Although further work is required before these data can be accepted as definitive,
there are substantial grounds for taking them as a basis for discussion. In that context,
Greek dietary patterns can be compared against published information on the diets
followed by contemporary rural and urban populations in other European countries.
Such a comparison allows a better appreciation of the characteristics of the traditional
Mediterranean diet.
Descriptions of the diets followed by low-income rural and urban French and
English in the 19th and early 20th centuries were examined.62-64 Contribution of
macronutrients and the major staple food item, bread, to the diets followed by low-
income French and English as well as Greek representatives are shown in Table 2.
Data shown for the French and English populations are derived from the same types
of sources as those used for the elucidation of the Greek patterns, i.e., either family-
budget surveys or archival household logs.
Rural Greeks and French exhibited patterns characterized by higher availability
of protein (86-119 g/capita/day) than their English counterparts (56 and 70 g/cap-
ita/day). Data presented in Table 2 also show that rural groups, with the exception
of Greek herders and French fishermen, derived lower proportions of their calories
from fat than their low-income urban counterparts.
Compared with the English and the French, low-income urban Greeks derived
a higher percentage of their energy from fat and a lower one from carbohydrate.
This observation is in agreement with the increase in availability and consumption
of olive oil that occurred in the late 19th century in Greece. It has been well
documented that diets in England throughout the 19th century were based on cereals
and tubers. Furthermore, consumption of bread and animal foods by English
laborers dropped throughout the 19 th century, compared with 18th-century consump-
tion. For members of the working class in England, the typical response to salary
increase in the 1800s was an increased consumption of alcohol and beer, but not of
meat or dairy.63 Potato consumption, however, showed a dramatic rise during the
19th century and, for working classes, ranged from 270 g to 400 g daily. It has been
maintained, therefore, that during the first half of the 19th century, a deterioration
in the diet of working classes in England occurred, despite an increase in overall
food supplies. Bread consumption was high among low-income French; available
evidence indicates that poor laborers in mid 19th-century France were eating one
to two kilograms of bread daily.
This pattern of reliance on cereals and potato was reversed in England as well
as other western European regions at the end of the 19th century with the dawning
of economic growth and the improvement of transportation and food-storage tech-
niques. The transition was marked by a decline in cereal and potato consumption
and a concomitant increase in consumption of animal foods, resulting in a higher
fat intake. Economic growth in Greece occurred at a later time than in western European countries, and the availability of animal products among rural and low-
income Greeks increased only after the 1960s.69,70
Further differences between the European and Greek 19th-century diets that are
not obvious from the data in Table 2 should be noted. Specifically, the Greek diet
was enriched with generous quantities of vegetables and fruits, including several
wild species. In contrast, in 19th-century England, consumption of vegetables and
fruits items is known to have been limited, due to a sheer scarcity as well as an
ingrained distrust and prejudice held toward these items by the working classes.
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