A large study of populations was a major breakthrough in understanding how dietary habits of different groups of people are related to their degree of health. That's how the Mediterranean diet was "discovered". The Mediterranean diet is based on fresh produce, complex carbohydrates, dietary fiber, and monounsaturated fatty acids.
Awareness of the Mediterranean diet began in the 1950s, when Professor Ancel Keys embarked on a comparative survey of the diet of seven countries: Finland, Japan, Greece, Italy, Holland, USA and former Yugoslavia.
The resulting data, together with those of other researchers, clearly demonstrated that among the populations living in the Mediterranean, whose diet consists mainly of bread, pasta, fruits, vegetables, fish and food seasoned almost exclusively with olive oil, the death rate from ischemic cardiovascular diseases is much lower than in most North European countries such as Holland and Finland, where the staple diet consists mainly of foods of animal origin and saturated fat as found in milk and red meat.
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