From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet#History_and_reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet#History_and... > The c

From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet#History_and_reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet#History_and... > The concept of a Mediterranean diet was developed to reflect "food patterns typical of Crete, much of the rest of Greece, and Italy in the early 1960s".[43] Although it was first publicized in 1975 by the American biologist Ancel Keys and chemist Margaret Keys (a husband and wife team),[56] the Mediterranean diet failed to gain widespread recognition until the 1990s. Objective data showing that the Mediterranean diet is healthy originated from results of epidemiological studies in Naples and Madrid,[57] confirmed later by the Seven Countries Study first published in 1970,[58] and a book-length report in 1980.[59] > The most commonly understood version of the Mediterranean diet was presented, among others, by Walter Willett and colleagues of Harvard University's School of Public Health since the mid-1990s.[60][61][62][63] The Mediterranean diet is based on a paradox: although the people living in Mediterranean countries tend to consume relatively high amounts of fat, they have far lower rates of cardiovascular disease than in countries like the United States where similar levels of fat consumption are found. Comparing Americans with Italians and Cretans of the 1960's has so many confounding factors. For one thing, the Cretans and most Italians would have lived in villages and small towns and would have been predominantly farmers engaged in physical work (and so exercise) whereas most Americans of the '60s would live urban lives in large cities and not exercised a lot. I don't know if any research attempted to account for this difference in life styles, but diet can't have been the only factor that affected relative cardiovascular health.