How about a heady minestrone brimming with bright zucchini and carrots, green beans and butternut squash, fragrant garlic and onion, and slivers of plump cabbage leaves for dinner?

Or perhaps you would prefer a simple pizza slathered with ruby-red tomato sauce and flecked with fresh basil? Maybe artichoke hearts and tomatoes stuffed with minced onions, cilantro, and a rainbow of chopped bell peppers, Moroccan-style, are more your speed. Chilled tomato and pepper gazpacho, anyone? A Greek eggplant salad with red bell peppers, tomatoes, and wild marjoram?

Or maybe just a simple antipasto featuring grilled vegetables, marinated olives, and ratatouille?

Fresh and plentiful in the Mediterranean region, vegetables and herbs give traditional Mediterranean cuisine much of its character and flavor, not to mention its beauty and vibrant color.

The traditional Mediterranean diet is naturally heavy on vegetables-not surprising, considering the garden-friendly Mediterranean climate. Traditionally, many people in the Mediterranean made their living farming the land. Others simply grew food to feed their own families.

What would classic Mediterranean cuisine be without vegetables? From eggplant Parmesan and tomatoes Provençal to stuffed vine leaves and spinach-cheese pie, vegetables provide the people of the Mediterranean with variety, color, and flavor without the high cost of meat-based meals. But vegetables, it seems, do much more than provide low-cost meals for people eating them in great quantities in the Mediterranean.

Many of the health benefits of the traditional Mediterranean diet are undoubtedly due to the high proportion of fresh vegetables.

Many studies have examined the protective effect of vegetable consumption against certain chronic diseases. Some have uncovered an inverse association between vegetable and fruit consumption and the risk of many types of cancers, especially cancers of the upper respiratory and digestive tracts, lungs, stomach, pancreas, and cervix, as well as colorectal and ovarian cancers.

Could vegetable consumption in the Mediterranean be linked to low chronic disease rates? Evidence mounts to support this theory, even when the evidence doesn’t directly involve the Mediterranean. Not too long ago, researchers Kristi Steinmetz, Ph.D., R.D., and John Potter, M.D., Ph.D., compiled more than two hundred population and animal studies that looked at plant food consumption and cancer rates.

Indeed, there appears to be a strong relationship between plant food consumption and cancer rates. The researchers could only speculate that cancer can be a disease resulting from a diet devoid of sufficient amounts of plant foods.

Human bodies, it seems, are better able to maintain and even regain their health when plant foods make up the majority of calories in the diet. But that is no surprise to people studying the cuisine and health status of people living in the Mediterranean.

High vegetable consumption seems to have a profound effect on the occurrence of other chronic diseases, not just cancer. The risk of heart disease, arthritis, macular degeneration (age-associated loss of sight due to gradual degeneration of the macula, a part of the retina), age-related cognitive decline (such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia), and other age-related health problems may all be reduced as vegetable consumption increases.

In addition to decreasing the risk of chronic diseases, research suggests that once chronic disease is present, certain components in vegetables may slow or even reverse the progress of the disease.

This process occurs perhaps by offering a boost to the immune system, as well as assisting in the fight against cell-damaging free radicals (more on free radicals later in this chapter).

In short, research on many fronts strongly suggests that a plant-centered diet rich in vegetables, as well as fruits and whole grains, may add both quality and quantity to your years