Specs

I had my yearly physical exam yesterday, and if I do say so, I am a very healthy puppy! My stats were great: my doctor said he hasn't seen lipid (cholesterol, triglycerides) scores as good as mine in a long long time. In particular, my "good" cholesterol was very high. There aren't many things that can raise good cholesterol and lower bad cholesterol at the same time, but olive oil is one of them, and we eat a LOT of olive oil in Casa Wild.

 

We eat a basically Mediterranean diet composed of legumes, whole wheat grains, fruits & veggies, not so much meat, and fish whenever we can get it. Oh, and lots of olive oil and wine :) The cool thing about this way of eating is that it all tastes great. And f course controlling portions is important and the Med diet with all its fiber and olive oil really makes you feel full.

 

The typical Mediterranean diet differs from the what the USDA food pyramid recommends in a few ways. For one, people of the Mediterranean basin eat a much higher percentage of calories from fat, up to 40%. But it's good fat, like olive oil or nuts. I think our diet at home is about 35-40%. The Meds also limit meat, especially red meat. They do eat some sat fats, in the form of cheese and yogurt, but they don't get our rate of heart disease because it's balanced out with everything else (and the wine helps that too). Aaah...the wine they have at every meal....the USDA would never recommend that, we've still got a strong temperance movement here and ultimately that leads to the biggest difference between the two philosophies:

 

While the Mediterranean food pyramid is simply documentation of what the people of the Mediterranean basin, some of the healthiest people on the planet, eat, the USDA pyramid is mired in a political web of having to support US interests while keeping many strong political organizations as happy as possible. Wine for instance, should really be on there, but that would make several influential organizations very unhappy. So politics trumps science. And why does the USDA, the government organization responsible for promoting US agriculture, get to assemble the food pyramid in the first place? That's a huge conflict of interest and results in recommendations of products the US produces regardless of the validity of those items in an actual diet. The eating of fish is downplayed on the USDA pyramid as compared to the prominent position it has in the med diet, and meats are promoted to the level of beans, as if they were somehow equal. The latest pyramids I've seen from the USDA aren't really even pyramids, they're all mixed up and have a series of vertical stripes making everything pretty much equal in terms of nutrition. Is this what it's come to? The educational value is just gone.

 

So the way I see it, the Med pyramid trumps the USDA pyramid because 1) it's based on an actual population and has many years worth of data to support it and 2) it wasn't "created" by any one group, it's simply a documentation of a lifestyle that seems to work really well as a component in keeping people happy & healthy.

 

The Mediterranean lifestyle is more than just eating of course. It's having long lazy dinners outdoors with family and friends laughing and it's the long hours working outdoors and the long walks in the evenings. These things are just as important as the food they eat, in my mind.