The truth about the Mediterranean diet | ZOE Dailies with Christopher Gardner

hello and welcome to Zoe science and nutrition and our special daily series about diets each day this week we're examining one of the world's most popular diets putting the latest scientific evidence under the microscope we'll find out these diets true impact on your health I'm your host Jonathan wolf and I'll be joined throughout this series by Professor Christopher Gardner hello Christopher good to be here Jonathan Christopher is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and the director of nutrition studies at the prestigious Stanford prevention Research Center is is one of the world's leading researchers and how our diet impacts our health so what's on our plate today Christopher in episode 6 Jonathan we're taking a trip to the Mediterranean for [Music] lunch Christopher I definitely know this one you're talking about the Mediterranean diet right yes so we recently had on the show Professor Walter Willet from Harvard um and he's sort of widely hailed I think as sort of The Godfather of modern nutrition and he's been talking about the benefits of the Mediterranean diet for decades now but what exactly is the Mediterranean diet and I like to ask this of all Americans because I feel I visited lots of places in the Mediterranean and they seem to eat very different food if you're in Spain or Italy or you know somewhere like Morocco I I think this is an excellent question to ask and the answer is olive oil it is only olive oil eat whatever you want during the day and at night put a of olive oil next to your bedside gulp that down and in the morning you can claim your Mediterranean I feel that maybe there's a bit more to [Music] this hi I'm delighted that you're here to find out if eating the Mediterranean way can improve your heart health if you haven't already hit the Subscribe button and the bell to turn on notifications so you'll know whenever a new episode arrives this will really help us to continue our mission to improve the health of millions I don't think the average person could describe the Mediterranean diet to you we actually have several Mediterranean diet scores and you should eat more vegetables more fruits more beans more whole grains they have a a controversial one where they say you should have some alcohol not none and not a lot but you actually get dinged for having none which is quite controversial right now you get a point for eating moderately but you're supposed to cut back on uh meats and dairy but even the dairy part is controversial so as I find and I look through this I see some of the scores count Dairy against you whereas some say oh yogurt is Mediterranean and so what is the overarching idea of this which I guess is a bit in the name but help me to un understand what is the sort of the the concept of the Mediterranean diet it really is a whole food plant-based flexitarian diet so of all the names that you could give it Mediterranean sounds kind of sexy ah oh I I love the temperate climate and I love all the foods from all those different cultures uh it certainly includes fish uh and it probably includes modest amounts of meat but I actually some of my favorite descriptions of the Mediterranean diet are the lifestyle that goes with it which often doesn't get discussed so in some of the older data where they recognize that people on quote unquote Mediterranean diet had better health outcomes they were shepherds who walked miles each day tending their flocks and he took a siesta every afternoon for three hours it was hot Siesta every afterno I want a three-hour nap every day settle for 30 minutes Christopher so so really if you go back uh some of the original data were from the inhabitants of creit who did this and you know as as time has gone on it is one of the few diet patterns that actually has data they've actually randomly assigned thousands of people to this and tracked them for years and years and saw that it saved lives it saved hospital bills okay so that's amazing because it's very rare in nutrition science right that there are studies that actually intervene get people to change what they're eating and study this for long enough that you can sort of see long-term effects on like like the end health conditions like having a heart to tackle stroke because it's very very hard but you're saying in this case there actually that real hard data and and I have an underlying reason for this so it's fun it's tasty it's not low fat it's got avocados and fatty fish and nuts and seeds so I can imagine randomly assigning people to eat your usual diet or change to this Mediterranean diet which a lot of restaurants will serve and sounds good as opposed to I need need you to eat vegan or keto or some other restrictive diet where people aren't willing to sign up for that or if they are they're able to follow it for a short amount of time and you have you made an excellent point there there's a difference in these studies as to whether we're studying long-term Health outcomes or short-term impacts on risk factors which is actually what I do for a living I study blood cholesterol blood pressure blood glucose um insulin these are all things that you can change in your diet in weeks or months but the the real thing we're interested in is longterm health and to study that they have to follow it for years and years and years and years because you want to know do people live for many more healthy years so I guess by definition you got to wait for years to find out if that happens what if you lowered your cholesterol but died of misery or boredom or something right it's like yay I lowered my cholesterol but I hate life so Mediterranean is sort of indulgent if you think of the things that come from the cultures that practice this so-called mediteran di but you are you're right I'm sure it's different in Morocco and France and Italy and Greece it is not one diet but it it does have this theme it's a whole food plant-based diet so I think people listening will be like okay that sounds really interesting I'm still completely confused about what it is um maybe you could contrast it with for example like the typical American or or British diet which are quite similar what's the difference between that if you were switching to a Mediterranean diet what would you be what would you would you be doing so I actually think the best contrast is with this low-fat diet that has been so pervasive for so long the Mediterranean diet by the time you get the fatty fish and the avocados and the nuts and the seeds and olive oil poured liberally all over your salad is 40% fat or more okay so it's quite a lot of fat in that diet quite a lot of fat and in fact we did this study of ketogenic versus Mediterranean diet and it was a lot of fun we actually got the Mediterranean diet up to about 50% fat and fat feels good