The Mediterranean Diet: From the pyramid to the circular model
What is it about?
The Mediterranean Diet (MD) is a millennial example of healthy and sustainable dietary pattern. It bases its principles on the limited and responsible use of resources, encouraging their reuse, whenever possible, and preventing over-exploitation. The MD is also a healthy food model through the prevention of many chronic non-transmissible diseases. In order to promote the Mediterranean model to the public, it has become widely adopted to employ graphic models that are both expressive and easily understandable, like the pyramid model. The pyramid model is an effective educational tool for promoting nutritional recommendations. Over the years, the pyramidal representations have been enriched in an attempt to provide increasingly more information. The goal of our study is to propose a new representation of the Mediterranean Diet based on circularity. The circular representation aims to highlight both the importance of the various components/categories within the model, as well as the inherent cyclical nature that characterizes human life, the seasonality of food, the production chain, and the concealed circular economy behind each product.