How we research these pages

Food writing is easy to fake and hard to check. This page says where the information on this site comes from, what we refuse to do with it, and how to correct us.

Where the guidance comes from

Anything on this site that describes the Mediterranean pattern itself — which foods sit at the base, how often fish appears, what happens to red meat — is taken from organisations that publish nutrition guidance, and the page names which one and links to it. The ones we use most:

• American Heart Association — What is the Mediterranean Diet?
• Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, The Nutrition Source — Mediterranean Diet
• Mayo Clinic Diet — Mediterranean Diet 101
• Oldways — Mediterranean Diet & Pyramid
• MedlinePlus (US National Library of Medicine) — Mediterranean diet
• NIH StatPearls — Mediterranean Diet
• USDA FoodData Central, for anything about the composition of a specific food

What we do when the sources disagree

They often do, and the honest thing is to show it rather than average it into a number nobody published. Fish frequency is a mild example: Harvard and Oldways say at least twice a week, the Mayo Clinic Diet says two to three times. Alcohol is the sharp one — the organisations above take genuinely different positions, one of them does not mention it at all, and more than one warns people who do not drink against starting. So this site does not present a daily glass of wine as settled advice, and it attributes every quantity to whoever published it. You can see that laid out on what the Mediterranean diet actually is.

The rules we write under

• We report; we do not promise. We will tell you what an organisation says. We will not tell you what a plan will do to your health, your weight or your bloodwork — nobody honest can.
• No invented numbers. If we cannot source a figure, we write around it rather than estimating one. That is why you will not find prices here: they move too much and vary too widely to state.
• No calorie targets in our own voice. If a calorie figure appears at all it is quoted and attributed. We do not set them.
• No borrowed authority. No fabricated dietitian, no invented reviewer, no credential we do not hold. See the medical disclaimer.
• Recipes and plans are written to be cooked. Every meal named on this site is a real dish with real components that an ordinary supermarket sells.

How pages get updated

Guidance changes, and pages here get revisited when it does — when a source we cite republishes, when something turns out to be unclear, or when a reader tells us a page is wrong. Where a page carries a review date, that date is real.

One thing we are deliberately silent about: some widely repeated claims about official dietary guidance are currently in flux, and rather than repeat what competitors assert we have left them off the site until we can check the primary document ourselves. An absence here is sometimes a decision.

Tell us we are wrong

If a page is inaccurate, out of date, or just unhelpful, the contact form reaches us. Corrections get made and we do not quietly delete the problem.