Me: Maam/Sir, are you sure you do not have any ailments?
Patient: No, doctor, Im sure.
Not convinced, I ask the customary question:
Me: Are you on any medication?
Patient: I only take a pill for my diabetes and one for my blood pressure.
It is moments like these that clue me into how much the average Westerner is used to relying on drugs, and to being in constant contact with diseasesso much so that they are considered a part of us. More depressing still, after reprimanding them for neglecting their own health, I often hear: Doctor, if you call these illnesses or I take the pill and Im fine. It is then that I understand that it is not really their fault, but rather societys. Society does not facilitate the spreading of health awareness. Eastern populations, though not as technologically advanced, have an inherent respect for their own bodies. In Japan and India, for example, they live using natural treatment methods for their bodies and minds, which are methods available to all, and that are inculcated in them since childhood. Health education and respect for our own bodies are the really important things in this life. We should consider ourselves lucky that our conscience or spirit, (depending on ones beliefs), came to be in a healthy body. And yet what do we do instead? We destroy our cells with the crap that is offered us every day. Adults, with their food miseducationbut even worse, with their arrogant assumption that they are perfectly able to safeguard their childrens healthconvince their kids that the products they are consuming are the best for keeping in shape. Chocolate and candy are the rewards for children who receive good grades or who do well in class. Holidays, religious or not, are a pretext for preparing lavish meals where the majority of guests, as soon as the guest of honor appears, fling themselves toward laden trays of food that is anything but natural. Sometimes we are so fixated on the food that we forget even to congratulate the honoree. And what kind of a party would it be if it did not end by gorging on sweets?
How the Mediterranean Diet Is Presented
She is the great media starlet, the healthy and historic Mediterranean Diet. On all public TV stations, there are exciting little stages where many professionals, supporters of the Mediterranean Diet, are invited. They all line up against the ill-fated nutritionist who, in accordance with his own work experience, found all of the holes in what is today listed as an Intangible Cultural Heritage element: the Mediterranean Diet. These little panels do nothing but confuse those people who, when in doubt, fall into theoretical Do It Yourself health paths, listening to a variety of canards such as red meat causes tumors, or alkaline diets are miraculous, or carbohydrates constitute the main energy source of cells, or drinking lemon water in the morning cleans the overnight accumulation of mucus out from the intestines, etc. The result? When these people convince themselves to come see me at my office, I have to resolve both the problems created by the hypothetical Mediterranean Diet and those caused by the miraculous alternative theories patients came across online.
As an occupational hazard, in addition to taking a patients medical history and asking in detail about their daily food habits, I tend to observe the food carts of patrons at the supermarket. Over the course of time, a thought has isolated itself in my mind, detached from all that was narrated to me during my study courses and during nighttime channel surfing, and I have come to the conclusion that it is the hypothetical Mediterranean Diet that has created this health crisis in the Western populace. Easy nowI too may be taken for a witch doctor by a couple of professionals who back the Mediterranean Diet, but no matter. The time has come to tell you what a healthy Mediterranean Diet is, and above all, how it came about. In time, you will come to understand how science, because of an affirmation typically inherent to its scientific research, manages to deceive itself and the rest of the population.
They tell us that the Mediterranean Diet is the food regimen that is been followed by the people who bordered the Mediterranean Sea, where the climate allowed many species of plants to grow for thousands of yearsfrom vegetables to cereals and legumes. The great study that led to the discovery of the benefits of the Mediterranean Diet was made by an American researcher by the name of Ancel Keys, who, together with his team, came to Italy and a few other countries adjacent to the Mediterranean to figure out why cardiovascular diseases were almost non-existent in these specific areas. Ancel Keyss team studied how these people ate, and were immediately astonished: the Mediterranean people, who had almost non-existent cardiovascular diseases, consumed lots of fats, primarily via eating dry fruits and most especially extra virgin olive oil. Keys continued his studies and concluded them with what is currently presented to us as the healthiest diet in the world: the Mediterranean Diet. The diet is represented by the famous food pyramid that shows, at the very first and largest bottom step, what people should eat the most, and, alas, consume as their main meals: cereals (wheat, rice, oatmeal, etc.) and fruits and vegetables. Therefore, cereals are recommended for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yes, you heard that correctly: even after getting home at night, we should apparently be eating our beloved bread, in deference to one theorythe theory of the scalewhich claims that it is quantity which creates health problems. Maybe, I say, but not in this case. What results is an obsessive compulsion (which turns into an actual mania) to weigh everything at all costs, with overly exact and expensive little food scales used to try to avoid an extra milligram of cereal.
