Rome - Hailed for keeping people slim, healthy and living
longer, the Mediterranean diet has followers all over the world - but
is increasingly disregarded around the Mediterranean, a United
Nations expert said Tuesday.
According to Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Senior
Economist Josef Schmidhuber, over the past 45 years the famed diet
revolving around fresh fruit and vegetables has 'decayed into a
moribund state' in its home area.
Research indicates that as people in southern Europe, North
Africa, and the Middle East regions have grown richer, their food
habits have changed for the worse, Schmidhuber said.
People on the shores of the Mediterranean have used higher incomes
to add a large number of calories from meat and fats to a diet that
was traditionally light on animal proteins.
What they now eat is 'too fat, too salty and too sweet,'
Schmidhuber said.
His findings are contained in a paper presented at a recent
workshop organized by the California Mediterranean Consortium of
seven United States and European Union academic institutions on
Mediterranean products in the global market.
In the 40 years to 2002, daily intake in 15 European nations
included in the study, increased from 2,960 kilocalories to 3,340
kilocalories - about 20 per cent.
But Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus and Malta, who started
out poorer than the northerners, upped their calorie count by 30 per
cent.
'Higher calorie intake and lower calorie expenditure have made
Greece today the EU member country with the highest average Body Mass
Index and the highest prevalence of overweight and obesity,'
Schmidhuber, said.
'Today, three quarters of the Greek population are overweight or
obese.'
More than half of the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese populations
are overweight too. At the same time there has also been a 'vast
increase' in the overall calories and glycemic load of the diets in
the Near East-North Africa region.
All EU countries disregard FAO and the World Health Organization's
recommendation that lipids should account for no more than 30 per
cent of total Dietary Energy Supply, but Spain, Greece and Italy are
all well over that limit and have become the EU's biggest fat
guzzlers.
The country which registered the most dramatic increase was Spain,
where fat made up just 25 per cent of the diet 40 years ago but now
accounts for 40 per cent.
Schmidhuber attributes the change in eating habits not only to
increased income but to factors such as the rise of supermarkets,
changes in food distribution systems, working women having less time
to cook, and families eating out more, often in fast-food
restaurants.
At the same time, calorie needs have declined, people exercise
less and they have shifted to a much more sedentary lifestyle.
On the positive side however, Schmidhuber notes Mediterranean
people now consume more fruit and vegetables and more olive oil.
But they generally fail to follow the diet which their ancestors
devised and which several Mediterranean countries want to have placed
on the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural
Organization's (UNESCO) world heritage list.
USA
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