The Italian Reset Diet

CHAPTER 1

THE “HEALTHY” MEDITERRANEAN DIET

Premise

The end of the Second World War was a very important and significant event in the history of mankind. Other than redistributing the population map of the West, in the early post-war period (around 1950), a true food revolution began to put strain on our bodies. The human body functions like a well-oiled machine, but when atypical dietetic conditions occur, it needs time to make the best of these new conditions. Yes, our genes do not mutate easily; it takes thousands of years for significant change in the human genome. When we input something in our immune system that is not recognized, the body does not work properly. It is up to us, maybe with the help of a nutritional biologist, to bring everything back to normal.

The consequences of this food revolution presented themselves almost immediately. In fact, from 1950 to today, numerous new pathologies have appeared, and they are putting the best researchers in the pharmaceutical field to the test. We used to fight bacterial infections; today these are gone, making way for metabolic, tumoral and autoimmune diseases, whose causes they say are unknown. To name just a few: type 2 diabetes is affecting 246 million people, and in Italy alone there are 6 million patients with thyroid dysfunctions. In addition, there are 3 million people with multiple sclerosis, and 1,000 tumor cases are discovered in Italy every day. We could go on and on with these dismal statistics, but better to stop and make sense of it all. Despite these frightening data, we continue to believe that medicine has taken several steps forward and that life-spans have increased; honestly, I do not believe that it is anyone’s dream to live to 85 if it means being a depressive slave to ten medications, with fewer organs than before and with an inability to walk autonomously. Do you? I really do not think so.

Even today, we continue to ignore the close connection between the explosion of illnesses and the aforementioned food revolution—on the contrary, we are constantly invited to follow the “healthy Mediterranean Diet,” recognized ever since 2010 as being on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. The consequences of these facts are devastating: I find myself in the office writing up food regimens for children with fatty livers, and rebalancing the bodies of adolescents dealing with the onset of lupus erythematosus, psoriasis, and various autoimmune diseases. What saddens me the most is that every day, when I ask new patients about their medical history upon their preliminary analysis, many of them sit down and say that there is nothing wrong with them. Considering their (maybe even a tad advanced) age, I find myself insisting they reflect on their condition:

Me: “Ma’am/Sir, are you sure you do not have any ailments?”

Patient: “No, doctor, I’m sure.”

Not convinced, I ask the customary question:

Me: “Are you on any medication?”

Patient: “I only take a pill for my diabetes and one for my blood pressure.”

It is moments like these that clue me into how much the average Westerner is used to relying on drugs, and to being in constant contact with diseases—so much so that they are considered a part of us. More depressing still, after reprimanding them for neglecting their own health, I often hear: “Doctor, if you call these illnesses…” or “I take the pill and I’m fine.” It is then that I understand that it is not really their fault, but rather society’s. Society does not facilitate the spreading of health awareness. Eastern populations, though not as technologically advanced, have an inherent respect for their own bodies. In Japan and India, for example, they live using natural treatment methods for their bodies and minds, which are methods available to all, and that are inculcated in them since childhood. Health education and respect for our own bodies are the really important things in this life. We should consider ourselves lucky that our conscience or spirit, (depending on one’s beliefs), came to be in a healthy body. And yet what do we do instead? We destroy our cells with the crap that is offered us every day. Adults, with their food miseducation—but even worse, with their arrogant assumption that they are perfectly able to safeguard their children’s health—convince their kids that the products they are consuming are the best for keeping in shape. Chocolate and candy are the rewards for children who receive good grades or who do well in class. Holidays, religious or not, are a pretext for preparing lavish meals where the majority of guests, as soon as the guest of honor appears, fling themselves toward laden trays of food that is anything but natural. Sometimes we are so fixated on the food that we forget even to congratulate the honoree. And what kind of a party would it be if it did not end by gorging on sweets?

How the “Mediterranean Diet” Is Presented

She is the great media starlet, the “healthy” and historic “Mediterranean Diet.” On all public TV stations, there are exciting little stages where many professionals, supporters of the Mediterranean Diet, are invited. They all line up against the ill-fated nutritionist who, in accordance with his own work experience, found all of the holes in what is today listed as an Intangible Cultural Heritage element: the “Mediterranean Diet.” These little panels do nothing but confuse those people who, when in doubt, fall into theoretical “Do It Yourself” health paths, listening to a variety of canards such as “red meat causes tumors,” or “alkaline diets are miraculous,” or “carbohydrates constitute the main energy source of cells,” or “drinking lemon water in the morning cleans the overnight accumulation of mucus out from the intestines,” etc. The result? When these people convince themselves to come see me at my office, I have to resolve both the problems created by the hypothetical “Mediterranean Diet” and those caused by the “miraculous” alternative theories patients came across online.

