What Is the Mediterranean Diet? Food List, 7-Day Meal Plan and Recipes

In short

• Build most meals around vegetables, beans and lentils, whole grains and fruit.
• Make extra virgin olive oil your cooking and dressing fat, and keep butter for the odd pastry.
• Eat fish or seafood at least twice a week, with poultry, eggs, yogurt and cheese in moderate amounts.
• Push red and processed meat, sweets and ultra-processed snacks to the edges of your week.
• Season with herbs, garlic and lemon, and sit down to eat with other people when you can.

What is the Mediterranean diet, exactly?

Picture lunch in a Cretan village in the early 1960s: a plate of boiled wild greens dressed with lemon and a generous pour of oil, a bowl of beans, bread made from barley or wheat, a piece of sheep’s cheese, fruit from the tree behind the house. Meat appeared on feast days. Fish came when the boats did. That is the kitchen researchers had in mind when they began talking about a Mediterranean diet, and it still describes the heart of it today.

Across the region, the details change. Catalonia has its bread rubbed with ripe tomato, Spain its lentils simmered with paprika, Italy its pasta with chickpeas and its minestrone, Provence its ratatouille and its soupe au pistou, Greece its bean soups and trays of oven-baked vegetables. What they share is the balance on the plate: plants first, olive oil as the fat that ties everything together, and animal foods in supporting roles.

Where does the Mediterranean diet come from?

The idea took shape in the late 1950s, when the American physiologist Ancel Keys and his colleagues launched the Seven Countries Study, which followed thousands of middle-aged men in the United States, Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, the former Yugoslavia, Greece and Japan. Over the following decades, the men of Crete stood out, with some of the lowest rates of death from heart disease in the whole study, on a diet that was anything but low in fat. Most of that fat came from olive oil.

In 2010, UNESCO added the Mediterranean diet to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, on behalf of Spain, Greece, Italy and Morocco, and extended the listing in 2013 to Cyprus, Croatia and Portugal. The recognition has less to do with nutrients than with a way of life: how food is grown, fished, shared at the table and handed down from one generation to the next.

Mediterranean diet vs Cretan diet: what’s the difference?

The Cretan diet is the original that inspired the rest: the way people ate on the Greek island of Crete in the middle of the twentieth century. It is a local version of the Mediterranean pattern with a few strong traits of its own, including a great deal of olive oil, wild greens gathered on the hillsides, pulses almost every day, barley rusks, snails, goat’s and sheep’s cheese, and very little meat. In France the two names are often used interchangeably, partly because a well known French trial of the 1990s, the Lyon Diet Heart Study, tested a Cretan-style diet in people who had already had a heart attack.

For a home cook today, the gap is small. Think of the Cretan diet as the Mediterranean diet at its most rustic and most plant-heavy.

Mediterranean diet food list: what to eat and how often

The frequencies below loosely follow the food pyramid published in 2010 by the Mediterranean Diet Foundation in Barcelona. Treat them as a compass rather than a rulebook.

What should you limit on the Mediterranean diet?

• Red meat and cured meats, which move from the center of the plate to the side.
• Butter, cream and deep-fried food, replaced by olive oil in most dishes.
• Sugary drinks, pastries and sweets, saved for the weekend or a celebration.
• Ultra-processed food in general: ready meals, packaged snacks, sweetened breakfast cereals.
• Alcohol. Wine belongs to the traditional picture, but health authorities don’t advise anyone to start drinking for their health, and water is the everyday drink.

What does the research say?

The best known trial is PREDIMED, run in Spain with about 7,400 adults at high risk of heart disease. People asked to eat the Mediterranean way, and given a regular supply of nuts or of extra virgin olive oil, ended up with roughly 30 percent fewer heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths than those on a reduced-fat diet. The results were published in 2013, then withdrawn and republished in 2018 after problems were found in the way some participants had been assigned to groups. The corrected analysis reached broadly the same conclusion.

Many observational studies have also associated this way of eating with lower rates of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Association is the key word, because people who eat like this often move more, smoke less and cook at home more often. The fair summary: few eating patterns have as much evidence behind them, and none of them comes with a guarantee against disease.

A 7-day Mediterranean diet meal plan

This week borrows dishes you would find anywhere from Andalusia to the Peloponnese. Everything works with supermarket ingredients, and one night’s dinner often turns into the next day’s lunch.

Easy Mediterranean and Cretan recipes to start with

None of these asks for special equipment or hard-to-find ingredients. For more plant-first dinners, browse our easy vegetarian meals and our healthy recipes.

• Dakos. Crete’s answer to bruschetta: a hard barley rusk softened with grated ripe tomato, topped with feta or mizithra, oregano and olive oil. No cooking involved.
• Horta. Wild or garden greens such as chicory, dandelion or chard, simply boiled, then dressed with lemon and olive oil. It sounds austere and tastes wonderful.
• Fasolada. Greece’s white bean soup, cooked slowly with carrot, celery, tomato and a good amount of oil.
• Briam. A tray of sliced vegetables baked until soft and caramelized at the edges. Even better the next day.
• Gemista. Tomatoes and peppers hollowed out, filled with rice, herbs and the chopped tomato flesh, then baked.
• Pasta e ceci. An Italian pantry dinner of pasta and chickpeas with garlic, rosemary and a little tomato.
• Pisto. Spain’s cousin of ratatouille, cooked down until jammy and served with bread or an egg.
• Soupe au pistou. Provence’s vegetable and bean soup, finished with a basil, garlic and olive oil paste stirred in at the table.

What does a Mediterranean breakfast look like?

Breakfast is the meal where the Mediterranean is least dramatic. In Spain it is often toast rubbed with tomato and drizzled with oil. In Greece, thick yogurt with honey and walnuts, or bread with cheese and olives. In much of Italy, to be honest, a coffee and something sweet.

If you want a breakfast in the spirit of the diet, go for plain yogurt with fruit and nuts, whole-grain toast with tomato and olive oil, oats with fruit, or eggs cooked in olive oil with a handful of greens.

How do you start without turning your kitchen upside down?

• Change your cooking fat first. Swapping butter and neutral oils for extra virgin olive oil changes more dishes than any other single step.
• Add one bean or lentil meal a week, then a second.
• Put fish on the menu twice a week. Canned sardines, mackerel and tuna all count.
• Make vegetables the biggest thing on the plate, with grains and protein on the side.
• Keep a bowl of fruit and a jar of nuts where the cookies used to be.
• Plan the week ahead, so good intentions survive a busy Wednesday.

How can Olivi help you eat the Mediterranean way?

Knowing the principles is the easy part. Remembering them at six in the evening is harder. In Olivi, you can ask Olive, the built-in assistant, for something like “plan me a Mediterranean week, fish twice, no red meat, dinners under 40 minutes”. She builds your week meal by meal, with your own recipes or new ones written around your dietary preferences and allergies, and the grocery list fills itself in, sorted by aisle.

Every recipe shows its nutrition facts, calculated from official food composition data rather than guessed, and you can share the list with whoever does the shopping. Olivi works on the web, on iPhone and iPad, and on Android, where it is currently in beta.

Good to know

• This article gives general information about a way of eating. It is not medical advice. If you have a health condition, are pregnant or take medication, talk to your doctor or a registered dietitian before changing your diet.
• Sources: the Seven Countries Study led by Ancel Keys; UNESCO’s listing of the Mediterranean diet as intangible cultural heritage (2010, extended in 2013); the Mediterranean Diet Foundation pyramid (2010); the PREDIMED trial (New England Journal of Medicine, first published in 2013, republished in 2018); the Lyon Diet Heart Study (1994 and 1999). Consulted in September 2026.