The Mediterranean Diet

So - hold your breath and get ready to hate me - I’ve been in Sicily for the past week. It’s nice there.  12th century palaces + awesome churches + beaches + wicked museums + remote volcanic islands for snorkeling + gelato for breakfast = best darn place I’ve been for a vacation in a while.

But I digress.  Italians eat a lot. Antipasti, pasta and then some seafood for dinner? I never left the table less than groaning - except for this one amazingly beautiful restaurant in the courtyard of this old wall/palace/ruin thing because their food was pretty and very very tiny. And also, I tried to order a green salad at one point and ended up with just HUGE bowl of lettuce, so I pretty much just gave up on vegetables that weren’t in pasta for the rest of the visit.

I never felt guilty, though. Every time I sat down to my steaming bowl of risotto with clams or spaghetti with mussels (look Anne! I am eating shellfish!) or entire leg-sized grilled squid, I kept on thinking - Mediterranean Diet! It’s all health food. Eat up! And have dessert why don’t you?

Sure we don’t really know if tomatoes fight cancer (and I don’t even have a prostate). And olive oil is great, but still a fat high in calories, and energy balance is the real silver bullet in many diseases such as cancer and heart disease. But pah! Happy people are healthy people.

But even if the people are healthy, the fish I was eating might not be. Mediterranean fisheries aren’t in a good way. Stocks are down in many species, especially tuna, and the WWF has reported that icky flame-retardant chemicals are building up in swordfish. And then there’s the whole turtle by-catch problem, for example, the endangered loggerhead turtle

So yeah. But you should still go.