The Mediterranean diet occasionally includes meat, eggs, dairy products

We receive and publish this letter on the Mediterranean Diet

Good morning Mr. La Pira, Sunday morning I saw the rerun of an episode of the program Mi manda Rai Tre where you talked about Nutri Score and the traffic light label and I thought about writing, to say that I find it really worrying that many people have not yet understood what it is. means by Mediterranean diet. This morning there was the professor on duty, who gave an erroneous definition of this diet, confused and this fact is now repeating itself too often, to the point that I also wondered that it is not happening by chance, but it is being done. purposely. I hope they are my fantasies, the fact is that it is enough to do a simple search on Google, even Wikipedia
in short, to find correct information. The original Mediterranean diet and therefore the authentic one, refers to a historical period in which the daily diet was still very poor, which of course does not mean deficient, but made of raw materials and simple foods, easily available in the territory of origin, not imported. Around the 40s and 45s, it was an American doctor who identified a very low mortality among the indigenous inhabitants of Cilento from cardiovascular diseases and attributed it to the type of diet that was common among those peoples. The Mediterranean diet in fact. Now it is evident that before the war, meat and in any case the component of animal origin was very little represented in the diet, in those places they ate mainly fish, not meat and vegetables in quantity, legumes, cereals, fruit. Instead the usual expert said that the diet includes meat, eggs, milk, cheese, without specifying or specifying anything. This type of food was available only when the animal produced them, intensive farming did not yet exist and production was not pushed, so it was necessary to follow the natural rhythms of the animals to which man had to adapt. I believe you never ate red veal meat, perhaps once a year. In short, precisely because of this mystification, which I do not know if it is accidental, when it comes to the Mediterranean diet, people often misunderstand it does not have clarity. Everything will still be in favor of the food industry.

Chiara Cerulli

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