all you should know about the Mediterranean diet

HOLLISTER, Calif. - Aug. 26, 2015 - PRLog -- Many times over the years one could hear on the talk shows – and they are still going on strong – on the radio or the plethora of mavens on TV extolling the latest and the best diets that guarantee you to lose the extra weight and never regain it again, provided you stayed on that diet. I have never have paid much attention to them in the past because my thinking was how can all these diets achieve the same results when they are so different from each other?

And in the mix of all this din one can hear about the Mediterranean diet from all kinds of experts but I had never paid that much attention to any of them either, except lately when I was listening to the radio and this expert, who was talking about the Mediterranean diet, I decided to listen to him. He was also accepting phoned-in questions from his listeners. That’s when I came to the realization that this expert did not know much about the diet itself but he knew how to answer the questions. When he was talking about the recipe ingredients, he could never go wrong with his answers because all the ingredients are known to be very healthy because they are natural and fresh; you gather them in the fields or buy them and eat them the same day due to lack of refrigeration. However, I doubted very much if he really knew the diet itself very well.

Who am I to criticize this expert? What are my qualifications? The only qualification that I have is just this one; the fact that I was born there and grew up eating that food until the age of fourteen when I finally settled in this rich country and almost ate myself to death.

I love red meat. I am not fat but at one time my total cholesterol was 376 and one doctor even told me “I don’t know how you are still walking around.” At that I decided to go back to my old diet, sort of, because I never left it completely and my cholesterol now is 150 to 170 and I’ve never felt better in my life. I’ve been cooking for many years now and all my recipes are based on the original ones when my mom and other people in the town, where I grew up, were using. The ingredients were few and the recipes simple. If one woman asked another woman for a recipe, the answer was, “a handful of this and a handful of that.” Precise measurements.

Of course now I have altered the original recipes very slightly, not by changing the ingredients but by adding minute amounts of other simple ingredients to enhance the taste of the finished meal that you yourself have cooked over a hot stove. Also, I must caution some of you, that some of the ingredients may not seem too appetizing to you but I want, nevertheless, to give you the genuine cuisine and you alone can decide whether you are brave enough to try something different. Keep in mind the fact that at this time, if anything were edible, it was eaten; nothing was discarded whether it came from the earth, sea or animal. This diet was not consciously selected by the people, at the time. This diet was not a diet of choice; it was a diet of necessity. This was the only food available and you had to eat it or perish. We didn’t eat it because of its health benefits, we never really had a choice, it was that or nothing; we had no other choice, it was just necessity. It was a very simple choice to make though; we had nothing else to eat, it was life itself, you eat what you have or you starve. And of course after so many years on this diet, the necessity became the norm.

We never knew that our diet was healthy at the time and neither did anyone else anywhere in the world cared about healthy diets. Food per se was never associated in a negative way when it came to a person’s health until the second half of the twentieth century. I am sure this diet, as it is presented in this book, has countless local variations between Western Turkey and the whole Northern Mediterranean coastal areas all the way to the Iberian Peninsula in the West and the plethora of small and large islands in between and to a lesser extend to the shores of North Africa.