As an occupational hazard, in addition to taking a patient’s medical history and asking in detail about their daily food habits, I tend to observe the food carts of patrons at the supermarket. Over the course of time, a thought has isolated itself in my mind, detached from all that was narrated to me during my study courses and during nighttime channel surfing, and I have come to the conclusion that it is the hypothetical “Mediterranean Diet” that has created this health crisis in the Western populace. Easy now—I too may be taken for a witch doctor by a couple of professionals who back the Mediterranean Diet, but no matter. The time has come to tell you what a “healthy” Mediterranean Diet is, and above all, how it came about. In time, you will come to understand how science, because of an affirmation typically inherent to its “scientific” research, manages to deceive itself and the rest of the population.

They tell us that the “Mediterranean Diet” is the food regimen that is been followed by the people who bordered the Mediterranean Sea, where the climate allowed many species of plants to grow for thousands of years—from vegetables to cereals and legumes. The great study that led to the discovery of the benefits of the “Mediterranean Diet” was made by an American researcher by the name of Ancel Keys, who, together with his team, came to Italy and a few other countries adjacent to the Mediterranean to figure out why cardiovascular diseases were almost non-existent in these specific areas. Ancel Keys’s team studied how these people ate, and were immediately astonished: the Mediterranean people, who had almost non-existent cardiovascular diseases, consumed lots of fats, primarily via eating dry fruits and most especially extra virgin olive oil. Keys continued his studies and concluded them with what is currently presented to us as the healthiest diet in the world: the “Mediterranean Diet.” The diet is represented by the famous food pyramid that shows, at the very first and largest bottom step, what people should eat the most, and, alas, consume as their main meals: cereals (wheat, rice, oatmeal, etc.) and fruits and vegetables. Therefore, cereals are recommended for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yes, you heard that correctly: even after getting home at night, we should apparently be eating our beloved bread, in deference to one theory—the theory of the scale—which claims that it is quantity which creates health problems. Maybe, I say, but not in this case. What results is an obsessive compulsion (which turns into an actual mania) to weigh everything at all costs, with overly exact and expensive little food scales used to try to avoid an extra milligram of cereal.

As you will see in the following pages, I describe the consumption of carbs at night as a veritable bonanza for diabetes. And if this were not enough, we are even advised to consume the simple sugars found in fruit. But we will go over this in the following chapters. In my opinion, the horror of the diet they pass off as Mediterranean lies in the encouragement of the daily consumption of dairy because they say Mediterranean people consumed it during every meal.

Luckily, Italy’s extra virgin olive oil is also recommended for daily consumption. On the highest tier of the food pyramid we find meat, shellfish, eggs, legumes and seafood. Eggs, legumes and seafood on the last tier, together with meat? Mediterranean people really only ate fish twice a week? And legumes?

The “Mediterranean Diet,” in percentages, calls for the total daily calorie intake of carbs to be 55-65% (of which 10% is from simple sugars, thereby encouraging the consumption of glucose and fructose); 25-30% of calories in the form of fats, and the rest, (meaning a max of 15%), from proteins. Proteins are demonized together with fats as being harmful to one’s health. That is how you have the whole population flinging itself onto carbs and cereals for years, and glutinous grains in particular, which are anything but healthy. There is usually an argument whenever a patient, under the care of this pseudo “Mediterranean Diet,” substitutes wheat pasta with buckwheat pasta; he or she is declared reckless and gullible by his or her own physician for daring to consider ordinary pasta, (and white and refined pasta at that), the cause of his or her problems. Yet, just so we understand each other, buckwheat pasta has the same amount of carbs as ordinary pasta but of a different quality, and when you hear the physician whose care you are under for your food regimen, and who often specializes in everything but nutrition, say that a diet without carbs is a health risk, you ask yourself: “what do you mean, without carbs?” Surely, that physician has never read the nutritional value of buckwheat—otherwise he or she would not be making statements lacking any sort of knowledge in nutritional biology. Who is left picking up the bill, then? It is the poor patients who often find themselves almost forced to leave it to fate and flip a coin for advice on the right path to follow. Heads: “I’ll listen to the potbellied physician who suffers from diabetes.” Tails: “I’ll try this new theory by this fit young physician who has resolved his own health issues simply by consuming specific categories of food.”

What Was the True “Mediterranean Diet”?

