Greece, the nation that gave rise to the idea of well-formed muscular men in the name of Adonis, now has the highest prevalence of obesity in the EU, according to a report issued yesterday.

"Greece today is the EU state with the highest average body mass index and highest prevalence of overweight [people] and obesity," says the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation report.

It reveals that the XXXL factor is one effect of a dramatic retreat from the Mediterranean diet in the region itself.

Josef Schmidhuber, an FAO senior economist, said people, not only in southern Europe, but also in north Africa and parts of Asia, were increasingly eating food that was "too fat, too salty and too sweet". The diet of fruit and vegetables, taken by their forebears, was in "a moribund state".

His findings appear in a report given to a workshop on Mediterranean products, organised by the California-Mediterranean Consortium of academic institutions.

Schmidhuber said that in 40 years, up to 2002, there had been a 20% rise in the average daily calorie intake of people living in the former 15-nation EU - but in the countries bordering the Mediterranean the increase had been steeper. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus and Malta had increased calorie consumption by an average of 30%. Three-quarters of the Greek population was overweight or obese by the end of that period.

Spain, Greece and Italy are now the EU's biggest consumers of lipids (fats and oils), the report says. In Spain fat made up 25% of the diet 40 years ago but now accounts for 40%, the FAO said. But sedentary lifestyles, supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, and a fall in home cooking, were also to blame, it said.