In 1958, an American physiologist named Ancel Keys began one of the most ambitious nutritional studies ever conducted. He followed 12,000 men across seven countries — the United States, Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and Japan — for fifteen years, tracking what they ate and what happened to them.

The study had flaws, as all longitudinal research does. It has been debated, refined, and partially contested in the decades since. But one finding has survived every subsequent analysis, every methodological critique, every attempt to explain it away.

The men who lived longest, with the lowest rates of cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline and metabolic illness, were the ones eating closest to the traditional diets of Crete and southern Italy. Not because they were trying to be healthy. Because that was simply what grew there, and how it had always been prepared.

Keys called it the Mediterranean diet. The name stuck. The research that followed over the next seven decades is among the most consistent in nutritional science.

What the evidence actually shows

The Mediterranean diet is one of the most studied dietary patterns in human history. The volume of research is not the interesting part. The consistency is.

A 2013 landmark trial — the PREDIMED study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine — randomised 7,447 participants at cardiovascular risk into three groups: a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil, a Mediterranean diet supplemented with mixed nuts, and a control low-fat diet. The trial was stopped early. The Mediterranean diet groups showed a 30% reduction in major cardiovascular events compared to the control group. The effect was large enough that continuing the control condition was considered ethically problematic.

A 2021 meta-analysis in BMJ reviewed 41 systematic reviews and found that adherence to a Mediterranean dietary pattern was consistently associated with reduced all-cause mortality, lower incidence of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, and neurodegenerative conditions including Alzheimer's disease.

The cognitive findings are particularly relevant. A 2015 study in Neurology followed 447 participants over four years and found that those eating a Mediterranean diet showed significantly less brain atrophy, better memory retention, and slower cognitive decline than those eating a standard Western diet. The researchers estimated the difference in brain ageing at approximately 5 years.

Five years of cognitive reserve. From food.

Why it works — and why it is harder to replicate than it looks

The Mediterranean diet is not a list of foods. This is the most common misunderstanding about it, and the one that explains why most attempts to adopt it outside of its original context produce mediocre results.

It is a way of eating — characterised by abundance of vegetables, legumes, whole grains and fruit; olive oil as the primary fat source; moderate consumption of fish and fermented dairy; minimal red meat; and almost no processed or industrialised food.

But the mechanism behind its effects is not reducible to any single component. Researchers initially focused on olive oil's oleic acid content. Then on the polyphenols in vegetables and wine. Then on the omega-3 fatty acids in fish. Then on the prebiotic fibre in legumes and whole grains feeding the gut microbiome.

The answer, increasingly, is that it is all of these things together — what nutritional scientists call a synergistic dietary pattern, where the components interact in ways that individual supplements cannot replicate. A 2020 review in Cell found that the gut microbiome of people eating a traditional Mediterranean diet showed significantly higher microbial diversity, which is consistently associated with better immune function, reduced systemic inflammation, and more stable mood and cognitive performance.

This is why you cannot take an olive oil capsule and reproduce the effect. The diet works because of what it contains, how those components interact, and critically — what it does not contain.

The longevity villages

The data from the Blue Zones adds another layer that the clinical trials don't capture.

Blue Zones — a term coined by researcher Dan Buettner based on demographic work published in National Geographic and later in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine — are five regions in the world where people consistently live to 100 at rates ten times higher than the United States average: Sardinia in Italy, Okinawa in Japan, Nicoya in Costa Rica, Ikaria in Greece, and Loma Linda in California.

Two of the five are Mediterranean. And the dietary patterns of Sardinia and Ikaria are almost identical in their structure: plant-forward, legume-heavy, olive oil as the primary fat, small portions of animal protein, fermented foods, minimal sugar, and food that is grown locally and eaten seasonally.

What is striking about the Blue Zone research is that it confirms the clinical trial findings through an entirely different methodology. These people were not enrolled in a study. They were not following a protocol. They were eating the way their grandmothers ate, in places where the industrial food system had not yet fully arrived.

The longevity was a consequence of how they lived. The food was central to that.

What this has to do with a lunch in Dubai

I am not suggesting that a single corporate lunch changes a lifespan.

But I am suggesting that the cumulative effect of what senior professionals eat — day after day, event after event, working lunch after working lunch — adds up to something measurable. And that the default of corporate catering, built around visual abundance and short-term satisfaction, is working in the opposite direction from everything the research recommends.

The executives and decision-makers we work with in Dubai are, almost universally, people who take their performance seriously. They train. They sleep. Many of them have coaches, advisors, protocols for almost every dimension of how they work. And then they sit down to a lunch of refined bread, heavy protein, rich sauce, and a dessert that will guarantee a difficult afternoon.

Not because they don't know better. Because nobody thought to do better on their behalf.

This is the gap SALVA occupies. Not as a health food company — we are not that, and we do not want to be. But as people who believe that food prepared from the right ingredients, in the right quantities, in a way that the body recognises and processes without effort, changes what is possible in the hours that follow.

The research on the Mediterranean diet is not about longevity in the abstract. It is about sustained function. A body and a brain that continue to work well, over time, because they were given what they actually needed rather than what looked impressive on a table.

What Paolo cooks

The ingredients Paolo sources from Tuscany and Umbria are not chosen because they are Italian or because they carry a good story — though both are true.

They are chosen because they are, almost exactly, the ingredients that appear most consistently across seven decades of Mediterranean diet research: ancient grains with intact nutritional profiles, cold-pressed olive oil from centuries-old trees, dried legumes from producers who have never changed their methods, seasonal vegetables with the microbiome diversity that industrial growing eliminates.

These are not exotic ingredients. They are simple ones — prepared with the attention that simple things require, in portions that leave the body feeling supplied rather than burdened.

That is, in the end, what the research on longevity keeps returning to. Not supplements. Not protocols. Not optimisation in the contemporary sense.

Just food that was grown well, prepared with care, and eaten in the right amount.

The oldest populations in the world have known this for generations.

We are bringing it to a boardroom near you.