Updating the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid towards Sustainability: Focus on Environmental Concerns.

Background: Nowadays the food production, supply and consumption chain represent a major cause of ecological pressure on the natural environment, and diet links worldwide human health with environmental sustainability. Food policy, dietary guidelines and food security strategies need to evolve from the limited historical approach, mainly focused on nutrients and health, to a new one considering the environmental, socio-economic and cultural impact-and thus the sustainability-of diets.

Objective: To present an updated version of the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid (MDP) to reflect multiple environmental concerns.

Coping With Food Insecurity Using the Sociotype Ecological Framework.

Ensuring Food Security (FS) for all citizens is a fundamental human right and policy for all countries. Dealing with Food Insecurity (FINS) is a challenge causing stress at many levels-national, household, and individual. The conceptual framework of the Sociotype has been developed as a summary ecological construct to organize the multiple, dynamic, reciprocal inputs from the environment that interact with the genotype to determine the expression of phenotypic behaviors such as coping with stress.

A Consensus Proposal for Nutritional Indicators to Assess the Sustainability of a Healthy Diet: The Mediterranean Diet as a Case Study.

Background: There is increasing evidence of the multiple effects of diets on public health nutrition, society, and environment. Sustainability and food security are closely interrelated. The traditional Mediterranean Diet (MD) is recognized as a healthier dietary pattern with a lower environmental impact.

Mediterranean Diet: From a Healthy Diet to a Sustainable Dietary Pattern.

The notion of the Mediterranean diet has undergone a progressive evolution over the past 60 years, from a healthy dietary pattern to a sustainable dietary pattern, in which nutrition, food, cultures, people, environment, and sustainability all interact into a new model of a sustainable diet. An overview of the historical antecedents and recent increased interest in the Mediterranean diet is presented and challenges related to how to improve the sustainability of the Mediterranean diet are identified. Despite its increasing popularity worldwide, adherence to the Mediterranean diet model is decreasing for multifactorial influences - life styles changes, food globalization, economic, and socio-cultural factors.

Food security and sustainability: can one exist without the other?

Objective: To position the concept of sustainability within the context of food security.

Design: An overview of the interrelationships between food security and sustainability based on a non-systematic literature review and informed discussions based principally on a quasi-historical approach from meetings and reports.

Setting: International and global food security and nutrition.

Sustainable diets: the Mediterranean diet as an example.

Objective: To present the Mediterranean diet as an example of a sustainable diet, in which nutrition, biodiversity, local food production, culture and sustainability are strongly interconnected.

Design: Review of notions and activities contributing towards the acknowledgement of the Mediterranean diet as a sustainable diet.

Setting: The Mediterranean region and its populations.

Mediterranean diet pyramid today. Science and cultural updates.

Objective: To present the Mediterranean diet (MD) pyramid: a lifestyle for today.

Design: A new graphic representation has been conceived as a simplified main frame to be adapted to the different nutritional and socio-economic contexts of the Mediterranean region. This review gathers updated recommendations considering the lifestyle, dietary, sociocultural, environmental and health challenges that the current Mediterranean populations are facing.

Transmitting Mediterranean food culture through art: a creative interdisciplinary approach.

Objective: As a qualitative problem solving method, to manage the accelerating phenomenon of overweight and obesity among children and adolescents as well as to promote the Mediterranean Diet and the diversity of the Mediterranean Food Cultures heritage, it is presented a creative interdisciplinary approach through art.

Design: Taking into account that young generations are becoming the highest majority of the consumer population in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries, it is reported the artist practice and the creative community-based interdisciplinary experience of Plexus International, a network of artists and scientists of various nationalities and disciplines.

Setting: Mediterranean Region and International.

Towards the advancement of the Mediterranean food cultures.

The Forum on Mediterranean Food Cultures has the purpose to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue to acknowledge the underestimated role of the Mediterranean diet and of the Mediterranean food cultures for an effective sustainable development in the Mediterranean. It is addressed towards the achievement of food security and a broader nutritional well-being in the entire Mediterranean area. The Forum uses a creative approach for the development of community-based programmes to manage the emerging trend of childhood overweight and obesity, as well as to reduce the increasing erosion of the Mediterranean food cultural heritage.