Mediterranean diet and cooking VS supermarkets’ ready meals

Giving a correct guide, teaching good food principles is the key for preventing many physical problems in adult age. Clearly, these days with so much food is made for our supermarkets by the same companies the results are likely to be and look a lot like one another. Here in southern Lazio, many family-runned and small food producers and sellers are still very active and part of the local food shopping. Our land offers excellent freshness and quality ingredients with a high nutritional value.

            Cherry tomatoes

In Italy, with little efforts in food shopping, people are not all condemned to a monotonous diet of tedious, labor-intensive raw ingredients. In South Pontino the daily freshness of our vegetables, tomatoes, broccoli, celery with their high quantity of raw vitamins, fibers and oligo-elements, help the regular function and gastro-enteric apparatus. They also carry on a very important action in preventing tumor pathologies. In other countries, using clever marketing approaches, supermarkets habitually present themselves as a progressive solution to the population time-saving and food variety. The profits that can be made from convincing people that they don’t need to mash a potato or cut and wash a salad are significant. So increasingly supermarket shelves are filled with foods that prevent, or at least reduce, the need for any home cooking whilst making the stores’ owners a large profit at the same time. But, even the best Marks and Spencer ready meal cannot be even providing the important nutrients so necessary to our body.

It is no coincidence that the countries most attached to supermarket shopping have the worst eating habits. This can happen because people have effectively surrendered control over what they eat to a few powerful chains. Supermarkets know that, because they progressively more control where public shop, the people can be conditioned, by repetition and force of habit, to believe that supermarket TV dinners of the 21st century are better than anything they might cook, and possibly even just as good as what they might experience abroad. But this is not the case at all. In other words, the more you cook and know about food, the less you are likely to see supermarket prepared food as either desirable or good value. Pasta is the Italian dish by excellence. Cooking elaborate pasta dishes can be very easy and fast for example. The Italian dish by excellence is, deservedly, the main-stay of Mediterranean cuisine. The secret lies in combining its already good nutritional properties with its satiating capacity, without increasing the calories intake with excessively fat dressings.

Pasta, actually, even though it is not a complete food by itself, needs very little to become one. To balance it, you just need to add a sauce that may be made of vegetables, proteins (without exaggerating) and fats. Furthermore, it has to be al dente and not only for reasons of a better taste and consistency: to chew more means removing hunger and digesting better. But what are the reasons behind this dish becoming almost the symbol of the Mediterranean diet? It is its capacity to release the starches very slowly, thus allowing modulating their effect on the organism. In other words, the feeling of being full lasts for longer, whereas the sensation of hunger, after a dish of pasta, returns much later than with other cereal-based dishes such as pizza, bread or rice. Another advantage of the slow assimilation of pasta lies in the sugars that are contained, which, if metabolized too rapidly, would cause dangerous repercussions on glycaemia. A factor to be kept in mind, and not only for diabetics.

Finally, a dish of spaghetti dressed with tomato, basil, extra virgin olive oil, and one sprinkle of Parmigiano Reggiano, is not only a typical product of Italian tradition, but a correct meal from a nutritional view point. Even the tomato sauce, in fact, is a cherished helper of health. It contains the lycopene, a powerful antioxidant, effective against free radicals, and dangerous by-products of the metabolic processes. It is freed with the cooking and is best absorbed with olive oil. Those who like to accompany their meal with a glass of red wine should do so with no guilty feelings, as even wine, in moderate quantities, is healthy, because it contains polyphenols, other antioxidants that improve the rate of "good" cholesterol.

The South Pontino olive oil, rich with polyn-saturi fast acids has got an exceptional nutritional value. It helps to protect our arteries. Anchovies and other fresh fish available daily provide a complete nutritional input and at the same time grant an antioxidant action and a low fat contribution. Our cheese, particularly Buffalo mozzarella plays a very relevant role in nutrition because it’s rich in calcium and proteins, balanced in fats. That’s particularly worth as for children and teen-agers.