Puntata 1 - Perché è importante parlare di cibo?

Hello patients, I'm Dr. Giuseppe Tartaglione, a family doctor who will accompany you on this trip entitled "The food will save us" to discover everything that counts in the world of food, from the field to the table, between theory and practice, with complex retroscenes and false myths. The question of today is why it is important to talk about food? Well, talking about food is important for infinite reasons, but I would like to focus on two special days. First, the food is health, environment, ethics, politics, and much more that we will discover together in the next episodes, but not considering these spatulas means being like a ant trying to understand how a elephant is crawling on its back, because, as we will see, food constitutes the primary connection between human health, environmental sustainability and social justice. It is precisely because of this that the food has a central role in the field of so-called circular health, a concept that recognizes the planet Earth as a closed ecosystem and admits that the health of all forms of life that inhabit it is strongly interconnected. In this context, it appears evident the responsibility that humanity has in the confrontations of the planet Earth, in quality of predominant species, and the efforts that it must put in the field to protect this unimaginable well. The real problem concerns, without further ado, the confusions of the lagoon around this issue, which is often undervalued, given to countless people and delegated to others. It is therefore that the journalist Michael Pollan asserts that the most natural of human activities, choosing things to eat, has become, in some way, an enterprise that requires a remarkable help from the experts. And then, here with my podcast, to give you the tools and finally make you autonomous. Second, food is a real weapon. In particular, it is a weapon of mass prevention, because the impact of food and, in general, of the diet on health and well-being is really huge. A small incision. The word "diet" comes from Greek and means lifestyle, not restrictive food regimes to keep for a short period of time at the end of overcoming the usual test, which then, when it comes to diet, immediately comes to mind a patient of mine who told me to follow the spiritual diet and, seeing me with an interrogative face, explained "Doctor, does it mean to eat every grain of God or to hope for the miracle? " Exactly he said. Speaking of spirituality, however, let's start with an issue. Food is not a faith, it does not have to be believed. It is a fact that eating in a rather than in another way has repercussions on health. Certainly it is not the panacea of all evil, but, together with physical activity, it constitutes the basis of the pyramid of health, not that the essential point of departure on the road towards well-being. A correct lifestyle, in fact, is useful not only to reduce the risk of getting sick, but also to live longer and to reach a state of complete well-being and physical psyche. As I see it, health does not have to be a turning point, but a precious resource, without which it is almost impossible to express its own personal potential. So, health as a means to reach the end of expression of our potential. We need to take care of health until we are in possession, without taking it for granted, which then the Western society is very focused on the fear of death, even if at the same time they are running away from thought. And this toy makes lose sight of a more subtle enemy, the disability. At the end of the nine hundred, in fact, it was characterized by two phenomena of remarkable negative impact on the quality of life, because linked to the increase in the incidence, also in the youth, of many diseases chronic degenerative and of the disease has been correlated. The first is the epidemiological transition, whether the lowering of mortality is corresponding to an increase in morbidity. Translated, despite the length of the average life, there has not been any damage in terms of years of life in health. The second is called the extension of morbidity, that is, the more precociously a chronic disease attacks an individual, the more likely it will be years of life that will lose him or will have to live sick. Certainly, death is inevitable and one of the goals of medicine remains the prevention of precocious deaths. But if precocious deaths take years to our life, it is otherwise true that the disability takes life to our years. So, let's stop for a moment and think about it. Every human being eats three times a day for the entire arc of life, and the food is a source of about 25,000 substances that possess a biological activity, among which almost all structural and functional molecules that serve the human body, the other is the oxygen that we introduce through breathing. It is therefore obvious that, if consumed in a non-rational way, the food can represent without further ado the favorite stimulus of the disease in the predisposed individual. And this is particularly true not on acute pathologies, but on the health of the organism in the long run, whose impact is so deep that it is possible to state that at each step we take all the effects of medical decisions. Think that the wrong diet is responsible for more deaths than any other risk factor. It is said that 11 million deaths per year for the wrong diet, against the 7 million deaths caused by smoke, which has been considered until a few years ago the single most important risk factor. To convince ourselves further about the importance of food are the data of the WHO, the World Health Organization, which focuses on the economic aspects and on the prevention of major chronic diseases of the generations. For example, but we will then have a way to deepen, such diseases are infarcts, ictus, obesity, methamphetamine, metabolic syndrome, many types of tumor, etc. According to the WHO, an annual investment less than a dollar per capita would allow to reduce cardiovascular diseases in the world with huge economic savings for collectivity in Western countries. In addition, the WHO estimates that 80% of the premature deaths related to the main diseases of the generations are preventable by only acting on physical activity and on food. This last one in particular would lead to the decrease of about 50% of the mortality for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and about 30% for oncological ones, with a much greater percentage if you associate yourself with smoking cessation. It is said that extremely high numbers, the thing starts to get very intriguing. I managed to study your curiosity, you can find other depths in my book "The food will save us" edited by Alteconomia.