At a glance, the diet looks like it's mostly nutrient dense, single ingredient, food.

You can't really go wrong eating like that.

I always think of a Mediterranean diet as a Greek diet and not an Italian diet because there are definitely overweight Italians eating a lot of carb heavy pasta!!

I think it is more focused on portion size.

I've never seen this highlighted, but using honey as a primary sweetener is probably also part of it.

A big part of it is eating home food (i.e., unprocessed), be physically active (e.g., walk) and a big difference with elsewhere in the West is that life in many places of Greece and Italy is very slow and not stressful. Stress-free life helps a lot for long-term health and longevity

it's mostly the olive oil and polyphenols, remove most of the grains and carbs and it's even better.

The Mediterranean diet is a load of baloney.

Nina Teicholtz, in her book The Big Fat Surprise (#320715) has a whole chapter on the Mediterranean diet, and the falsehoods and self-interest that it springs from.

Basically - the olive oil industry supported and funded the majority of research and conferences on the Mediterranean diet, giving out lots of olive oil in the process. Here's an extensive quote from that chapter:

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“Olive Oil Ambassadors” These endeavors were obviously expensive, however, and required corporate sponsors, which is why, from the start, Oldways had forged a close relationship with the International Olive Oil Council (IOOC). This agency, headquartered in Madrid, was founded by the United Nations to control olive oil quality and to develop the “world olive and olive-oil economy,” in countries nearly all of which border the Mediterranean Sea.IX

Before becoming involved with Oldways, the IOOC had tried to generate olive-oil-friendly research by funding American scientists.X The academic research community was primarily preoccupied with the effect of various fats on serum cholesterol, and IOOC leaders thought that olive oil might be validated by this type of investigation, since the oil’s effect on cholesterol had been shown in preliminary investigations to be neutral overall. Yet clinical trials were a slow-going business, and a positive outcome wasn’t a sure thing, so the IOOC was glad to shift gears and assist Oldways in promoting olive oil through the far more efficient and appealing vehicle of the Mediterranean Diet conferences instead.XI

Naturally, this meant that olive oil flowed liberally at every event. Samples of olive oil were tucked into flower arrangements and handed out to participants in miniature shopping bags. Olive oil was also, inevitably, the subject of various scientific panels.

“It worked this way,” says Drescher, describing how conferences were funded. “We’d start with the IOOC money, but then we’d work with the government, and they’re able to absorb hotels. The national airline flies people over. Anytime you can get the government involved, they’re able to absorb expenses.” Italy, Greece, and Spain all contributed. “It was really about aligning the interests of these countries with the interesting new directions of scientific research,” Drescher explained. In other words, nations and their industries promoted themselves by providing lavish perks aimed at buying the good opinion of experts who would ultimately advise the public on nutrition. The strategy clearly worked.

The sway of olive oil money was nothing new in nutrition research. The Greek portion of the Seven Countries study had received funding from the Elais Oil Company in Greece, the International Olive Council, the California State Olive Advisory Board, and the Greek Association of Industries and Processors of Olive Oil. The early part of the study was financed by the NIH, but when those funds ran out, as Henry Blackburn recounts, Christos Aravanis, the principal Greek researcher on the study, “didn’t have any problem picking up the phone and collecting oil-company money.” And Keys “helped significantly in realizing these funds,” too, according to his colleagues. Keys reported only two of these grants when he first came out with his study, and in a later publication, only one.

Beyond the interests of the olive oil industry, which was the first or second most important agricultural product for Italy, Greece, and Spain, each country also had its national fruits or vegetables that could profit from being included in the Oldways’ Mediterranean diet menu: tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Greece.XII Sponsoring an Oldways conference was really no different from what these industries were doing in their own countries, anyway: In Italy, for instance, the agricultural sector had early on supported the government’s Mediterranean diet public health campaign with posters and TV commercials, urging its citizens to “eat Mediterranean.” Ferro-Luzzi had prevailed in convincing authorities that this kind of a campaign was a good idea, based partly on the commercial appeal. “I told them that what was good for commodities was good for the people,” she said. Spain and Greece ran similar efforts, as did the European Union as a whole, spending a reported $215 million over roughly a decade on olive-oil-related public relations. These campaigns also targeted European doctors with “scientific” bulletins about olive oil, leading some researchers to complain that their governments were improperly disguising marketing campaigns as scientific advice.

Nothing seemed to influence the scientific elites in Europe and the United States as effectively as the Oldways conferences, however. These heady and luxurious experiences, part science seminar, part foodfest, and part cultural celebration, were a stroke of genius in targeting the nutrition world’s most influential people.

Nestle spelled out to me the obvious though unspoken quid pro quo of these sorts of conferences: “Every single journalist who went on one of those trips was expected to write about it, and if they didn’t, they weren’t invited back. . . . Everyone knew what they were supposed to do. And they were happy to do it! If you’re in Morocco and being served a dinner where people come in with flaming platters of whatever, you’re going to write about it. There’s plenty to write about!”

Looking back, however, Nestle, who wrote Food Politics, the seminal work on how the food industry influences nutrition policy, recognizes that the conferences were more of a racket than most participants realized. “At the time it seemed totally benign. But it was so seductive. Oldways was basically a for-hire public relations company. . . . And the purpose was to promote the Mediterranean diet for academics like me who got sucked into that,” she told me.

Kushi, the former Willett student who now directs scientific policy for Kaiser Permanente, said he and his colleagues all knew that olive oil money was flowing behind these gatherings, but “the fact that it was laundered through Oldways made it a bit more palatable.” The experts invited by Oldways were simply too transported by the whole experience, it seems, to be much concerned about a possible industrial agenda underneath.

Eventually, says Newsweek’s Laura Shapiro, she was no longer invited to the Oldways conferences because “I couldn’t get with the program.” She was going on the free trips without writing stories about them explicitly, and at some point, she says, “Oldways told me they couldn’t justify my presence to their sponsors.”

But in the meantime, Shapiro says she had written about the health benefits of olive oil and had served the Mediterranean diet agenda quite well. “We, the press, were little olive oil ambassadors, everywhere. That’s what Oldways created!”

And although some of these “ambassadors,” like Shapiro, fell out of favor with Oldways,XIII inevitably there were others to replace them. Ten years of conferences organized by Oldways elevated the diet into a stratosphere of success, where it has remained, with continuing attention from the media and academic researchers, for decades. The New York Times alone has published more than 650 articles with “Mediterranean diet” in the title since Willett’s pyramid came out. And nutrition researchers have given it serious, sustained attention, writing more than a thousand scientific papers on the Mediterranean diet since the early 1990s. Epidemiologists in Willett’s department at the Harvard School of Public Health, at least one of whom attended every Oldways’ conferences throughout the 1990s, have between them published nearly fifty papers on the Mediterranean diet. By comparison, diets such as South Beach and the Zone, which were not introduced by elite university scientists nor promoted by conferences abroad, have been the subject of only a handful of scientific papers. The Atkins and Ornish diets have received slightly more expert attention than these other popular diets, as we’ll see in Chapter 10.

Nancy Harmon Jenkins, one of the founders of Oldways and author of The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, acknowledged to me, “The food world is particularly prey to corruption, because so much money is made on food and so much depends on talk and especially the opinions of experts.”XIV

Being a Mediterranean myself, it's not just the food but the way of living. Enjoy your long afternoons with friends and family. Totally agree with the nap: my advice would be 15-30 minutes to reset your nervous system. And most importantly.... take it easy.