The Greek food fight - The Best from Greece

AS IF she didn’t have enough on her plate already, Athena Linou is now on a nationwide crusade against fatty foods.

Prime Minister George Papandreou recently appointed Linou to head the new National Committee for Greek Nutrition. She already wears three hats: she is professor of epidemiology at the Athens University Medical School, president of the Institute of Preventative Medicine, Environmental and Occupational Health (a non-governmental organisation she established with her husband, also a doctor, in 1991) and part of a team of scientists investigating whether high rates of cancer mortality in Oinofyta, western Attica, are linked to high levels of nickel and chromium in the Asopos River.

The Athens News caught up with Linou, who is also a mother of five, before she left for Brussels to attend a high-profile gathering of nutrition and public health experts on May 31.

“My job on the committee is to promote Greek nutrition in the country and abroad,” she says. “Greeks’ health is deteriorating. There is great potential to improve the health of the Greek people.”

The new committee - a brainchild of the prime minister - is made up of representatives from five ministries: health, education, culture, regional development and agriculture.

“This is the first time that all these ministries have come together to promote the Greek diet,” Linou says. “We recently published our first report outlining what must be done.”

Though funding is a problem - there is no state funding available - the former Harvard University professor says she is seeking European Union sources to cover the cost of public awareness campaigns and other initiatives. She’s also using the social media - Twitter and Facebook - to reach out to the public. A new blog, Eat the Greek Way, was launched by the nutrition committee last month.

Get them while they’re young

Linou has lots of ideas about how to get Greeks to throw junk food out of their daily diet.

Children are at the top of the committee’s food chain. She says she is “distressed” by the fact that most school-age children snack on croissants, cookies and chocolate milk during recess. “We’ve had several meetings to discuss what types of food should be allowed to be sold at schools,” Linou says. “We want at least to ban croissants, cheese and spinach pies - not because they are necessarily bad, but because the ingredients used to make them may include lots of trans-fats that can be worse than eating animal fat.”

The proposal, she adds, “is seriously being discussed at the education ministry.”

Linou says she wants to rewrite the school canteen menu. She wants to allow only nuts, bread, cheese and fruit, as well as juice, milk and yoghurt - food without any added sugar.

“Teachers have warned us that older students in middle or secondary school may simply go buy snacks from shops out of school or they might even have their junk food delivered to them during their break,” she says. “But even so, I still feel that it is necessary for schools to offer the right food and create a culture. We have to send a positive message.”

Cooking up tourism

Linou is also working closely with the tourism ministry. She says promoting the traditional Greek diet - famous for increasing longevity - can attract tourists. Selling the Mediterranean diet to tourists is something that other countries like Spain have been doing for years.

Common to a number of countries around the Mediterranean basin, the Mediterranean diet has been associated with low rates of heart disease. The traditional Greek diet is high in mono-unsaturated fats such as olive oil and also relies heavily on whole-grain cereals, fruits and vegetables, fish and low consumption of animal fats.

Linou noted that “in its report, the committee has stressed the need to promote culinary travel and promote the health aspects of the Greek diet”. This is something that the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises, Sete, also stressed in its annual report last year about the future prospects of Greek tourism.

“Even though the Mediterranean diet and the Greek diet have lots in common like the use of olive oil as a main ingredient, there are other features of the Greek diet that have not been fully explored,” Linou says. “This is why we believe that we have to stress the Greek diet - not only its ingredients, but how these ingredients are used and how the Greeks eat. Eating is connected to celebrating. It’s also slow eating. It’s a whole culture. This is something that is being highlighted in more and more studies.”

The junk food generation

GREEK children are growing up fat, according to researchers at the Agricultural University of Athens.

The results from the Greek Childhood Obesity (Greco) study suggest a very high prevalence of obesity among Greek children and a very low adherence rate to the traditional Mediterranean diet.
Children in Greece eat more salty snacks, sweets and food high in sugar than fruits and vegetables, according to Antonis Zampelas, who headed the research. He says current childhood obesity rates in Greece are among the highest in Europe.

“Around 30 percent are overweight and 12 percent are obese,” Zampelas noted. “This is an extremely high score and the indication is that it is getting worse.”

“Only around 4 percent of the children have an optimal Mediterranean diet,” he added.

Some 5,000 Greek schoolchildren between the ages of 10 and 12 from around the country participated in the study. The children were weighed and measured. They also answered a semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire about their dietary habits and physical activity with their parents.

Researchers found that one-third of the boys and girls were overweight. There was a prevalence of obesity among 12.9 percent of the boys and 10.6 percent of the girls. Only 4.3 percent of the children had an optimal Kidmed score, measured by the Mediterranean Diet Quality Index for Children and Adolescents.

Zampelas said busy schedules play a big role in the quality of food parents feed their children. According to the researcher, children of working mothers eat more junk food.

Back to the Overview

Homepage