Mediterranean diet has decayed - EU report

Malta should safeguard the Mediterranean diet, universally hailed as beneficial to health, and should not remain passive towards the way people are consuming food in this globalised world, said Maria Ellul, principal scientific officer in nutrition for the government.

It is in the best interest of Mediterranean countries to safeguard this diet - which is well established in the prevention of cardiovascular disease - in order to lead a healthier life and prevent higher financial burdens being imposed on health care systems, she said.

Ms Ellul, an officer within the Health Division's directorate general for public health regulation, was giving her analysis of the recently launched report called The EU Diet - Evolution, Evaluation and Impacts of the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), released by senior economist Josef Schmidhuber.

The report states that, over the last 40 years, the European diet has undergone fundamental change that often meant deterioration. This also applied to the Mediterranean diet that has "decayed into a moribund state" in its home area.

The report attributes the change in eating habits not only to people's increased income - leading to the consumption of more meats and fats - 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 have shifted to a much more sedentary lifestyle.

Commenting about this report, Ms Ellul said that, while the report said nothing new about the Mediterranean diet, it served as "yet another wake-up call" on the importance of this diet.

The diet consists typically of abundant food and vegetable intake, olive oil as the principal source of fat, fish and poultry consumed in low to moderate amounts and red meat consumed in low amounts.

"We already know that the Mediterranean diet has been adulterated," Ms Ellul said adding that Malta had been listed as not having a typical Mediterranean diet soon after British rule.

Nutritionists were also aware of the benefits of the diet that were primarily unveiled back in the 1960s through the research of American scientist Ancel Keys who changed the way the world perceived cholesterol and health disease.

Therefore, while the reports' claims - that the Mediterranean diet was deteriorating and that there was an increase of obesity in the EU - were known, she did not entirely agree with all reasons listed for the degeneration of the diet.

The issue ought to be examined at a much broader level, she said as she listed various aspects that had to be taken into consideration when examining the Mediterranean diet.

These included the history of the Mediterranean, agricultural resources, globalised food trade, the Mediterranean lifestyle, the tourist influx and mortality rates.

She believes the report, which delves deeply into the impacts of the EU's CAP (a system of EU agricultural subsidies and programmes), was relevant to food policy makers who faced the challenge of reviving the Mediterranean diet by ensuring that the healthier products were made more accessible to the consumer.