Mediterranean Diet vs Ghanaian Diet

2007 Words5 Pages

Mediterranean diet has been known to be the healthiest diet in world for the past years. Medical doctors and nutritionist recommend Mediterranean diets to their patients. This perception and attitude has led to the devaluation of other regional foods which upon further investigation may be if not more, equally healthy like the Mediterranean diet. An example of such situation is my regional diet- the Ghanaian diet. This article is therefore to prove that my regional diet is equally nutritious, accessible and even more economical than the Mediterranean diet using Greece as my target in the Mediterranean region. I will begin this article with a brief history of the whole idea of Mediterranean diet. Then proceed to do my analysis on both diets on the basis of nutritional value, accessibility and affordability or economics.
The term Mediterranean diet refers to dietary patterns found in olive-growing areas of the Mediterranean region. (Antonia Trichopoulou and Pagona Lagion, 2009). Mediterranean diet is based on food patterns typical of Crete, much of the rest of Greece, and southern Italy in the early 1960s, where adult life expectancy were among the highest in the world and rates of coronary heart disease, certain cancers, and other diet-related chronic diseases were among the lowest in the world. (W. C. Willet, 1995). Over 60 years ago scientist began studying the healthiest modern population. A nutritionist named Ansel Keys noted that men who lived in the mountains of Crete and ate a traditional Cretan diet had low rates of heart disease and cancer and lived to a very old age. So he designed a 15-year, seven-nation study to investigate how different regional diets affected disease rates and mortality. He looked at Greece (Crete), ...

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