Healthy Food in Italy

Half a million Italians are obsessed with healthy Food, Healthy Food List peering labels and vote for dishes penitential. A fashion, according to experts, that can spill over into mania or even a syndrome alimentaredi VERA Schiavazzi

Healthy food obsession when you see an enemy at the table

THE Founding Father (involuntary) was Woody Allen. There is a movie in which the actor-symbol of the neuroses Westerners do not watch the food, any food, with a look of fear mixed with disgust: "I never eat oysters. Food like dead. Not sick, not wounded, died. "Close relative of hypochondria and rufofobia, the fear of dirt, orthorexia, or craze right food is an obsession, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say a fashion, that as soon as it is detected already been targeted by those who feels under observation vegans and raw food first of all, two growing categories (six million Italians would have already given up meat and fish, and among them 10 percent of any food of animal origin), sportsmen (for them l 'coupled between performance and power is central), men and women crazy for her beauty and "purity" within. And if by Woody Allen the fear of what is in the pot is avowedly irrational, ironic and fluctuating, a bit 'like that for sex, drift mania of the new warriors of the food leaves no survivors.

It turns into a "hunt poison" which eventually lose taste, pleasure, passion. We recognize the supermarket, where they spend long moments to scan the labels in the store where you interrogate bio deeply committed helpless, in the office where containers arrive with more or less full of designer-made vegetables cook at home. And the restaurant, from which they can abstain and where, however, feel uncomfortable. The phenomenon is growing. They say two recent studies, one from the University of Catanzaro Italian and Dutch scientists Knowing Robert and David Eisenberg, whose results were presented at the International congress research on integrative medicine and health in Portland.

It is confirmed by the estimates of the Ministry of Health in Italy: about three million people who suffer from eating disorders fifteen percent is made of orthorexics.

The percentages are growing everywhere. The word was used for the first time in 1997 by Steven Bratman, but twelve years later was officially recognized by the British government, while in Italy the most recent report comes from researchers at the Department of Health Sciences, University of Magna Grecia Catanzaro ("Orthorexia nervosa: an eating disorder common in athletes") that reveals how the 15 percent of athletes is at risk.

Reported risks, arrived countermoves. Ettore Pelosi, nutritionist and Turin marathon runner, was among the first graduates of the master's degree in nutrition vegetarian and vegan Polytechnic University of Marche (the only one in Italy, while similar courses are common in universities in California, even under the pressure of the Vegan Society). "Sport - says Pelosi - encourages us to think about what we put into the pot on substances that we need and healthier choices. From there, a short step: many of my patients are racing activities and have abandoned the steak, the My task is to build with them a balanced diet. as for me, I consider myself an omnivore selective: I have not signed a contract with an undertaking not to eat meat or fish, most simply want to get to know the origin of the foods that consumption ".

Already But awareness and phobia are two different things: even the 220,000 visitors to the Salone del Gusto in Turin just concluded in search of food "good, clean and fair" to the philosophy of Slow Food, but I am also willing to give yourself a tear to the rule, and do not care (like real orthorexics) that the dish they eat has never even been touched by a "bad" food. According to Lorenzo Maria Donini, Professor of Food Science at La Sapienza, the priests of the food "pure" proceed by elimination: "It begins with a first-class and continue with the other: via the supermarket vegetables that may contain pesticides, via the long-life milk, via the butter, sugar away ... A little 'as the collective psychosis that occur during epidemics such as "mad cow" disease or avian influenza. But those are understandable, it is temporary behavior. More attention is necessary, however, when a person behaves this way for months or years. "

A philosopher Roberto Esposito calls the obsession with self-defense, the same that could lead us to live in a sterile capsule to get to a hundred or a hundred and fifty years (the most deadly boredom) the "paradigm immune." "The strengthening of procedures for the protection of the life - notes Esposito - threatens to capsize into their opposite, sickening life." The fear of eating, contaminated, not to discover the hidden enemy in a salad or in a seemingly innocent pizza overflowing with gluten, salt, and white flour also hurts to social relations: an invitation to dinner turns into a nightmare, a travel is out of the question (or is faced with a suitcase full of fingers of the preferred brand), the refrigerator's girlfriend looks like the cave of the witches. The girlfriend, because the new obsession, unlike most widespread and well-known anorexia and bulimia, it seems to affect mostly males. It affects new mothers, it is true, however, that "healing" is often in contact with a routine nannapappa- home-office that does not allow too many caveats. The Peter Pan gym, however, carefully cultivate their new neurosis: "In two months I combined two dinners with many of my fellow course zumba dance - tells of www. Pianetadonna fannysingle, forty Milan - The first was a teetotaler and non-ate starchy foods, the second was vegan and he chose a restaurant from suicide., I wonder what has changed since we went to high school and the boys abbuffavano while we were trying to lose weight? ".

A very good question, which hides another: and if this were one of the many lands where males and females have exchanged the roles? And the orthorexic pledged to remain spotless in the stomach and the soul was nothing more than the heir of the old aunt who washed his hands twenty times a day? To him, to them, explain the research Donini, you no longer tastes and aromas, in return, the memory for the calories of individual foods and their percentage of saturated and unsaturated fatty grows day by day. Friends refuse contagion, and little by little they leave, after being accused of being "people who can not love yourself." Vinciguerra Paola and Giorgio Calabrese, a psychotherapist and a nutritionist, indicate in their "Stress & Diet" (Kowalski) missteps to avoid in order not to fall into the new disorder: stop living running, have a more natural approach with food and offer it to the children, have breakfast and do not use meals as a substitute for other pleasures.