Most people these days suffer from high cholesterol or heart diseases. Data collected by the top medical clinics of the world reveals – a person is expected to, on average, have a heart attack between the age of 42 and 43. The chance of a heart failure has further increased owing to unhealthy food habits, sedentary lifestyles, and hectic work life. However, switching to Mediterranean diet menu can go a long way in solving this problem.

It has been observed that people consuming red meat and fat age on a higher scale age rapidly with an average lifespan of 27 ½ years. Here is why it is harmful –

• Meat starts decaying very quickly after the death of the animal. The human intestinal tract is 12 times its length, whereas, it is only three times in case of carnivorous animals. Hence, a decaying matter stays longer in the human digestive system than that of an animal.
• Carnivores possess sharp claws and jaws with pointed, elongated ‘canine’ teeth to pierce the meat. But humans have flat, back molar teeth to grind food along with alkaline saliva; and have more difficulty to digest meat.
• The stomach hydrochloric acid in humans is 20 times less potent than meat-eaters.
• This is the reason why a Mediterranean diet menu usually excludes red meat and stresses on substituting it with chicken or fish. These are lean but healthy proteins.

The ‘Vital Life Principle’?
A proper Mediterranean diet menu embodies the “Vital Life Principle” – certain foods contain more life force than others. All living things absorb energy from the sun, and this energy is stored inside green plants, fruits, nuts, grains, and vegetables. Eating these foods leads to consumption of the solar energy directly. Many plants retain their life-giving energy for many days after they are picked. In other words, a person lives on “live” food with almost all the vital energy still intact. This is not a modern theory but was discovered 2500 years ago by Pythagoras. A Mediterranean diet menu is good for the body and the mind.

What to eat?
A proper Mediterranean diet menu does not recommend you to have uncommon or hard to find food, but it recommends the common food in their purest and most nutritional form. That is why, a healthy diet includes both raw food like fruits, and cooked food. A proper Mediterranean diet menu can be obtained from the family physician or a professional nutritionist or, simply, from the internet. All the recommendations have the following things in common –

• The non-starchy food contains more fiber and boosts digestion.
• Cooked food can be consumed when it is prepared with less oil. To keep your body healthy and to avoid high cholesterol, extra virgin or virgin olive oil is to be used for every dish. They have large amounts of good fat.
• Substituting red meat like mutton or beef with chicken and fish is a good idea, as the latter offers lean proteins without any harmful fat.
• Have fresh fruits like apples or oranges regularly.
• Along with fresh fruits, fresh vegetables when cooked in olive oil, are the best for a proper healthy diet. Eggplants and peas are great sources of fiber and protein, and underground vegetables (potatoes and carrots) and nuts are the best antioxidants and provide the highest levels of mono-unsaturated and polyunsaturated fats.
• The idea behind setting up a proper Mediterranean diet menu is to keep the ‘low-density lipoprotein’ (LDL) cholesterol or bad cholesterol levels low and protein and vitamin levels high. Monounsaturated fats are the required fats for the body which olive oil is rich in.

How to eat?
One cannot get the full benefit from a proper diet unless he knows how to eat properly for better digestion. So here are a few tips:

• Doctors repeatedly warn not to overeat as half-digested food forms a putrid, decaying mass in the body and poisons the bloodstream.
• When someone eats in a disturbed mood, not only is the food not digested properly, but also this undigested food produces very harmful toxins in the body – it would have been better not to have eaten at all. For this reason, the food must be eaten as much as possible in a peaceful mood, in serene and happy surroundings.
• Forcing the digestive system to digest many different types of foods also strains and weakens it. For this reason, it is advisable to eat no more than four different preparations of food in one meal.
• It takes about four hours for the food to leave the stomach and for the digestive juices to accumulate again, ready to digest the next meal. Avoid eating in between meals.
  Following a proper Mediterranean diet menu has far more benefits than you can imagine. The best part of this diet is that you get to taste delicious and pure food along with a long and healthy lifespan.