As you will see in the following pages, I describe the consumption of carbs at night as a veritable bonanza for diabetes. And if this were not enough, we are even advised to consume the simple sugars found in fruit. But we will go over this in the following chapters. In my opinion, the horror of the diet they pass off as Mediterranean lies in the encouragement of the daily consumption of dairy because they say Mediterranean people consumed it during every meal.
Luckily, Italys extra virgin olive oil is also recommended for daily consumption. On the highest tier of the food pyramid we find meat, shellfish, eggs, legumes and seafood. Eggs, legumes and seafood on the last tier, together with meat? Mediterranean people really only ate fish twice a week? And legumes?
The Mediterranean Diet, in percentages, calls for the total daily calorie intake of carbs to be 55-65% (of which 10% is from simple sugars, thereby encouraging the consumption of glucose and fructose); 25-30% of calories in the form of fats, and the rest, (meaning a max of 15%), from proteins. Proteins are demonized together with fats as being harmful to ones health. That is how you have the whole population flinging itself onto carbs and cereals for years, and glutinous grains in particular, which are anything but healthy. There is usually an argument whenever a patient, under the care of this pseudo Mediterranean Diet, substitutes wheat pasta with buckwheat pasta; he or she is declared reckless and gullible by his or her own physician for daring to consider ordinary pasta, (and white and refined pasta at that), the cause of his or her problems. Yet, just so we understand each other, buckwheat pasta has the same amount of carbs as ordinary pasta but of a different quality, and when you hear the physician whose care you are under for your food regimen, and who often specializes in everything but nutrition, say that a diet without carbs is a health risk, you ask yourself: what do you mean, without carbs? Surely, that physician has never read the nutritional value of buckwheatotherwise he or she would not be making statements lacking any sort of knowledge in nutritional biology. Who is left picking up the bill, then? It is the poor patients who often find themselves almost forced to leave it to fate and flip a coin for advice on the right path to follow. Heads: Ill listen to the potbellied physician who suffers from diabetes. Tails: Ill try this new theory by this fit young physician who has resolved his own health issues simply by consuming specific categories of food.
What Was the True Mediterranean Diet?
Dear friends and readers, the true Mediterranean Diet dates back to the Greeks and the Romans, populations that shared the areas by the Mediterranean Sea. Surely, in those days, there was no physician on duty who recommended the proper food amounts each person needed to eat in order to maintain their ideal weight, or to optimize their health. People ate when they were hungry and, among the poorer echelons, whenever food was available. The cultivation of cereals existed back then too, but luckily for them, agriculture was not as intensive and the consumption of grains was limited to the period from July to December, (if there was a great harvest). For the rest of the year, peoples main meals were based on legumes and wild vegetables, and they ended with dry fruits/nuts. As for the dressing? Extra virgin olive oil.
Surely, breakfast did not consist of a cappuccino with a croissant on the side, nor did they drink warm milk with a tablespoon of sugar, and cookies! If those poor farmers had started their days with such a breakfast, they would not even have had the energy to lift the hoes onto their shoulders! Breakfast was usually at 9 in the morning, after having already put in 4 hours of work, and it was a savory breakfast based on legumes, eggs, and pieces of dry bread. As previously mentioned, because of the lack of flours, bread was not baked every day, but only on the weekend, and it was consumed in broken pieces as an accompaniment for legumes. If we take a look at the nutritional composition of legumes, we see that they contain three times the amount of proteins found in cereals while containing much fewer carbohydrates. Furthermore, they have a much different (and better) glycemic and insulin impacts compared to cereals.
The Romans and the Greeks were noted fishermen, and sheep-farming was very common as well, not to satiate milk-lovers but for the wool, a little bit of cheese, and meat (due to lack of pasteurization techniques, milk was not consumed all that often). The most widespread livestock species, then, were sheep and goats, not cattle; the latter were used as pack animals or for working in the fields.
As for fruit? Because of the lack of refrigeration, they could not preserve fruit all year. Fruit was consumed seasonally: apples and pears in September, persimmons in October and November. Then they waited for the warmer weather to start consuming apricots, strawberries, cherries, loquats, figs, etc. Certain fruits were dried so they could be eaten as sweets during festivities. I only wish that we would consume dried fruits as sweets today! Meanwhile, so-called barbarians actually ate only a few berries and nothing else. Nowadays, however, thanks to intensive cultivation, we eat fruit all year, in enormous quantities, including in the form of fruit juices. Fruit does not only mean fiber, vitamins and minerals, but also fructose, a sugar that is almost absent in green vegetables and that, when consumed in excess, becomes very dangerous for the liver, arteries and joints.
