The Italian Reset Diet. Dario Polisano

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 patient’s 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 now—I 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 years—from 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 Keys’s 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 theory—the theory of the scale—which 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, Italy’s 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 one’s 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 buckwheat—otherwise 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: “I’ll listen to the potbellied physician who suffers from diabetes.” Tails: “I’ll 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, people’s 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