July 1993: This Mediterranean Diet and Olive Oil Thing

                                                                                                                                                       tetxu

 

Nine days I’m in Italy, one of 30 guests of the International Olive Oil Council. It has arranged a comprehensive program supporting the virtues of olive oil: a symposium on olive oil, a tour of restaurants and olive groves that will introduce us to the merits of olive oil and the delights of the Mediterranean diet.

In Capri at the Hotel Quisisana, we observe cooking demonstrations on the hotel patio timed, unfortunately, to coincide with a coffee break for people attending a different meeting: Conferenza Internazionale Sulla Dieta Mediterranean (it appears the Mediterranean diet is hip). We mingle, weaving in and out of our mingling trying to get closer to the cooking demos. Mind you, as we mingle, we do not socialize with the other group: it would be improper, don’t you agree, to barge in on another’s conference without having paid its registration fee. However, what results from this co-mingling of coffee-break and cooking demo, renders our demo—its ways and means translated into English—indiscernible. Observing the confusion, one person remarks, “It is no wonder the Italians lost the war.”


                                                                                                         Axel Alvarez

The well-intentioned demo is to point out that it’s really OK to substitute olive oil for butter when baking pastries; that it’s OK to substitute olive oil, period, for butter or anything else. A New York foodie with a passion for pastries, samples several sweets and says, “Really pretty good. If that’s what I must put up with to lower my cholesterol, so be it.”

 

Rose Levy Beranbaum, a respected and wildly-successful author of, among others, the best-selling Cake Bible (left) cookbook disagrees. She tells me that the demo maven has offered to edit her cookbook, substituting the appropriate amounts of olive oil for butter. “Why would I want to do something like that?” she asks. She stops short of sacrilege. Had she not—who knows?—an olive oil bigshot might have banished her from the conference. 

That afternoon, we listen to speakers talk of the attributes of olive oil and the Mediterranean diet. “How is it,” says Prof. Dimitrios Trichopoulos, M.D., Dept. of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, “that people in Mediterranean countries who don’t exercise, smoke too much, and have access only to sub-optimal [his word, not mine] healthcare, live long and healthy lives and have a lower incidence of coronary heart disease?” Must be the olive oil, right? “Well,” says Trichopoulos, “the evidence isn’t conclusive, but there seems to be a corollary between the consumption of olive oil and a reduction in heart problems.”

Excuse me, Professor, but before I bite I want conclusive evidence. I’ve listened to and read lots of analyses of and reports on diet and nutrition and the effects of mono- and polyunsaturates on good and bad cholesterol and warnings about high blood pressure and fatty glucose. And, guess what? The more I sub-optimally absorb, the more convinced I am that a lot of questions linger out there begging to be answered.

Trichopoulos’s wife—less a shill than her husband—also spoke at the conference. She’s with the Athens School of Public Health. She said that the Mediterranean diet is not defensible. No kidding. There were, she was forced to admit, contradictions. For example: the Greek diet is high in fat, but the diet in southern Italy is low in fat, high in complex carbohydrates; yet both regions, “have a low occurrence of heart disease and several cancers.” And, say I sotto voce, lots of them smoke.

At a dinner at a fancy restaurant, butter suddenly appears, and then, just as suddenly is whisked away, as if the restaurant had committed an unspeakable impropriety.

Seafood pasta: a Med-diet staple.

OK, OK: given the sponsorship of the tour, I didn’t press my luck. I really wanted to taste butter churned in Italy, but thought better of it. I reminded myself this was a Mediterranean diet adventure, sponsored by the olive oil people and I wasn’t about to challenge its intent, even though a day later we sat down to a meal of Italian peasant food that not only was incredibly flavorful, but ignored, in the cooking and preparation of it, every Med diet rule. But, then again, to echo Mrs. Tricopoulos, the Med diet was not defensible.

I agree: it’s a pleasant enough dining diversion (trendy, too, let’s admit) to dip bread into a saucer splashed with olive oil. Just as pleasant a diversion, I’ll insist, to slather butter or a butter substitute (horrors) on a slice of bread, no matter its carb or fat content.

Moderation in all things, defensible or not. Hippocrates, a Greek, said that.

I laugh a lot. Whatever wisdom I dispense in what passes for my columns/essays, I try to lace with a wit some of you find amusing, others trying. The point? I think wit, humor, jest is healthy; as healthy as olive oil. I don’t think I’d survive without it.

Which is why, midway through the tour while drinking red wine with wonderful breads and buffalo mozzarella, I argued thus: The appreciation of the Mediterranean diet seems to me (correct me if I’m wrong) to be based solely on the consumption of nutritious foods that include ingredients such as olive oil, tomatoes, bread, cheese, wine, etc. Why has no one considered how lifestyle (laughter, anyone?), heredity, culture, gender, emotional stability, mental health, and stress affected the physical well-being of people living in countries that border the shores of the Mediterranean?

At JFK, after clearing Customs with my box of olive oils, compliments of the tour, I head for the Delta terminal and my connecting flight. At the gate, a businessman is pacing back and forth in front of the check-in counter. He is not happy. It appears he is having some difficulty with his reservation. He is screaming at the top of his lungs. “I want everyone to know that Diana Gruber [not her real name] is a mean spirited, black hearted, inconsiderate, and rude person who refuses to talk to me and should not be in the employ of this airline.”

The Mediterranean diet is not defensible. This is: guzzling quarts of olive oil weekly would never help that man live a long and happy life.
Seafood pasta: Andrey Starostin