“EAT a Mediterranean diet.” That’s the message disseminated by our benighted public health establishment.

Defining this concept is as tricky as wrestling with an eel, but government advisors waste no time pondering any philosophical or nutritional complications.

They don’t do complexity either because they see the public as children who must be addressed as simpletons.

So they traduce the rich food culture of Mediterranean countries shamelessly.

They tell us that ‘Mediterranean’ means consuming lots of fruit and vegetables, eating very little, if any meat, filling your plate with high fibre grains, and eschewing traditional fats, such as lard, suet, butter, beef dripping and duck fat, for liquid oils and low fat spreads.

READ MORE: Joanna Blythman: Omicron is being used to heighten fear levels. Don’t be spooked

Now, you’d think that anyone prescribing a Mediterranean diet for populations that do not live in that region might feel bound to set out the relevance of their recommendations.

Why should I, living in Scotland, or someone in Sweden, or Somalia, abandon my native food culture to embrace ingredients and eating habits from a distant zone, as characterised by advisors in Anglophone countries where obesity and diet-related disease is rampant?

And behind that necessary question lies an even more elementary one. Why should should we be railroaded into the foregone conclusion that there is only one universal prescription for a healthy way to eat?

Why aren’t our diet overlords punting the Nordic diet? That’s heaps of fish, ferments, cured pork, and liver.

Sweden even has its own visceral version of haggis: polsa.

Or why don’t they advocate a Japanese diet? Ahem, the slim, long-lived Japanese are big on fatty beef. Japan doesn’t fit their narrative.

I could argue convincingly that both Japanese and Nordic eating patterns are much more appropriate for our geography, and ultimately far better for our national health, than some misconstrued Mediterranean equivalent dreamed up dullard government dieticians who steadfastly ignore all emerging science that suggests otherwise.

But the White Saviour, post-colonial arrogance of these people is colossal. And destructive.

To get a taste of how resilient food cultures can be by undermined by these edicts, we can travel to the Nunavik region in Alaska, where the local health authority recommends an idiotically inappropriate ‘plant-based diet’, in the form of an igloo-shaped pictogram.

READ MORE: Eating lots of fruit and vegetables could be bad for your health, says Joanna Blythman

At its base, in place of fishy fat and flesh – staple, native foods that kept the Inuit people in great shape for millennia – the pictogram shows approving images of mangoes and pineapple.

Just the sort of hearty grub you need to thrive in Arctic temperatures. Not.

These sugary fruits have to be flown up from Mexico. Guess what? Rates of obesity, heart disease, and T2 diabetes are soaring in Nunavik.

Historically, the locals had no such health issues when they ate almost exclusively fat and protein from seal blubber and marine birds. Arctic peoples fared well when they stuck to the ingredients on their doorstep that they had evolved to eat.

There’s a learning outcome here: the composition of a nourishing diet will vary around the globe, according to specific geographical limits.

In nutrition, one size does not fit all.

Returning to the Mediterranean, the obvious question is wherever did these dietary ‘experts’ get the idea that Mediterranean people don’t eat red meat?

Have they never heard of, let alone tasted, sheftalia, the celebrated Cypriot, caul fat-wrapped sausage made from pork and lamb, or dropped in on a popular Tunisian “mechoui”, that’s a whole lamb cooked on a spit?

Have they missed out on the joys of Greek stifado – beef and onion stew – or never sunk their teeth into gyros: shavings of meat, usually pork? It’s only the national dish you’ll find on every corner from Thessaloniki to Crete.

You’d have to be exceptionally unobservant to visit Turkey without tripping over places selling kofta, and succulent Iskender kebab – usually lamb, sometimes beef.

In Sardinia, lamb, beef, and game cooked outdoors on a spit “alla brace” is so ubiquitous it can get boring. Please note that Provençal daube is made with chunks of beef, traditionally mature bull meat, not Quorn cubes.

Cured ham is the sine qua non of the Spanish diet. Corsicans will react very badly if you impugn the honour of their salted, dried, aged coppa (pork neck) while searching for a shop that sells tofu.

And from where does the preposterous vision of the Med as a wholegrain paradise come?

Apart from Palestinian freekeh, I can’t remember ever being served whole grains in the Mediterranean area. Refined grains – bulgur, couscous, rice – reign supreme.

Now, a study just published on the bones of victims of the 79AD eruption of Vesuvius provides evidence that the current interpretation of the Med diet defies historical fact.

Using chemical and physical analysis combined with statistical modelling, an international team of researchers examined the bone collagen – a protein that holds bone tissue together – of 17 skeletons from Herculaneum.

This provides us with a rare snapshot of ancient Roman eating patterns. Researchers found that cereal consumption was lower, and fish consumption higher than in the Mediterranean diet as now defined.

They also uncovered significant differences between the sexes: men ate more fish than women, who obtained more of their dietary protein from animal products: meat, eggs and dairy. Animal foods and fish were what kept the inhabitants of ancient Herculaneum going.

How different from contemporary mores, where ‘he’ typically chooses a steak while ‘she’ goes for the vegetarian option.

But expect no revisions of the modern Mediterranean diet from those government bods who advocate it. Their mission is ideological, and so they will simply double-down on 50 years of misinformation.

After all, evidence from 2,000,000 years of human evolution hasn’t troubled them to date. Humans rose to the top of the animal world because they predated other animals.

Show me the cultures that flourished almost exclusively on plants.

Direct me to data on all those ignored vegan civilisations. Did I miss them?

When the blood-thirsty Aztecs were sacrificing animals, were unsung plant-eating populations coexisting with them peacefully, braiding corn leaves?

I don’t think so.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.