white bread neatly sliced and conveniently bagged for American consumers. Whole grains are consumed in abundance outside the obligatory loaf of bread—rice in the form of paella, risotto, and pilaf; pasta in its many incarnations, from Italian spaghetti to Moroccan couscous; and the versatile cornmeal mixture called polenta. Legumes are another staple—inexpensive and high in protein, they were an essential part of the traditional Mediterranean diet. White haricot beans, small red cranberry beans, lentils, chickpeas, and fava beans remain popular options today. Another common Mediterranean theme is wine, although it was traditionally consumed primarily by men and always with meals, never recreationally. A small piece of cheese to begin or end a meal was common, but food was never smothered in cheese the way it sometimes is in Americanized Italian dishes. Many Mediterranean dishes share a similar flavor and character due to a few popular flavoring ingredients: garlic, onion, lemons, olive oil, basil, oregano, Italian parsley, and often a few small pieces of pancetta (an unsmoked bacon).

Beyond the ingredients themselves, eating the traditional Mediterranean way is a philosophy in itself: Life is for savoring, and food is a glorious and beautiful expression of life. Meals are gatherings of family and friends—genuine events, not inconvenient chores. Food sustains life, and the quality of the food we eat, not to mention the manner and spirit in which it is prepared, is a reflection of the quality of our lives.

In traditional Mediterranean culture, food was both more and less significant than it is in the United States today. Food was less important because it wasn't the source of anxiety we often make it today. Neither was it a commodity, continually reinvented to be faster, cheaper, lower in fat (in other words, tapping the latest buzzwords to make it a more profitable industry). Yet, in the Mediterranean, food was and arguably still is far more important than in the United States. Handled and consumed with reverence for its life-sustaining capabilities, food celebrated the beautiful, the simple, the healthful. Food means vitality, a ritual to share with loved ones, an integral part of life itself.

The Magic Discovered

In the early 1950s, the great American researcher Ancel Keys and his wife, Margaret, traveled to the southern Italian shores, not just to escape the cold and dark skies of Oxford, England, where Keys was spending a year sabbatical as a visiting professor at Magdalen College, but to explore the curious notion that heart disease was apparently almost nonexistent in this area. At a time when Americans, particularly those in their forties and fifties, were subject to an unusually high rate of heart disease in the United States, Keys was intrigued by reports that the then-new American epidemic was almost unheard of in southern Italy. Heart disease appeared to occur with any significance only within a small upper-class subculture.

Also intriguing were reports of the diet of this region, which was described as nutritionally wholesome but containing very little food from animal products. The diet was low in total fat, with minimal amounts of saturated fat, and consisted primarily of plant foods such as vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.

Remember, this was 1950—a time when Americans in general believed large steak dinners, baked potatoes, and refined white bread rolls slathered in butter, along with a hefty glass of whole milk, made a nutritious dinner. How could such a meager, plant-based diet result in such heart-healthy citizens? It seems obvious to us now, but at the time, Keys felt compelled to investigate.

Ancel Keys helped to define the link between nutrition and health as we understand it today. Before Keys, awareness of the connection between diet and health was tenuous at best. Keys suspected the link to be more than incidental, and we can credit him with the discovery of the relationship of diet to coronary heart disease. From as early as the 1940s, his clinical work at the University of Minnesota as well as epidemiological observations showed how blood cholesterol was an indicator of heart disease, and that diet—particularly the type of fat consumed—affected blood cholesterol levels. His interest in the relationship of prolonged dietary habits to coronary heart disease rates led him to spearhead one of the greatest and most influential epidemiological studies of our time, the Seven Countries Study.

Keys began his research in Naples, Italy, where he and his wife, Margaret, along with local medical colleagues, studied the blood cholesterol levels and heart disease rates of the local working men. Serum measurements from the initial study subjects revealed extraordinarily low blood cholesterol levels. The male subjects in their forties were especially impressive, with blood cholesterol averaging 165 compared with about 230 from blood samples of males of the same age living in Minnesota. As Keys must have suspected, heart disease and low cholesterol levels rarely coincide.

In his subsequent book How to Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way, Keys described his results: "What these men told us about their eating habits confirmed dietary studies in the area that reported only about 20 per cent of calories from fats compared with around 40 in Minnesota. According to the doctors who helped us, the hospitals caring for the general populace rarely had coronary heart patients; such patients were found to be only in private clinics caring for the rich."

Even considering that the rich were more able to afford hospitalization at this time and in this area, evidence suggested that deaths attributable to heart attack among the working classes were far lower than those among the richer classes. According to Keys, the diet of the Neapolitan working class was of a quite different composition than the diet consumed by the upper classes, who consumed meat daily, as opposed to once every week or two. The diet of the working class sounds both simple and irresistible, as Keys describes it:

Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Amaranth