When it comes to the true Mediterranean Diet, the consumption of oily dry fruits (or nuts) during main meals as a second course or as a snack during working hours was very common, and they often substituted for bread or for other foods for long periods throughout the year.
The Discovery of America and the Death of the Mediterranean Diet
The year 1492 is a very important date, not only because of the discovery of this new land, but above all due to the ensuing consequences. The European colonists immediately understood the enormous potential to exploit this new territory: the flora and fauna were almost completely different compared to those of the Western world. The American food products we find on our tables today include:
Borlotti and cannellini beans, which, because of their yield, went on to substitute cowpeas, which then started to gradually go extinct;
Peanuts, which unfortunately partially substituted Mediterranean dry fruits/nuts;
Corn, which is used as the main ingredient in polenta;
Prickly pears;
Pineapples and other types of fruit;
Hot peppers, tomatoes, bell peppers, eggplants, and potatoes, which belong to the same plant family, the Solanaceae, (and we will see how they can cause serious problems for those who suffer from autoimmune diseases);
Chocolate/cocoa, which was consumed in its bitter state by the American Indians. Yet the Spanish deemed it better to mix it with sugar, thus giving rise to the chocolate that conquered all the cafes in Europe. (And speaking of sugar, it was the very expanse of American soil which led to the great sugarcane plantations and then allowed the spread of the sweet salt in all of Europe.)
As you may have come to understand, when nutritional experts recommend a healthy dish of pasta with tomato sauce, deeming it the perfect Mediterranean dish, you get a pretty good idea of how educated they are. I certainly would not even let them write me up a Saturday cheat-night menu.
I hope that, at this point, a question has sprung forth in your mind: But does the healthy Mediterranean Diet exist at all? My answer is that it is called the Mediterranean Diet solely because when you are eating your pasta with tomato sauce you may be eating it in Italy; if you were on an island in the Atlantic if would be the Atlantic Diet. Joking aside, alas, the Mediterranean Diet no longer exists, but that does not mean we cannot honestly revive it again, making sure not to back the idea that in the Mediterranean Diet, one must eat a little bit of everything. Lets just say that many experts love to be a little too egalitarian when it comes to food. I, on the other hand, love to improve peoples health, and if a particular food must be eliminated from a diet then it must be eliminated, period. Today, not even wheat is Mediterranean because of all the genetic selections that have taken place. Neither is milk, as its chemical composition totally changes because of pasteurization. Nor are many types of fruit, created by man through cross-breedinggenetic splices that would never occur in nature. What you eat every day is the fruit of human intelligence, which can think up of so much but seldom spares a thought to the unpleasant consequences that come with usurping Mother Natures place. Nature is very unforgiving.
Clinical Cases
G.B., a 36-year-old female with fibromyalgia treated with morphine and antidepressants. After 20 days on the Italian Reset Diet, she solved her illness and discontinued the drug treatments.
R.M., a 59-year-old female with hypertension, diabetes and migraines. After one month, she was able to control her blood sugar and blood pressure, and forgot about her migraines. After three months, she put aside all her medications, because all of her pathologies had disappeared. She lost 30 kg (approx. 66 lbs.) in five months.
S.R., a 44-year-old male, lost 25 kg (approx. 55 lbs.) in three months and returned to his ideal weight.
G.M., an 82-year-old male, successfully blocked his Parkinsons tremors in one month. Today, he is able to walk and to eat without the fear of dropping the spoon from his hand. He has also resolved his insomnia issues. His tremors reappear only when he reintroduces wheat and dairy, which are severely forbidden, in his diet.
CHAPTER 2
THE HORRORS OF COMMON DIETETICS
Premise
Macro- and micronutrients are the components of all foods. Macronutrients are all the components that, among their functions, also provide energy: fats, carbohydrates and proteins. Micronutrients are all the components that do not provide energy, such as vitamins and mineral salts; rather, they enable all metabolic processes to take place within our bodies. Your food intake is heavily centered on the abuse of macronutrients, especially carbohydrates, but is very lacking in vitamins and minerals. This means that while your organic machine draws its daily energy from macronutrients, it cannot use them effectively because of the lack of micronutrients, which also serve as the bodys organic sweepers. And so toxins accumulate, causing weight gain at first and the onset of pathologies later on.