You’ve no doubt heard about the heart-healthy, disease-fighting, longevity-promoting virtues of the Mediterranean diet.
Health experts love it because it’s simple and flexible, unlike complex and restrictive diets like Whole30 and keto. On a Med diet, all you have to do is focus on eating lean proteins (especially seafood and poultry), with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, unsaturated fats, and a little wine if you’d like. Even the name itself conjures images of lazily nibbling olives off a patio table behind a cliffside villa. This isn’t a diet—this is a lifestyle.
Except that some dietitians are now criticizing that very image. The Med diet is, and has always been, narrowly defined. And as any glance at a map will tell you, the region extends beyond Greece and Italy—it’s a vast swath of land consisting of 22 countries including Tunisia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Syria, and . To exclude those cultures from our definition of the Med diet, even implicitly, discourages the consumption of a wide