in your mouth it tastes good but it's unsaturated fat and so when we get back to that sort of misunderstanding of the lowfat message it was always trying to get to low saturated fat Mediterranean diet is a low saturated fat High unsaturated Whole Food plant-based diet so you are there's not much meat in the Mediterranean diet yeah when you look at the scores for Mediterranean diet you get dinged for meat and livestock and um processed meats and things like that yep so it's again not necessarily as I understand it completely excluding meat you could eat a Mediterranean diet with some meat but somehow this is the sort of once a week or something rather than the three times a day or it would be a smaller portion so it's not a steak or a pork chop or roast beef at the center of the plate with some vegetables and starch on the side so it's like a Mediterranean salad with Greek cheese on it or it's an eggplant musaka or I there just great wonderful sounding names and so you might actually be having meet quite a few times a week but it's just it's sort of on the side rather than like a large piece of meat with a little bit it's one of the ingredients in here so you've added some fish or you've added a small amount of lamb or you've added so what else would be the difference as you shift from like this lowfat diet to um a Mediterranean diet really the main focus for me is Whole Foods okay I know whole food doesn't make any sense so really what we mean is yeah those bakeries that you would have bread where you would go to the bakery every day you wouldn't get this white Wonderbread that will last forever on the market because it would go bad they they sort of took out all the things that would have perished on the Shelf so it'll stay there forever no no no this has some oils in it this has some nuts and and whole grains in it yeah that would go bad and the bugs would eat them if you left them out on the Shelf because we expect you to buy this food and eat it soon it's fresher it is perishable uh yeah and it really is just these cultures you know for centuries had those kind of foods they're just built on thousands of years of wisdom and they taste great and sound great and you talked about sort of whole grain could you help people to understand a little bit I think you've explained the fat side of this what would it mean for sort of the sort of carbohydrates on your plate yeah so uh especially in the US for grains we eat mostly wheat and refined wheat so what about Millet and quinoa and barley and farro and there's a whole lot of grains where you can make a grain-based salad or a grain-based dish put vegetables and nuts and seeds and maybe some fish or some yogurt with it so the whole grain would be not the flow that's all pulverized it would be the as it grew as you were agriculturally growing this crop and you harvested it eat the whole grain before you powderize it and grind it to a pulp it's interesting I was in um Athens early uh in this year which is where my co-founder George is is from and I was struck by a couple of things it's obviously definitely a Heartland of the Mediterranean um first thing is sort of how many beans they eat as part of their sort of traditional dishes which is something that in the states and the UK we're really not used to we've like really pushed it to to the side and the other thing is the enormous amount of olive oil that they put on everything yes uh so yeah very liberally putting on olive oil and other oils so I don't want to overhype the olive oil I think most oils are fine as long as you're not just drinking them right you're cooking with them and seasoning with them the beans I'd love to build on that beans are so underappreciated in the US so many cultures have a diet based on grains and beans because they are their storage capacity is really great you dry the grains and the beans they're packed with nutrients they're packed with fiber they're inexpensive as a whole so they're really good at feeding populations that might not have all the resources for fancy food so beans are very much underappreciated and so many types of beans kidneys and chickpeas and lentils and pulses like the overall name is legumes I don't know about in the UK but nobody in the US says legumes like they nobody says leg I mean like honestly I have no idea what legume is but legum is a overarching name that covers soybeans and peas and lentils and pulses and garbanzo beans which technically botanically are all different uh subcategories of legumes so Christopher what happens in your body if you switch from this traditional us or UK diet to the Mediterranean diet and and why You' seen those benefits in in your heart for example as a result well I think the biggest deal which honestly isn't played up that much but it was in the study that we did of Keto versus Mediterranean we actually called It Mediterranean plus diet our main emphasis was getting rid of added sugars and refined grains well and that's in the US that's 40% of our calories so here's some math that I would love to share on this question so picture that 60% of your calories is some combination of three types of fat saturated mono and poly let's say 10 each and then you're getting 10% of your calories as they do in the yes from good carbohydrates and 10 roughly from each of animal and plant protein that adds up to 60 40 left is added sugars and refined grain 40% of people's calorie intake is from like added sugar just crap added on top of something else it's from crap and so this is like Ultra processed and so as soon as you eliminate those 40% of calories that would be a low carb diet because it was all carbs refined grain and added sugars so this is the way I would love to frame it so what if you replaced all of those with beans and veggies and plants you would have a very lowfat diet because you replaced the crappy carbs with good carbs I don't most people can't eat that many calories from Beans and vegetables it's it's very bulky so you got the low carb people would say oh all of that should have been fat please move all 40% over to fatty things and that's pretty hard too unless you're were going to eat meat that would be a lot of avocados a lot of nuts and seeds a lot of fatty fish and so what's going on inside your body as you when you make that shift that is actually delivering these health benefits so I still think our major problem is uh too much simple carbohydrate that gets delivered too quickly to the bloodstream which causes too much of a spike in insulin so this is like blood sugar jumping in your blood sugar monitoring these now with the continuous glucose monitors that I know Zoe has has based a lot of their studies on which is just fascinating that we're learning about the time sequence of what you're absorbing from your diet going into your blood and being put away and this Mediterranean diet because it's fewer