And believe it or not I didn’t even gain weight.
After returning from Italy on vacation, I now have had a taste of at least one version, the northern Italian one, of the Mediterranean Diet. This is not going to be a tutorial on the Mediterranean Diet; there are excellent resources for that both online and in print. I tried to read the book The Mediterranean Diet years ago after hearing a lecture on various popular diets, but it is so boring I couldn’t plow through the first few chapters. Very succinctly this diet has more evidence of its health benefits than just about any other eating style.
It was fun, not to mention delicious, to see how the principles of the diet are brought into play. The basis of the diet is to make fruit and vegetables, whole grains and healthy oils the big part of the food pyramid. This shows up on the menus of every restaurant. When you order meat sauce the first question is where is the beef? In America if you order meat sauce, you get maybe a quarter-pounder or more of hamburger in a helping. In Italy the sauce has specks of meat, but is primarily wonderful home-made tomato sauce, with lots of spices, and enough meat to add flavor. I doubt there is a half ounce of meat in a helping of meat sauce. The second thing you notice is the helping size. In America a serving of pasta is 2-3 times the size of a typical helping in Italy. Last is that the pasta is uniformly freshly handmade, likely with unenriched wheat, often whole-wheat.
The next thing I noted was that unlike in Rome where everything was very salty, in Tuscany there was little salt in most foods. We were told that this is a historical artifact of the fact that salt was taxed in the Etruscan territory, so no salt was used in the bread or in most recipes, and other spices were used in place of salt. It leads to bland bread, but nicely flavored sauces and flavorings for other foods. Butter was never served with the breads. Usually bread was served with olive oil, with or without Basalmic vinegar.
Another plus is that fish and shellfish is highly favored by Italians. On most menus many of the prima courses featured seafood of one sort or another. When second courses featured red meat, the servings were typically quite small relative to ones you’d see in the US.
Last is the wine. It is typically served with most meals, is wonderful, and is a good enough reason to visit Italy all by itself. A bottle of red was the typical accompaniment to nearly every meal, except at the more casual places, where we bought the house wine by the ¼. ½ or 1 liter pitcher. I didn’t find a wine there I disliked.
Viva Italy when it comes to its version of the Mediterranean diet.