Ancel Keys, the American physiologist who first named the "Mediterranean diet" in the 1950s, did not arrive in Italy with a hypothesis. He arrived with a question: why were the men of southern Italy living longer than the men of Minnesota, despite — apparently — eating more bread and drinking more wine?
His answer, after decades of work, was that they were not eating less. They were eating differently. Vegetables, legumes, whole grains, fish, olive oil, fruit, nuts, a little cheese and yogurt, almost no red meat, modest amounts of wine with meals. And — crucially — they were eating together, slowly, almost always at a real table.
The diet industry took this and stripped out everything except the food list. The result is the supplement-aisle version of the Mediterranean diet: olive oil capsules, fish-oil pills, low-fat Greek yogurt, and a sense that you are failing because your weekday lunch is not photogenic enough.
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