I've often wondered if the whole Olive Oil/Mediterranean Diet thing is a myth - possibly like all good myths one with a grain of truth somewhere.

Yeah, if you eat it by the shedload. Especially when you are already on a rich diet.

Whole grain rice, not so bad, but not so good either. Just look at what you are evolved to eat. Were you evolved to eat cereals? I don't think so.

Plus, modern cereals bear little comparison to the grains available to our early forbears. They were skinny little things found in small amounts. Today, like us they are fat and stuffed with calories.

No, I was talking about breakfast cereals, not "cereals" in terms of the foodstuff.

Re, olive oil, it only starts to become bad for your health once you have reheated it for the 4th-5th time. So may be bad for you if you go to a badly maintained restaurant that does a lot of deep frying and doesnt change its oil often enough.

It was suggested that it also had to do with the level of family support such people had.

What about pasta then? The point I am trying to make is that most of the world's staple diet is cereal based in the form of rice, bread, pasta and so on and has been for thousands of years.

The average lifespan in the developed world has, up until now at least, been getting longer and longer so there can't be that much wrong with what we have been eating for the last few decades which has obviously included cereal based foods and red meat.

IMO pasta is shit, a vile slop hardly better than breakfast cereals.

You are missing a point here. If you are on short rations, grain based carbs are a life saver. Once you get to be well fed, they become a menace.

Obesity has always been a problem for those rich enough to have more food than they need.

It is quite possible that part of our evolution since we moved on from being plains apes, and started farming, has been an increased tolerance to higher levels of refined carbs.

We are still vulnerable tho.

Also possibly vitamin D levels from sunshine.

Yeah, that makes sense too. There's almost certainly several elements.

Quite right. It's the refining of the foods that we do that causes the problems.
And as for fats. They are very good for us.
The 3 secrets of French cookery. Butter, Butter and er Butter!
Throw away the bread and eat the butter! I know there'll be loads of people who disagree with that but how often do you meat a fat Frenchman?

Thankfully never.

I always have me porridge in the sun on the terrace.

.

The point is;

How often do you meat a fat Frenchman, and do you mean meat in the biblical sense?

Zero fat diet foods are for people who can't think.

Yep - I'm with you there Bill, the amount of carbs we eat, especially high-refined dense carbs, causes a whole range of metabolic problems in many people. We discussed this recently on another thread.

http://britishexpats.com/forum/showt...62#post9085062