Healthy Mediterranean diet is dying out at home, UN expert says

Jul 29, 2008, 8:55 GMT

Rome - Hailed for keeping people slim, healthy and living longer, the Mediterranean diet has followers all over the world - but is increasingly disregarded around the Mediterranean, a United Nations expert said Tuesday.

According to Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Senior Economist Josef Schmidhuber, over the past 45 years the famed diet revolving around fresh fruit and vegetables has 'decayed into a moribund state' in its home area.

Research indicates that as people in southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East regions have grown richer, their food habits have changed for the worse, Schmidhuber said.

People on the shores of the Mediterranean have used higher incomes to add a large number of calories from meat and fats to a diet that was traditionally light on animal proteins.

What they now eat is 'too fat, too salty and too sweet,' Schmidhuber said.

His findings are contained in a paper presented at a recent workshop organized by the California Mediterranean Consortium of seven United States and European Union academic institutions on Mediterranean products in the global market.

In the 40 years to 2002, daily intake in 15 European nations included in the study, increased from 2,960 kilocalories to 3,340 kilocalories - about 20 per cent.

But Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus and Malta, who started out poorer than the northerners, upped their calorie count by 30 per cent.

'Higher calorie intake and lower calorie expenditure have made Greece today the EU member country with the highest average Body Mass Index and the highest prevalence of overweight and obesity,' Schmidhuber, said.

'Today, three quarters of the Greek population are overweight or obese.'

More than half of the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese populations are overweight too. At the same time there has also been a 'vast increase' in the overall calories and glycemic load of the diets in the Near East-North Africa region.

All EU countries disregard FAO and the World Health Organization's recommendation that lipids should account for no more than 30 per cent of total Dietary Energy Supply, but Spain, Greece and Italy are all well over that limit and have become the EU's biggest fat guzzlers.

The country which registered the most dramatic increase was Spain, where fat made up just 25 per cent of the diet 40 years ago but now accounts for 40 per cent.

Schmidhuber attributes the change in eating habits not only to increased income but to factors such as the rise of supermarkets, changes in food distribution systems, working women having less time to cook, and families eating out more, often in fast-food restaurants.

At the same time, calorie needs have declined, people exercise less and they have shifted to a much more sedentary lifestyle.

On the positive side however, Schmidhuber notes Mediterranean people now consume more fruit and vegetables and more olive oil.

But they generally fail to follow the diet which their ancestors devised and which several Mediterranean countries want to have placed on the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) world heritage list.