Dear friends and readers, the true “Mediterranean Diet” dates back to the Greeks and the Romans, populations that shared the areas by the Mediterranean Sea. Surely, in those days, there was no physician on duty who recommended the proper food amounts each person needed to eat in order to maintain their ideal weight, or to optimize their health. People ate when they were hungry and, among the poorer echelons, whenever food was available. The cultivation of cereals existed back then too, but luckily for them, agriculture was not as intensive and the consumption of grains was limited to the period from July to December, (if there was a great harvest). For the rest of the year, people’s main meals were based on legumes and wild vegetables, and they ended with dry fruits/nuts. As for the dressing? Extra virgin olive oil.

Surely, breakfast did not consist of a cappuccino with a croissant on the side, nor did they drink warm milk with a tablespoon of sugar, and cookies! If those poor farmers had started their days with such a breakfast, they would not even have had the energy to lift the hoes onto their shoulders! Breakfast was usually at 9 in the morning, after having already put in 4 hours of work, and it was a savory breakfast based on legumes, eggs, and pieces of dry bread. As previously mentioned, because of the lack of flours, bread was not baked every day, but only on the weekend, and it was consumed in broken pieces as an accompaniment for legumes. If we take a look at the nutritional composition of legumes, we see that they contain three times the amount of proteins found in cereals while containing much fewer carbohydrates. Furthermore, they have a much different (and better) glycemic and insulin impacts compared to cereals.

The Romans and the Greeks were noted fishermen, and sheep-farming was very common as well, not to satiate milk-lovers but for the wool, a little bit of cheese, and meat (due to lack of pasteurization techniques, milk was not consumed all that often). The most widespread livestock species, then, were sheep and goats, not cattle; the latter were used as pack animals or for working in the fields.

As for fruit? Because of the lack of refrigeration, they could not preserve fruit all year. Fruit was consumed seasonally: apples and pears in September, persimmons in October and November. Then they waited for the warmer weather to start consuming apricots, strawberries, cherries, loquats, figs, etc. Certain fruits were dried so they could be eaten as sweets during festivities. I only wish that we would consume dried fruits as sweets today! Meanwhile, so-called “barbarians” actually ate only a few berries and nothing else. Nowadays, however, thanks to intensive cultivation, we eat fruit all year, in enormous quantities, including in the form of fruit juices. Fruit does not only mean fiber, vitamins and minerals, but also fructose, a sugar that is almost absent in green vegetables and that, when consumed in excess, becomes very dangerous for the liver, arteries and joints.

When it comes to the true “Mediterranean Diet,” the consumption of oily dry fruits (or nuts) during main meals as a second course or as a snack during working hours was very common, and they often substituted for bread or for other foods for long periods throughout the year.

The Discovery of America and the Death of the Mediterranean Diet

The year 1492 is a very important date, not only because of the discovery of this “new” land, but above all due to the ensuing consequences. The European colonists immediately understood the enormous potential to exploit this “new” territory: the flora and fauna were almost completely different compared to those of the Western world. The American food products we find on our tables today include:

● Borlotti and cannellini beans, which, because of their yield, went on to substitute cowpeas, which then started to gradually go extinct;

● Peanuts, which unfortunately partially substituted Mediterranean dry fruits/nuts;

● Corn, which is used as the main ingredient in polenta;

● Prickly pears;

● Pineapples and other types of fruit;

● Hot peppers, tomatoes, bell peppers, eggplants, and potatoes, which belong to the same plant family, the Solanaceae, (and we will see how they can cause serious problems for those who suffer from autoimmune diseases);

● Chocolate/cocoa, which was consumed in its bitter state by the American Indians. Yet the Spanish deemed it better to mix it with sugar, thus giving rise to the chocolate that conquered all the cafes in Europe. (And speaking of sugar, it was the very expanse of American soil which led to the great sugarcane plantations and then allowed the spread of the “sweet salt” in all of Europe.)

As you may have come to understand, when nutritional “experts” recommend a “healthy” dish of pasta with tomato sauce, deeming it the perfect “Mediterranean” dish, you get a pretty good idea of how “educated” they are. I certainly would not even let them write me up a Saturday cheat-night menu.

I hope that, at this point, a question has sprung forth in your mind: “But does the healthy Mediterranean Diet exist at all?” My answer is that it is called the Mediterranean Diet solely because when you are eating your pasta with tomato sauce you may be eating it in Italy; if you were on an island in the Atlantic if would be the Atlantic Diet. Joking aside, alas, the “Mediterranean Diet” no longer exists, but that does not mean we cannot honestly revive it again, making sure not to back the idea that in the “Mediterranean Diet,” one must eat a little bit of everything. Let’s just say that many experts love to be a little too egalitarian when it comes to food. I, on the other hand, love to improve people’s health, and if a particular food must be eliminated from a diet then it must be eliminated, period. Today, not even wheat is Mediterranean because of all the genetic selections that have taken place. Neither is milk, as its chemical composition totally changes because of pasteurization. Nor are many types of fruit, created by man through cross-breeding—genetic splices that would never occur in nature. What you eat every day is the fruit of human intelligence, which can think up of so much but seldom spares a thought to the unpleasant consequences that come with usurping Mother Nature’s place. Nature is very unforgiving.

