the mediterranean diet ANCEL KEYS INFLUENCE Ancel Keys

the mediterranean diet

ANCEL KEYS INFLUENCE • Ancel Keys was a nutritionist credited with the development of "K rations" for the USArmy. He noted that men who lived in the mountains of Crete and ate a traditional Cretan diet had low rates of heart disease and cancer and lived to a very old age. • He instituted a 15 -year, seven-nation study to investigate how different regional diets affected disease rates and mortality. He looked at Greece, Finland, Japan, Italy , the Netherlands and the United States to see how the diets compared. • He lived in Pioppi , a little village in Cilento, and he found that people who followed what he called a Mediterranean diet had lower rates of death due to cardiovascular diseases or cancer than people in countries like the United States, which had much higher disease rates. • Keys found the Mediterranean diet had fewer saturated fats, less dairy consumption and more fruit, vegetables and nuts than the other diets he studied.

…but what is mediterranean diet? The Mediterranean diet is a modern nutritional recommendation originally inspired by the dietary patterns of Greece, Southern Italy, and Spain in the 1940 s and 1950 s. The principal aspects of this diet include proportionally high consumption of olive oil, legumes, unrefined cereals, fruits, and vegetables, moderate to high consumption of fish, moderate consumption of dairy products (mostly as cheese and yogurt), moderate wine consumption, and low consumption of meat and meat products.