[Gastronomic, food and nutritional aspects of oriental Andalusia]

Eastern Andalusia, is also named Highland Andalusia, because the elevated orography of the Betics mountain range, with the highest Iberian Peninsula summits. This region arose with the division of the Spanish territory by provinces and currently includes Almeria, Granada, Jaen. You should only stop and look into the bottom of our cooking pots to find the syncretism of the three monotheistic religions, Christianity, Jewish and Muslin, which mixed parties of each one with meals of the others, thus allowing the globalization of their gastronomies that remained until nowadays and makes difficult to find the actual origin of a particular meal recipe. Modern cooking tries to find the fusion between tastes and ingredients of traditional cooking with current knowledge and technology. The geographic and climate diversities in Eastern Andalusia are proportional to its pantry, which in turn is the source of its meal recipes. The population of Eastern Andalusia is moving away of the Mediterranean pattern and getting closer to the developed Western countries diet. This trend to decrease the consumption of proprietary Mediterranean foods seems to be maintained in the last years although some of them start to recover. In addition, some food groups e.g. meat and meat derivatives, pastries and sweets, with actual elevated consumption, tend to be moderated. The current food pattern for the whole Spanish population, as well as for Eastern Andalusia, is compatible with high intakes of saturated fat, and total and free sugars, and low intakes of fiber in a high percentage of the Spanish population as reported by the ANIBES study.