Antonio Trichopoulou is one of the two women accredited with bringing the Mediterranean diet to prominence. She was promoting vegetable oils instead of saturated fats as part of a healthy lifestyle, on the back of Ancel Keys now discredited Seven Nations Study.
She felt compelled to act when she saw Olive trees being cut down and a traditional way of life disappearing.
And she did, indeed, do us all a huge favour, olive oil is probably the most healthy oil and it might have been drowned under a sea of corn oil and sunflower oil and cottonseed oil if it hadn't been for this woman and her Italian co-researcher.
But, is it not just as likely that it is the Mediterranean lifestyle that is heart healthy? The temperature and the sunshine for a start off, an abundant supply of vitamin D? A better work / life balance? Many Mediterraneans value family life, proper mealtimes, with lazy meals eaten over several hours. More locally grown, colourful vegetables, with few food miles, so nutritious food, that has been from field to table in hours not weeks.
In all observational studies there are too many confounding variables. If you took 1000 people in the middle of Siberia and put them on the Mediterranean diet, I would guess that they would see no benefits to health whatsoever. Any benefits would be wiped out by the cold, the Vodka and the cigarette smoking!
Nobody would dream of saying that colourful fresh vegetables, olive oil, plenty of fish are bad things to incorporate into a diet, it is accompanying that with the next bit, therefore saturated fat, red meat etc must be bad. We travel in Europe extensively and have visited all the Mediterranean countries, with their wonderful lamb, goat, some beef. It is a fallacy that people in these countries do not eat red meat, they do! In our part of Spain, it is the fat of the Jamon that is the most valued part.
All observational studies must be treated with huge scepticism, those financed by manufacturers are quite likely to be actually fraudulent. The recent well reported study that 'More Pasta is healthier' actually financed by a pasta manufacturer, completely reversed the findings in the study. Although the data clearly showed that the subset eating the most pasta had shorter life expectancies, the conclusions stated the opposite. And all the results were ridiculous anyway, each individual must have 100 confounding variables. Observational studies and diet just don't work. Did you realise that a typical diet analysis is made using either one interview, where people are asked to recall what they ate yesterday (partly people have bad bad memories or they lie to create a good impression) or a few questionnaires / food diary recordings. Then the researches presume that each person continues to follow the diet for the duration of the trial. If it is an interventional trial, then the person if introduced to the required changes, and included in the study results even if they don't implement the changes, or if they implement changes for a short while then revert to their original diet. The days of putting people in hospitals and mental institutions on experimental diets is long gone, thank goodness, but data from these sorts of trials are still often cited in modern research.
And if mouse studies were clearly labelled as such in the title, for instance "New study shows that mice eating an entirely artificial, high fat diet, where the protein is not a foodstuff, the fat is largely transfats do incredibly badly compared to mice eating natural grains", we'd all know it was garbage and didn't apply to us.
What is happening now is that large numbers of extremely talented, clever people are looking back at old research to find out how and why we got it so wrong, and they are discovering errors, lies, misinterpretation of data, exaggerated benefits etc etc etc. this is what has lead me back to my belief, it should be natural, it should be traditionally a food (not cotton seeds, High Fructose Corn Syrup, textured Vegetable protein etc etc). If I can remember my grandmother cooking it, even better.