“A set of skills, knowledge, practices and traditions ranging from the landscape to the table”.
With this justification, on 16th of November 2010, the Mediterranean Diet was included by Unesco in the List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. On this occasion, a Network of Unesco Mediterranean Diet Communities was approved and the Charter of Values was launched, the result of the theorist’s work of that particular diet and its benefits: the biologist Ancel Keys.
During his research about the spread of cardiovascular diseases in seven nations of four continents, merged into the famous Seven Country Study, the American professor identified a place in the South of Italy, in the municipality of Pollica, where there was a high percentage of centenarians and, at the same time, the incidence of cardiovascular diseases, strokes and Alzheimer cases proved to be lower. With his wife Margareth, Keys bought a house in the district of Pioppi and settled there to continue his studies, which his colleagues Martti Karvonen, Flaminio Fidanza and Jeremiah Stamler joined. In that community with simple habits, they noticed a daily consumption of bread, pasta, many legumes and vegetables, fish and very little meat, fresh fruits and, only few times a week, sweets with refined sugar and honey and wine drunk moderately during meals. Extra virgin olive oil was the only source of fat. For Keys, this diet was at the origin of the longevity and the limited spread of certain diseases among the inhabitants. The theory identified seven emblematic communities of the Mediterranean Diet in Italy, Greece, Spain, Morocco, Cyprus, Croatia and Portugal. And the work of the American gave a great notoriety to the traditional dietary habits of Cilento inhabitants and other Mediterranean populations. Until the important Unesco recognition.
Keys lived in Pioppi for forty years, before returning to the United States, where he died few months later, over the age of 100. The Mediterranean Diet has assured its healthy protection also to the one who had revealed it to the world.
