Hi everyone I'm Monica Reinagel and you're listening to the nutrition

divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous welcome.

May is Mediterranean Diet Month, and as I'm sure you're aware,

the Mediterranean-style diet is widely hailed as one of the healthiest diet patterns you can choose.

This, despite the fact that you end up eating

almost half your calories in the form of fat.

Our own government still recommends that we limit fat to 20 to 35% of calories.

But the research just keeps pouring in.

The Mediterranean diet reduces your risk of heart disease, cancer,

diabetes, and Alzheimer's. it slows aging, boosts weight loss, protects memory,

and even enhances academic performance in kids.

Yet in the best-selling book, The Big Fat Surprise, journalist Nina Ticholts argues that the

Mediterranean diet is overrated and based on shabby science.

Is our current infatuation with olive oil and red wine based on a hoax?

Are all the studies bogus?

And now on with our topic.

Tycholts and her publishers went out of their way to position the Big Fat Surprise

as a hugely controversial book, one that was going to stand the conventional dietary

wisdom on its head. But her central argument that dietary fats and saturated fat in particular

are not the enemies that they were once made out to be.

It's just not that controversial.

The book is exhaustively researched and impressively well documented.

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