What happened to the Mediterranean diet?

What happened to the Mediterranean diet?
It was about 70 years ago that Ancel Keys began to study the people of Piopi, Italy.
Ancel Keys, who followed this diet lived to be 101 years old.
Ancel Keys is the person after whom the famous K-Rations are named, used by American soldiers during world war two.
The people of that area had a diet that consisted of pasta, beans, breads, veggies, olive oil, fish and meat.
What stood out to Ancel Keys was how these people had a lower incidence of heart disease compared to other more well-fed people.
Today, however Italy has the biggest obesity problem in Europe.
Adolescents avoid the traditional diet and 36% of 12 to 16 year olds are overweight or obese.
Spain and Greece are also abandoning the diet.
Ancel Keys noted that the diet was never a diet of choice; rather when asked the people of Crete indicated they would have preferred to eat more meat.
Now with more affluence people are eating four times more meet them in the fifties, and the prevailing dive looks a lot more like the American diet and McDonald's.

Orginal NPR podcast is here: