I’m still researching and pondering the ins and outs of the Mediterranean Diet. One of the handiest visual representations I’ve found is at Oldways (in PDF or JPG format) which gives—much like the more-familiar, government-issue food pyramid—a sense of the proportions of various food types. Laying it out in a list instead, we come up with:

Daily

in order of decreasing proportion

• Bread, Pasta, Rice, Couscous, Polenta, Other Whole Grains, and Potatoes
• Fruits
• Beans, Legumes, and Nuts
• Vegetables
• Olive Oil and Other Plant Oils
• Cheese & Yogurt

also important

• Daily Physical Activity
• 6-8 glasses of water
• Wine in moderation

Weekly

• Fish
• Poultry
• Eggs
• Sweets

Monthly

• Red Meat

What does this actually look like?

That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Americans I think are programmed to expect meat, whether poultry, pork, or beef, at every meal (witness the old “meat and potatoes” cliché), unless the meal is “light” or skipped altogether. So there’s a kind of reprogramming that needs to take place when it comes to those weekly items.

To wrap my head around it, I started thinking of those four as individual “meals”, or at least the first three items, leaving out the sweets for now. So, one meal with fish as a main course, one with chicken or turkey, and one with eggs. If those were dinner entrees, say, that would leave four other dinners with non-meat entrees (assuming this wasn’t one of the weeks with red meat).

Proportions

But then I came to realize this particular chart didn’t mean itself to be taken the way I was looking at it. The proportions were the thing being measured, not the individual items themselves.

So it’s not a bad thing to have either poultry or fish a couple of times a week, or to use smaller portions of those items per meal, incorporated into other dishes. And it’s not “red meat once per month,” but that much red meat in that proportion, relative to the rest of the pyramid, during a month’s time. That makes much more sense to me now.

Protein

What this does leave is finding other good sources of protein, and there are plenty to be had in the “Daily” list. Plenty of fat, as well, but not necessarily the unhealthful kind.

Menus

What this also means is that I need to keep looking for visualizations of the diet, but perhaps by coming up with a week’s worth of daily menus, or maybe even a fortnight’s worth that could be mixed and matched randomly for the second half of the month.

More to come.