The Mediterranean Diet has become popular as it does not deprive you as other diets can. This plan includes fat, grains, and even wine, so it is an easier diet to stick to. However, it does focus on choosing whole grains and healthy fats mostly from fish, nuts and olive oil, and includes large quantities of vegetables and fruits. This diet also features a regular amount of cheese, yogurt and seafood and only small amounts of other proteins.
Benefits
As well as for being a convenient and well-balanced diet, the Mediterrenean Diet is popular due to its many health benefits. These benefits include lowering a person's risk for heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. The Women's Heart Foundation shows that the populations who eat this diet in Crete and Greece generally live longer, healthier lives than Americans.
Breakfast
For breakfast, Martha Shulman, author of the "Mediterranean Light" cookbook, suggests whole-wheat bread with fruit and yogurt, whole-grain cereal with low-fat milk and fruit, and once in a while, eggs with bread and fruit. The Oldways Non-Profit recommends adding vegetables to traditional breakfast menus. They suggest adding shredded zucchini or carrots to pancake batter and ingredients such as feta cheese, onions and peppers to eggs.
Lunch
For lunch, you could add an abundance of healthy vegetables to dishes of soups, salads, or pizzas. Shulman makes salads with tomatoes, chick peas, and other varieties of vegetables. She creates soups from seafood, such as sea bass or mussels, or makes vegetable soups. She makes homemade pizza from whole-wheat crust and adds toppings of vegetables instead of cheese. All of these dishes are seasoned with Mediterranean flavors of lemon, olive oil, parsley, basil, garlic and feta cheese.
Dinner
Dinner is the perfect time to add more seafood to your meals in order to follow the Mediterranean Diet. Oldways recommends trying fillets of mild fish, such as cod, mahi-mahi or tilapia, if you are not used to fish. Add fish to pasta or brown rice, with a side of mixed vegetables. Cook the meal with olive oil instead of butter. You can also have small amounts of red wine with dinner, as red wine is part of the diet. The Mayo Clinic suggests having grape juice instead if you do not or should not drink alcohol.
Snacks
The Oldways Non-Profit suggests making a snack of trail mix, using a combination of whole-grain cereal, nuts and dried fruits. Mediterranean cuisine also offers a number of healthy dips that can be ideal as snacks, such as hummus, baba ghannouj and tzakziki, according to Oldways. You can dip vegetables or breads into these dips. Oldways also suggests olives and sliced up fruit as healthy snacks. For desserts, Shulman creates many healthy desserts out of fruit, with whole-grains, honey and Greek yogurt as toppings.
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