Mediterranean diet

I always wonder this:
Is the Mediterranean diet the actual food eaten in the region
*or*
The type of eating that Americans imagine when they think about the Mediterranean?

Im just going to throw this in- Lasagna could be considered Mediterranean.

I also wonder if some of the benefits of the Mediterranean diet are due to the quality of the food i.e. fresh produce, grown locally, picked and eaten promptly. The vitamin content must be higher than the tasteless fruit and veg which is picked before it’s ripe and air freighted around the world. Or the produce which takes MONTHS to ripen because the weather is so bad (yes chillies and peppers in my garden in the UK - I’m looking at you).

I just know that tomatoes and cucumber grown in the soil in the sun, rather than hydroponically in filtered UV, taste sooo much better.

It's become the generic go to diet and it's description is also quite generic and generalized without taking regional, cultural, traditions, availability into account but instead and when looking into the diet they all sing the same tune. France and Spain consumes more red meat and fat than other, other regions hardly consume any grain and dairy is for many a daily tradition. Most doctors in NA don't have the foggiest idea what the Med diet actually is and just offer it up from the sheer repetitive and accepted default diet when giving out advice for the people that need to change their lifestyles to help people to move away from the SAD diet. Consuming whole foods, regionally if possible, organic if possible is basically as effective.