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Long heralded by many as THE weight loss diet to beat all others. The Mediterranean Diet has been hijacked by many countries each claiming it as their own over the last half century.
But the real question we face is this...
Is it any good for low carbers?
The answers may surprise you.
You don’t know it yet, but in the next few pages, you’ll uncover more
real information about the Mediterranean Diet that you can really use,
than you’ll find even by spending a couple of hours in the library or
online. We are going to answer those questions, such as:
What is it?
Where does it come from?
How can I use it? Is it tasty?
What can I eat?
Is it an expensive diet?
Do I have to count carbs?
And many more questions that I know you’re just itching to have answered.
Let’s start by: “What is it?”
What is it about the Mediterranean Diet that seems to be so hyped-up by so many people in the media? Well, typically and in a nutshell, the Mediterranean Diet consists of a high content of vegetables, fruit, cereals and legumes. It has moderately high levels of fish, not too much meat, certainly a low saturated fat count, low diary products, and modest alcohol content; yet if you ask most people about the Mediterranean Diet the thing they will come back with is “Oh, it’s got lots of olive oil in it”.
Whilst that is indeed a very common ingredient in the Mediterranean Diet, it is by no means the most important and neither is it the tastiest one. As you’ll see as we go through, the Mediterranean Diet is indeed rich in flavour, texture, variety and history.
Where is it from?
It is commonly understood that a gentleman by the name of Ansel Keys was the person who brought this diet to public attention. He was inspired to write about the Diet of the Mediterranean Region after a tour of duty in the US Forces took him to various parts of the Mediterranean, including Greece and Crete, back in the 1940’s.
After being demobbed, he then went about organising a 15-year scientific study to find out just why it was that the people who ate the typical diet of Greece and Crete seemed to live longer, healthier and be free of many of the health ailments such as heart attacks and cancers, that we now find so common in our own Western population.
We need to remember that Ansel Keys didn’t actually invent the diet. He merely noticed what people were eating in that region. So we need to look a bit further back in history to find out where the diet came from.
By doing so we will:
• More greatly understand some of the interesting history of the food of the Mediterranean.
• Uncover some of the really tasty dishes that aren’t often mentioned in Mediterranean Diet cookbooks,
But more than that, we will see just how easy it is to include and adapt many Mediterranean dishes into a low-carb regime.
Starting from Ansel Keys’ study back in the 40’s and 50’s, it appears his idea of the Mediterranean Diet is based on Greek and mainly Cretian food. Yet taking a step back in time, the things that they were eating then were really a mishmash of many of the Mediterranean countries. If you look at a map, you will see that there are a whole host of different countries, cultures and rich gastronomic histories which have influenced the make-up of the Greek and Cretian diet.
As you look at the map, you’ll notice that Crete, upon which the Mediterranean Diet was most commonly based, is right at the centre of the Mediterranean. It is part of a diverse collection of islands that sprinkle out from the bottom of Greece out into the Mediterranean, towards the Middle East and in part North Africa.
What many writers have overlooked is the simple fact that the whole of the Mediterranean was under the control of the Roman Empire for several hundred years. Whilst not everything about that was rosy, one of the good things that it did bring about was increased communications and trade throughout the whole of the Mediterranean region and beyond.
Throughout the Roman Empire, as people moved around and travelled, they took with them their various culinary traditions, their ways of cooking, the spices that they used, the herbs that they flavoured their dishes with. There was Greece and Crete right at the centre of it all. Their safe harbours offered travellers shelter from the storms that so often plagued the Mediterranean Sea, and they became culinary swap-shops as travellers from all parts of the known globe exchanged recipes and ingredient ideas and cooking methods with each other.
Can you imagine what it must have been like, several thousand years ago? Going down to the market near a Greek port and seeing fruits, legumes and vegetables, the like of which you may not have seen before, brought in by travellers.
Can you think what it must have been like walking along the quayside next to some of the boats from far-flung places as their cooks and chefs concocted whatever their favourite dish was, each using their own brands of herbs and spices. Imagine the aromas flooding your senses with new, strange and exotic smells, the like of which you may never have come across before.
Don’t forget, not only are we dealing here with national issues but you have the Jewish influence, later on you have the Islamic influence, the Christian influence, people drawn from every part of the known world, who in turn will have adopted culinary ideas and recipes from peoples who had invaded them in times past.
We cannot forget either, that the Romans took slaves from every nation they conquered. Roman historians of the time have written in many places about their nobles having slave cooks who prepared the most exquisite dishes from their home lands. Indeed it is documented that these slave cooks were often so prized that they changed owners for what were huge sums of money by the standards of the day.
