On vacation in southern Spain this year we enjoyed Mediterranean food. A typical meal was salmon fillet with homemade pesto sauce (basil, pine nuts and olive oil) and sautéed Mediterranean vegetables.

Our Mediterranean vegetable medley consisted of aubergines (aubergine) and courgettes (zucchini) and sweet pepper.

I wonder why in the UK we use the French word “courgette” while in the US the same vegetable is the Italian “zucchini”. It’s as if none of the English-speaking nations dared to name the vegetable!

Regardless, our salmon, pesto, and greens meal was packed with the nutrients you’d find in a healthy diet. Omega 3 fats in salmon, monosaturated fats in olive oil and polyunsaturated fats in pine nuts. As well as all the fat soluble vitamins that go along with this (ie A, D, E and K).

In this meal we do not have starchy carbohydrates (potato, rice or bread) because excess starch produces fat. And we get all the carbohydrates we need from the vegetable mixture.

And vegetables are full of plant chemicals that will make your arteries sing!

Now keep in mind that this meal is not low in fat. But it is so tasty and nutritious that your body does not need tons of this food. And this diet is good for lowering cholesterol despite (or perhaps because of) its fat content.

The Standard American Diet (or SAD!) contains 42% fat, mostly saturated fat. American doctors want patients to eat a low-fat diet (about 20% fat) to lower cholesterol. But the Mediterranean diet lowers cholesterol almost as well as the low-fat diet, and it tastes much better and is packed with nutrients.

And the Mediterranean diet contains… wait for it… 38% fat. This news bursts the arteries of American cardiologists because they have a hard time acknowledging that such a high-fat diet works!

It is, of course, the right kind of fat. And this diet is low in sugar and high in whole grains, so there’s more than just fat to help lower cholesterol.

The “low fat = healthy” lobby is so strong (and think about how many diet plans are built around it) that only through activated teeth will some doctors acknowledge that the Mediterranean diet is healthy.

But this diet satisfies our taste buds and the satiety centers of the brain. We enjoyed the food and felt full.

So you may not be in the Mediterranean, but you can eat nature’s bounty while increasing your health and trimming your waistline.

The Mediterranean diet is especially beneficial for all the colorful vegetables it contains. Sweet peppers, for example, come in various colors and are all good to eat. I like reds because they add visual flair to a meal and are especially helpful if you don’t like tomatoes (another red fruit that is closely related to bell peppers).

So what’s so wonderful about this redness? Well, you get plenty of vitamin C, lots of beneficial flavonoids to keep your arteries healthy, and a healthy dose of carotenoids. Carotenes are the red pigments that give peppers their color.

Carotenes are powerful antioxidants and tend to be fat soluble, so they will act as antioxidants for the fat-containing parts. Now I know you’re thinking fat wobbly hips at this point, but put those thoughts aside!

Structurally, fat is used for useful things like making cell membranes. Tissues made up of many layers of cells have many cell membranes, so skin, for example, has a lot of oil. I’m not talking about the layer of fat under the skin, I’m talking about the actual structure of the skin cells. Fat-soluble antioxidants help protect these cells. And this includes the interior of the skin, so the carotenes will protect the skin, the intestinal wall and the lungs (the latter two, the interior of the skin!).

The carotenes in the skin protect it from ultraviolet light and I’ve seen some research suggesting that people on a Mediterranean diet have more natural sun protection (but don’t ditch the sun cream).

You will also have many fat-related substances in your reproductive parts (ovaries, testicles, breast tissue) and in your nervous system, which is 60% fat. Therefore, you need a reasonable amount of fat-soluble antioxidants in your diet to keep all of these parts of you in good working order.

So take your Mediterranean fish and vegetables, with reasonable amounts of olive oil, nuts, seeds and whole grains to be healthier and lose weight.