One of the most talked about and recommended diets right now is the so called "Mediterranean Diet" but the hype might be wrong.

This Mediterranean diet study was hugely impactful. The science just fell apart.

"The million-dollar question in nutrition science is this: What should we eat to live a long and healthy life? Researchers’ answers to this question have often been contradictory and confusing. But in recent decades, one diet has attracted the lion’s share of research dollars and public attention: the Mediterranean way of eating. And in 2013, its scientific cred was secured with PREDIMED, one of the most important recent diet studies published.

The study’s delicious conclusion was that eating as the Spanish, Italian, and Greeks do — dousing food in olive oil and loading up on fish, nuts, and fresh produce — cuts cardiovascular disease risk by a third. As Stanford University health researcher (and nutrition science critic) John Ioannidis put it: “It was the best. The best of the best.”

Not anymore. Last week, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine pulled the original paper from the record, issuing a rare retraction. It also republished a new version of PREDIMED, based on a reanalysis of the data that accounted for the missteps. PREDIMED was supposed to be an example of scientific excellence in a field filled with conflicted and flawed studies. Yet it now appears to be horribly flawed."

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The author of the article, Julia Belluz, does a great job of cutting past the fluff of the retraction to highlight just what nutritional studies can identify and what they have a huge problem with. She further explains.

"As I’ve reported, nutrition science has done a great job of finding ways to address diseases of nutrient deficiencies, like scurvy. But today, our greatest health problems relate to overeating. People are consuming too many calories and too much low-quality food, bringing on chronic diseases like cancer, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. These illnesses are much harder to get a handle on. They don’t appear overnight but develop over years. They’re not usually related to one cause; they’re caused by many lifestyle and genetic factors in concert. And fixing them isn’t just a question of adding an occasional orange to someone’s diet. It involves looking holistically at lifestyle behaviors, like diet and genetics, trying to tease out the risk factors that lead to illness.

The trouble is, most of what we know about nutrition’s effects on chronic disease comes from observational data. Researchers track what large numbers of people eat over time and then look at their rates of disease, trying to tease out relationships in the data. Do people who drink more red wine have lower rates of heart disease? Is meat associated with an early death? Because these studies aren’t controlled like experiments, they can’t tell us whether one thing caused another thing to happen. Researchers try to use statistics to control for some of these “confounding factors,” but it’s impossible to catch all of them.

One of the things we here at Green Wizards must do in talking about nutrition is understand that what the Establishment views as good nutrition NOW might not be good nutrition tomorrow during the harsher times of full Collapse. Hell, most nutritional studies and media stories just about assume that the rest of the World needs to adapt to eating habits and food resources available to countries like the United States or countries in Europe, never mind that the idea that there isn't the resources to feed everyone like we Americans eat.

What we here need to identify is a diet that can be produced more locally, or even primarily in your home garden, which will meet your nutritional needs. Identifying those nutritional needs should I hope identify the plants and practices we which to focus on and learn to grow.

I like the idea of the Mediterranean diet, with its focus on less beef and chicken, both horrible examples of Bad Ag, and more focus on fish. And yet, as Greer once mentioned about the protest over single use plastic straws as ocean pollution. The biggest contributor to ocean pollution is thrown overboard plastic nets from fishing boats. So focusing on the health benefits of fish in your diet may contribute to the decline of fish in the ocean.

I like her conclusion to the article.

Layered on top of the difficulties with studying nutrition is the fact that people have very strong feelings about food — from scientists to study authors to the media — and these feelings bias the research and how it’s interpreted. Food is cultural, it’s social, it’s about our family histories and where we grew up, and it’s something we all have experience with, Allison noted. It’s no wonder “people become zealots” when they talk about diet.

Despite what the zealots say, there’s lots of data suggesting humans can survive — and even thrive — on myriad eating patterns. The optimal diet for any individual probably varies, but in general, you can’t go wrong with lots of fruits and vegetables, little junk food, and not too many calories. If you don’t smoke too much, don’t drink too much, and exercise regularly, you’ll probably be okay. Of courses, that’s easier said than done for the vast majority of people.