The Mediterranean Diet is the world's most sustainable food tradition. Developed across the centuries along the shores of the Mediterranean, it is based on seasonality, locality, freshness and minimal processing - helping to give answers to some of the most urgent problems today.

Award winning ‘green chef’ Xavier Pellicer visits an organic vegetable field outside Barcelona, which supplies his restaurant with produce, while London-based Chef Marianna Leivaditakis explains her connection to the land, sea and mountains of Crete. She seeks to bring back this way of life, which pushed her ancestors to respect the environment.

Rare film archive of the Cyclades in the 1950’s brings alive daily life on this unique island archipelago, which has combined seasonality with local agricultural products and a scarcity of water for thousands of years. For Professor Antonia Trichopoulou, the Cyclades drew on a tradition of poverty to create a unique tradition which respected the environment. She believes that this can help inspire the birth of a "Planeterranean diet", one healthiest for our bodies and the planet. At the Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastian, the Predimed team collaborates with chefs and dieticians to create recipes which are healthy, tasty and sustainable: a perfect meal.

Series Description

Food has a great influence on our well being and our body. Everybody knows that the Mediterranean Diet, consisting of plant based foods like vegetables, grains, nuts, legumes and fruits, with few or no animal products - is good for our health. Only few of us know, however, how particular plants affect different parts of our body, our heart and mind or how the food we eat can act as medicine, if used correctly. The Perfect Meal series follows five leading international scientists who gradually uncover the secret mechanisms of the Mediterranean Diet and reveal how certain ingredients and combinations of plant based foods can protect us from obesity, cardiovascular diseases, cancers and brain- ageing.