| The Mediterranean diet has its origins on the countries that face the Mediterranean Sea: Southern Italy, Spain, Greece, Crete, ex-Yugoslavia, Turkey and Tunisia. Along their unlucky story plain of hunger and misery, these people were able to set a diet based on their land’s products, mainly vegetarian. With the social and economic development of the last century, the south diet began to enrich itself with animal protein food to reach the rich countries level nowadays. During this process, it reached a point of quite perfection, having supplied its proteins lack but still conserving its original formula. It was about 1950-1960, and during this period, people from Mediterranean area, mainly from South Italy, had lower death rates of cronical-degenerative and neoplasia metabolic diseases. The Mediterranean food model is a program in which some typical food (
olive oil
,
pasta
, bread and legume,
vegetables
and fresh fruit, wine) are wisely matched with proper animal products quantities (meat, specially the white ones, fish, dairy products and eggs).
In this diet it is possible to prepare a
single dish
using these typical ingredients, having a complete, balanced and economical meal. The Mediterranean diet uses to be presented as a pyramid, where the quantities of each group of food (vegetables and fruit, carbohydrates and so on) are proportional to the size of the pyramid level. | The vegetables are at the lower part of the pyramid, together with the fresh fruit and one should eat 5-6 portions a day. |  |
The next level is occupied by the carbohydrates with 4-5 portions a day, then oil and fat with 2-3 portions a day followed by dairy products with 2-3 portions a day. Follows meat, fish, eggs, cold cuts and legume with 1-2 portions a day and at the top the sweets with 1 portion a day. The portions were established by studies, but one can easily apply the idea with the self good sense. Even if one does not weight 150gr to make a fruit portion, or 10gr to make a portion of oil, just balancing the diet following these proportions will work. | | |