added sugars and refined grains and fewer carbs in total because you've got more fat is really going to slow all that down so what are the possible challenges for someone saying well that's the first one Christopher that you sound like you're quite like what are the possible challenges with with trying to adapt adopt this diet so it it is a whole food diet and it requires some cooking uh I know a lot of people don't cook don't shop order out I will say there's lots of people making this like if you want to go out and find mediteran there's certainly plenty of restaurants and plenty of food food delivery services that provide this it takes more time to cook like that at home it's easier to cook at home in some of these other ways the downside with the Mediterranean is it's got enough flexibility that some people are going to be confused is this Mediterranean or not am I I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing I I read this recipe so I don't think there's many downsides to it other than getting overfocused on olive oil or just not being sure exactly what meets that category I mean one of the things that we see with um you know sort of the thousands of people who are starting the um as Zoe members and starting on their program each week is that for many of them it's complicated to understand how to go from what they're eating now because people eat in so many different ways right if we were to just you know talk to everybody who's listening right now there is this extraordinary diversity of the way that we all are used to eat understanding how to change and make steps for you to get to something much healthier is a lot harder with what you've just described which I think for most people is is quite close to the um uh you know the core principles that they're likely to to end up with than just saying you know cut out all fat or cut out all carbs right that's like very count your calories it's very simple whereas what you're describing I think is more complicated um and so I think there is a real challenge for for people and it's one of the reasons we do this podcast over a lot of time to help people to understand more about how they might adjust you know many aspects of their life to improve their health it is very consistent with a separate paper we wrote for ketogenic versus Mediterranean diet study it was just on adherence like how do we measure adherence and we had constructed the Mediterranean diet to be similar to what a normal score would be plus less added sugar and refined grain so we actually called It Mediterranean plus and ketogenic we had a well formulated ketogenic diet and so for some of these scores the Mediterranean folks were doing not as well as the keto folks and as we looked into this more closely said ah keto was just eating low carb they got a lot of points for eating low carb Mediterranean they were supposed to hit higher fat uh more legumes more whole grains more and we recognized pretty soon that that was a lot of categories they were supposed to hit every single day to be on this Mediterranean diet plus so much to your point yeah there there's there's many more goals and targets to hit it once so that as you're transitioning yes I nailed the beans one oh I forgot the whole grains yes I nailed the olive oil but I left this other one out it would take time which is fine I think listeners should allow themselves some slack here and say I'm learning about the olive oil I'm learning about the beans I'm learning about the whole grains I don't have to do it all at once I enjoy this I enjoy that I'm going to give myself months to figure out what this is and I'm going to appreciate all the different options I have and now I'm more comfortable with the whole packet it's not an easy thing that you can figure out for tomorrow I totally agree and I think I would just add we were talking about this um you know just just before recording that it can be really hard if you're going shopping you know in the grocery store to understand what to buy because so much of the food that we have today has all of these labels that these big manufacturers are putting on it which you know basically are deceitful like you they say in great big letters you know low fat and they don't mention like all the things they've done to this food or um you know how much uh of the food that um is on the the shelves actually is you know very highly processed Ultra processed but that's not very visible and so it's you know I think quite hard for something like um this diet that you're describing to figure out okay well is this the like Ultra processed highly added sugars that you're describing Christopher or actually is this the whole grain because there's a lot of things sadly that are pretending to be healthier than they are true yeah and and I know Shoppers want to simple thing they'd like to be able to go to the store and say on the label I saw that that sign that symbol and it meets my criteria we we don't have a the Mediterranean diet symbol because there's so many different ways you could meet it and so sorry it's not as easy to identify until you adapt it and embrace it and enjoy it well it's definitely something that uh I want us to be able to solve uh in the future but but I think that is I think we should recognize one of the the challenges that's the challenge so Christopher what's your verdict on the Mediterranean diet double thumbs up and I'm again you might miss interpret it and think it's just olive oil but get past that and go ahead and take your afternoon Siesta if you have the chance and go out and walk your flock of sheep but if you can't do that go out for a a walk because it's part of a Mediterranean lifestyle it's like get outside have some exercise get enough sleep and eat well Whole Food plant-based diet with enough room for some animal Foods you could include or exclude brilliant well I'm excited tomorrow to bring all of this together in uh our normal long form I'm excited too thank you Christopher all right thank you Christopher for our journey through the Mediterranean diet part of our special series of daily episodes about diets and our health I'm Jonathan wolf and I'm Christopher Gardner join us tomorrow for our regular weekly full length episode of Zoe science and nutrition where we'll be rounding up our analysis of diets and delivering our verdict on the healthiest diet to follow as always the Zoe science and nutrition podcast is not medical advice it's for General informational purposes only see you next time

Channel: ZOE

Views: 53,843

Keywords: zoe, zoe podcast, gut health, ultra processed foods, tim spector, jessie inchauspe, gut health diet, ultra processed foods documentary, ultra processed food, chris gardner, christopher gardner, you are what you eat, you are what you eat netflix

Id: owL3YA1RYkU

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024