The Romans were not alone in this practice. The Greeks, Byzantines, in fact virtually every civilization that has conquered another land followed the same practice.
On another note…
One of the most notable ingredients of modern Mediterranean cuisine is the tomato and more recently the potato. As far as we can tell, the tomato only arrived in Greece in the 19th century, coming over from Spain via Italy, yet it’s become a staple part of Grecian cuisine. Likewise the potato, and to a certain extent, rice. These things are not natural to the island of Crete or even the Grecian mainland, but are certainly now considered a traditional food.
The same goes for avocadoes, bananas and many of the other fruits that came from North America and more laterally, South America.
Is it low carb?
Now I expect you’re wondering, is the Mediterranean Diet low-carb? Well in its modern format, the short answer is almost. In fact it’s so close to low-carb that it’s very easy to convert any Mediterranean regime to any level of low-carb diet that you want. I hear you say “you’ve got moussaka, and you’ve got all those sorts of things, dishes rich in rice and pasta”.
Well as we shall see later on, the Mediterranean Diet as it’s now presented, has actually been hijacked, very successfully by certain parties. (Who will be named later). I have to say that many of the Greeks and the Cretians are not worried about that one little bit. Yet as we look back in history, the real Grecian diet (as I said earlier) is a natural for anybody following a low-carb regime.
You can convert it to low-carb simply by leaving out some of the higher carb vegetables, some of the legumes and pulses, and obviously the bread and the pasta. If you take out those four or five different things, what you’re left with is highly versatile, tasty and richly diverse. And when I say “tasty” I mean IT’S REALLY TASTY.
When you look at the abundant variety of food that’s available, not just in the Greek and Cretian cuisine, but in all of the other countries around the Mediterranean, you can see that there is such a rich tapestry of dishes to choose from, that I wouldn’t mind betting you could have a different one every day of the year.
How can I use it? Probably the best way for a low-carber to use the Mediterranean Diet is as a theme, just like you would use Chinese or Indian themes, or Italian, or things like that. In fact, you could split that theme down even further and take each of the many different countries from which the Mediterranean Diet draws its rich cuisine, and use each of those as a separate theme.
You have North African, Middle Eastern, you’ve got all the Jewish, the Islamic, the Christian influences. Moving round, you’ve got the Southern Eastern European countries, you’ve got Greece, you’ve got Crete, you’ve got the more recent interlopers such as Italy, France, Spain, and some even like to include some of the Portuguese dishes.
Now like any low-carbohydrate, or carbohydrate-controlled diet, yes of course you do have to watch the carbs. For some people, some of the dishes and ingredients might be a little unusual, meaning you’ll probably have to take greater care over those carbs until you get to know exactly how to use the ingredients in the best way. And as you would for every food preparation, you need to watch portion control and need to make sensible food choices.
Much of those portion control and food choices will of course depend on which part of the Mediterranean you are taking your particular dishes from. But if we are basing ourselves on Greek cuisine, which is very rich in salad stuffs, char-grilled vegetables and the like, then obviously your portions can be just that little bit bigger.
In many ways, Mediterranean cuisine is actually quite easy to prepare. If we base ourselves again on the Cretian cuisine, much of the traditional food preparation involves grilling or barbecuing. It’s only when they get onto the dishes that are normally specifically reserved for high days, holidays, feasts and religious observance that they start to cook things in ovens, or use other more long-winded ways of preparation. In fact, the watchword for much of Cretian cuisine, is that you do as little as possible to the food to produce a tasty dish. And that, in many ways, is one of the secrets of the Mediterranean cuisine.
Food preparation is kept simple and quick. In many instances for vegetables and so forth, just slicing or quartering, covering in a mixture of ubiquitous olive oil, salt, pepper and basilica, is more than sufficient; to either eat it raw or quickly grill it. And if you’ve had authentic Cretian cuisine, you’ll know just how tasty it is.
As an example, one of my best liked meat-based Mediterranean dishes is simply to take chicken quarters, baste them in a mixture of olive oil and basilica, sprinkle them with salt and pepper, and barbeque them. And as they’re cooking, pour over a little lemon juice to add to the flavour.
Now if you don’t want the hassle of having to watch things on the barbeque, just sprinkle a little olive oil in the bottom of an oven dish, add a couple of spoons of basilica, put your lemon quarters in the bottom, sprinkle over some salt and pepper, a few more spoonfuls of olive oil, a dab of basilica on each chicken piece and a squeeze of a quarter of a lemon juice just mixed in with the oil in the bottom. Stick it in the oven on about 180ºC for an hour, when you bring it out, it’s lovely, done and delicious. And you’ve not had to do a thing apart from maybe baste it once or twice during that time.
Go to Part 2
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