THE rest of the world may be trying to embrace the Mediterranean diet as the key to long life, but the people of Europe’s sunshine belt are abandoning it — and growing fat fast.

From Greece to Spain, the young, in particular, are putting on weight faster than in the north, acquiring the coronary and other ailments that afflict the fast-food cultures that have spread from the United States to Britain and the Continent.

“Things are getting worse with the growth of cities and globalisation,” Denis Lairon, director of the nutrition unit at Inserm, the national medical research institute, in Marseilles, said. “Soon the Mediterranean diet will just be part of culinary folklore, reserved for tourists. If we don’t do something, we are heading for ruin.”

Last week a study concluded that people aged 60 who stick to a Mediterranean diet can expect to live a year longer on average than their peers. Yet at the main city hospital in Nice, capital of the Côte d’Azur, Kathy Wagner Mahler, a paediatrician, said: “Obesity among the young used to be practically unknown here, but now it has become common. In the Provence area, one child in four is overweight and one in six is truly obese.”

While France remains one of the “thinnest” nations in Europe, obesity leapt by 45 per cent over six years to 2003, reaching 11 per cent of the population in the Provence region.

Nice Matin a Riviera newspaper, said that the spread of fast food and sedentary habits meant that the “Mediterranean recipe for health is being relegated to the status of food from an earlier era”.

This will come as a surprise to readers of a recent slew of diet books celebrating the svelte French figure, of which French Women Don’t Get Fat, by Mireille Guiliano, and the Chic and Slim series of books, by Anne Barone, are the best-known. The authors say that Gallic women eat mountains of butter, cheese, pâté and wine, yet have fewer weight problems because they shun fast food, use fresh, unprocessed ingredients and eat slowly.

The weight statistics are similar in Spain and Portugal and to a lesser extent in Italy. Greece is suffering the worst. Greek obesity rates are at a level with those of Britain and Belgium, among Europe’s highest.

In Marseilles, Dr Lairon said too many people think that all they had to do was drench their food in olive oil.

Dr Lairon said: “Cooking with olive oil is not enough. The Mediterranean diet is a combination of things — fish, cereals that are not highly refined, dry vegetables that are rarely eaten any more and oil sources like walnuts and almonds, which have been replaced by aperitif gimmicks grilled in oil and too heavily salted, like peanuts.”

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