--- description: Half a century ago, a little town in southern Italy taught the world how to eat. The town is under culinary siege, but the diet endures title: Eat like an Italian image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd22525fa2321936e/698a44c6db2987f28d269d46/360_cmediterranean_0220.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [World](/section/world/) # Eat like an Italian by [Stephan Faris](/author/stephan-faris/) Feb 20, 2012 5:00 AM CUT  Fresh herbs and veggies aren't just tasty: they're lifesavers Fresh herbs and veggies aren't just tasty: they're lifesaversGrant Cornett for TIME by [Stephan Faris](/author/stephan-faris/) Feb 20, 2012 5:00 AM CUT In the fall of 1957, a Minnesota doctor named Ancel Keys traveled from Naples to the southern Italian town of Nicotera. The road was long and dusty, winding for hours into the mountainous toe of the Italian boot. But the trip was worth it. Keys, a physiologist who had spent World War II developing combat food rations, was searching for the answer to one of the great questions of healthy living: Why did heart attacks plague some groups of people (say, Minnesota businessmen) while leaving others (southern Italian farmers, for instance) nearly untouched? Keys spent his stay in Nicotera measuring body-fat and cholesterol levels, gathering the first data for a global comparison of eating habits that enshrined the Mediterranean diet as the gold standard for a healthy menu. In subsequent visits, Keys and his colleagues weighed the villagers’ meals and recorded their contents, showing up unannounced to ensure that what the locals were eating when the scientists arrived was what they normally ate. “Without asking permission, they would open the door and walk into the kitchen,” recalls Pasquale Barbalace, 76, a resident of Nicotera who participated in the study as a young man. The unusual methods helped yield remarkable results. Compared with people in other countries, those in Italy who followed a diet rich in vegetables, legumes and olive oil were 30% to 40% less likely to suffer heart disease than those who consumed heavy quantities of red meat, milk and cheese. Keys’ findings spread fast, but as I discovered when I visited Nicotera last year, the Mediterranean diet could be slipping away. Fifty years of rising incomes, globalization and rapidly changing lifestyles have introduced unhealthy foods to a once healthy place, triggering an obesity epidemic that rivals that of the U.S. “The diet is in crisis,” says Barbalace, who runs the Observatory of the Mediterranean Diet, a historical and preservation society in Nicotera. “Today, we eat like Americans.” Indeed, Keys might not recognize where he was if he burst into the typical Nicoteran kitchen today. Gone are the whole-wheat bread baked in a wood-fire stove, the beans slow-cooked in a clay amphora and garnished with herbs picked from the fields that morning. Also absent are the frequent servings of fresh vegetables, dried fruits and nuts. There’s still plenty of olive oil, but with it come large quantities of whole milk, cheese, eggs and meat, not to mention junk food. The Mediterranean diet, it turns out, was a product of poverty. The farmers who trudged into the fields led lives of exertion. Their diet was healthy, but it was a menu of privation. “There was misery,” says Alfonso Melchi, 70, a truck driver from Nicotera who participated in the 1957 survey. As cheap, plentiful food became available, morning markets gave way to grocery stores, and carefully husbanded calories were replaced by cheese-covered dishes and slabs of beef. At the same time, Mediterranean lifestyles became more sedentary. Cars, remote controls, video games and long days at the office have dramatically cut the amount of time people spend in physical activity. And with women joining the workforce, there’s nobody in the kitchen to prepare a home-cooked meal. Paolo Rao, 59, a school janitor who participated in Keys’ study, remembers dinners of vegetables and lunches of homemade bread and dried figs. “Now my grandkids just eat fish sticks,” he says. According to the International Association for the Study of Obesity, 36% of Italian children ages 8 and 9 are overweight or obese; it’s one of the highest levels in Europe, rivaling the U.S.’s. Greece and Spain are not far behind. Making things worse is the fact that even if Italians wanted to go back to the old ways, it wouldn’t be so easy. Italy’s new eating habits have altered the country’s production chain as small farms have been replaced with industrial operations that cater primarily to supermarkets, where shelf life and appearance are valued over nutritional content. Sound familiar? Italy’s culture has been so transformed that nutritionists have to tread carefully when promoting healthy eating, since it’s a whole new thing to some people. Over the past several years, Rome’s school system has revolutionized its cafeterias, replacing prepackaged meals with food that is organic, locally grown and cooked on location. But it stopped short of a broad swerve toward a true Mediterranean diet for fear of angry reactions if it stopped offering daily servings of meat. “We’d get accused of scrimping,” says Paolo Agostini, a consultant for the program. “To introduce a real Mediterranean diet, you’d need to really push education–not just to the kids but to parents and teachers too.” That would be an investment worth making. The original Mediterranean diet may have been born of economic necessity, but it turns out that it’s even healthier than Keys believed it was. Nutritionists continue to uncover the benefits of a menu rich in fiber, olive oil, fruits and vegetables. According to Laura Di Renzo, a nutritionist at Rome’s Tor Vergata University, the Mediterranean diet is more effective than a low-fat diet at minimizing heart attacks and strokes and better than a reduced-carbohydrate diet at cutting the risk of diabetes. It also helps combat colon, prostate and breast cancer and aids in the prevention of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. If Italy chooses to fight its way back toward a healthier style of eating, it will have advantages most other countries don’t: a culture that venerates food and a generation that remembers the way things were. Italy’s current economic woes make it even more important that the country wake up to the wisdom of such Old World dining. “It’s not just a health crisis. It’s also a financial crisis,” says Antonino De Lorenzo, president of the National Institute for the Mediterranean Diet and Nutrigenomics. “Since we have health care that guarantees service for everyone, there will be higher costs.” For Keys, the diet worked well. He died in 2004, two months shy of his 101st birthday. Following his dietary example requires little more than deciding to eat one of the tastiest, freshest and most satisfying menus ever developed. As resolutions go, that’s an easy one to keep. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6641158/eat-like-an-italian/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6641158/eat-like-an-italian/"},"headline":"Eat like an Italian","datePublished":"2012-02-20T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-26T16:17:50.537Z","description":"Half a century ago, a little town in southern Italy taught the world how to eat. 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