No Sugar - Coating For This Advice

For nearly three decades, the American scientist Ancel Keys spent half of each year in Pioppi, Italy — considered to be the birthplace of the Mediterranean diet. Dr Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist, low-carbohydrate diet advocate, and straight-talking health campaigner, visited this picturesque town to film a documentary and research his book The Pioppi Diet. Louise Wates found out why

- Louise Wates

The Mediterranean diet is synonymous with good health; so much so that you may have seen those adverts for butter replacement olive oil spreads depicting active, saucy, pensioners in Mediterranean style backdrops, who are all active and saucy because of their diet. The evidence is there, too; a five-year study, published in 2013 and funded by the Spanish government, found that people who followed a Mediterranean diet supplemented with either extra-virgin olive oil or mixed nuts were around 30 per cent less likely to have had a heart attack or stroke, or to have died from one.

It is this very study that the NHS cites as it advises making our diet more “Mediterranean style” by eating “plenty of starchy foods, such as bread and pasta”; plenty of fruit and vegetables; some fish; less meat; and choosing products made from vegetable and plant oils, such as olive oil. 1 But cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra doesn’t entirely agree. In 2017, Malhotra’s book, The Pioppi Diet. A 21-Day Lifestyle Plan, written with film maker Donal O’Neill, was published by Penguin. And apart from proposing its own Mediterranean-style diet and lifestyle plan, it also unpicked some of the entrenched assumptions about the Mediterranean diet, and chronicled how a complete lifestyle incorporating diet, movement, and social interaction had morphed into the low-fat, starchy carbohydrate recommendations that have dominated health guidelines for the last four decades.

Unpicking conventions

There are many aspects of the Mediterranean diet that The Pioppi Diet picks apart, including the scientific assumptions upon which it is based, but starchy carbohydrates are one of Malhotra’s biggest bugbears.