For that matter, do any of us know what the Mediterranean diet actually consists of? There’s olive oil, for sure, and fish. But then what? “My understanding is almost entirely based on the stock images for those articles,” said a member of the Lifehacker staff who shall remain nameless, but who was saying what we were all thinking.
All that said, the Mediterranean diet seems to be a perfectly fine way to eat. If you’d like to try it, go for it. The vagueness of the diet’s description is both a pro and a con. The good news is that no food groups are cut out and nothing is officially off-limits. Unfortunately, without strict rules or definitions, it’s hard to know exactly what to have at your next meal if you want to stay on the diet.
Vegetables: it’s still hard to measure out 250 grams of different sizes and shapes of veggies, but the familiar American recommendation of 3 cups of vegetables should get you in the right ballpark.
Legumes: 140 grams per week is just 20 grams a day when you average it out. One can of chickpeas or black beans will check off this requirement for the week.
Fish: 250 grams per week means a quarter-pound serving twice per week—but that’s a minimum. You can have more.
Dairy: 180 grams is about six ounces. So a container of yogurt that weighs in at five to six ounces would be considered plenty for the day. Or go with feta or mozzarella in a meal.
Olive oil can be used as needed for cooking.
For recipe inspiration, Oldways (an organization that promotes traditional eating patterns, including but not limited to the Mediterranean diet) has a database of recipes here that you can filter by diet. OliveTomato has a printable shopping list (identifying typical “Mediterranean” groceries you might want to stock up on) and a sample 5-day meal plan. There is also a Mediterranean diet subreddit where people post meal ideas and recipes.
What you need to know about the studies that inspired the Mediterranean diet
In other words, when you see a headline about the Mediterranean diet, it’s not necessarily from a study that assigned one group of people to a Mediterranean diet and another group to a different diet (although those studies do exist). More typically, the studies survey people—sometimes in the Mediterranean region, sometimes not—on what they typically eat. Their answers are used to come up with a score (2 points if you eat more than 250 grams of vegetables on an average day, for example), and the people with the highest scores are contrasted against the people with the lowest scores.
You can read the scoring criteria here. Some of the targets are per week and others are per day, so read carefully. You get two points for each of the following:
At least 300 grams of fruits and nuts per day (1 point for 150-300)
At least 195 grams of cereals (that is, grains) per day (1 point for 130-195)
Less than 80 grams of meat per day (1 point for 81-120)
Alcohol in the range of 12 to 24 grams per day, which is about 1 to 2 standard drinks (1 point if you’re under 12 grams, no points if you’re over 24)
As you can see, it’s not exactly straightforward to use this system as a measure of your diet. Cheese and skim milk are both dairy products, but they’ll weigh different amounts. The same goes for fruit and nuts: are we talking a fresh apple, or a bag of pistachios? You’d also need to convert your units if you’re not used to grams—250 grams of fish is half a pound, easy to ask for at the fish counter, but 250 grams of vegetables could look very different depending on what the vegetable is. For example, that could be two and a half cups of broccoli, or it could be one large onion.
I find all this counting to be a hilarious counterpoint to U.S. News’s description of the diet as a set of "general guidelines." In previous years, they wrote that “no counting carbs, points, or calories” is a pro of the Mediterranean diet. You have to count a heck of a lot of stuff to figure out if you are even on the Mediterranean diet. I think what they're trying to say is that you can adopt general principles like "more vegetables" and "less meat" to make your diet more Mediterranean-ish. But that's so vague it's hard to call it a diet at all.
Some more caveats
It’s also important to remember that the scientific understanding of the Mediterranean diet has been cobbled together from foods that are considered traditional in Greece, Italy, and neighboring areas. Foods are included, or not, based on how typical they are deemed to be of that traditional eating pattern.
This means that when people say the Mediterranean diet is scientifically backed, they are referring to the studies that have been done on people who sorta-mostly follow it. It does not mean that scientists constructed it from scratch, specifying olive oil because they deemed it healthier than other oils, or determined 250+ grams to be the perfect amount of vegetables for some particular reason.
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