Clinical Cases

● G.B., a 36-year-old female with fibromyalgia treated with morphine and antidepressants. After 20 days on the Italian Reset Diet, she solved her illness and discontinued the drug treatments.

● R.M., a 59-year-old female with hypertension, diabetes and migraines. After one month, she was able to control her blood sugar and blood pressure, and forgot about her migraines. After three months, she put aside all her medications, because all of her pathologies had disappeared. She lost 30 kg (approx. 66 lbs.) in five months.

● S.R., a 44-year-old male, lost 25 kg (approx. 55 lbs.) in three months and returned to his ideal weight.

● G.M., an 82-year-old male, successfully blocked his Parkinson’s tremors in one month. Today, he is able to walk and to eat without the fear of dropping the spoon from his hand. He has also resolved his insomnia issues. His tremors reappear only when he reintroduces wheat and dairy, which are severely forbidden, in his diet.

CHAPTER 2

THE HORRORS OF COMMON DIETETICS

Premise

Macro- and micronutrients are the components of all foods. Macronutrients are all the components that, among their functions, also provide energy: fats, carbohydrates and proteins. Micronutrients are all the components that do not provide energy, such as vitamins and mineral salts; rather, they enable all metabolic processes to take place within our bodies. Your food intake is heavily centered on the abuse of macronutrients, especially carbohydrates, but is very lacking in vitamins and minerals. This means that while your organic machine draws its daily energy from macronutrients, it cannot use them effectively because of the lack of micronutrients, which also serve as the body’s organic sweepers. And so toxins accumulate, causing weight gain at first and the onset of pathologies later on.

The Calorimetric Bomb and the Kilocalorie

The calorimetric bomb is an instrument used to determine the thermal power of a fuel. Its mechanism is simple: the container, a component of the calorimetric bomb, is filled with distilled water. Then a porcelain vessel, in which the substances to be analyzed are placed, is immersed therein. Pure oxygen is then injected into the container. The combustion is triggered by electrodes that enable the flow of energy toward the “fuel.” The generated heat will be absorbed by the distilled water and its temperature will rise, showing the reading on a thermometer. Through this equipment, scientists have had fun quantifying the caloric values of macronutrients, and therefore of all the foods we consume daily. I do not know about you—I may just be strange that way—but I have never seen a burner inside me! According to this concept, our bodies are regarded as a food-burning sack, not taking into consideration calories’ effect on our DNA and on our immune system. I will give you an example: if you took a kilogram of lead and a kilogram of feathers and threw them off the fifth floor, the lead would fall at a faster rate than the feathers because of air resistance, despite weighing the same amount. As far as food is concerned, these impact our bodies and our metabolism, which acts as our air resistance! Three hundred calories coming from legumes will be very different than three hundred calories coming from white flour, because the latter contains only energy without any minerals or vitamins. The ensuing impact on our bodies is catastrophic! The calorie concept is not totally wrong, but I think it is how it is applied that makes it totally useless if not potentially dangerous, because people convince themselves that they can eat their delicious crunchy snacks since they contain the same number of calories as a fresh piece of fruit. I have actually seen professionally-prescribed diets where these snacks, justified by their caloric value, were allowed as afternoon snacks. Can you imagine? It gives me the shivers! Happy people, totally unaware of the serious health impact of these foods, follow these diets and boast about eating this crap! This is why I have never written out an overly specific diet for my patients, instead opting for food regimens, and why I always worked on changing their lifestyles.

Fats Do Not Make You Fat

I believe that fats are one of the most important nutrients in people’s diets. In the classic diet, they are the macronutrients that provide the highest energy: 9 kcal/g. It is this characteristic of fats that has always made them the boogeyman of all diets:

“Watch out for fats or you’ll put on the pounds! Away with extra virgin olive oil! Nuts are forbidden! Eat chicken breast galore!” And people do lose weight like this, but with very unpleasant consequences, such as hair loss, loss of libido, the yo-yo effect, increased inflammation, and loss of skin tone. Do you get the message? The reason for the loss of skin tone in all these diets is the lack of fats, which are essential components of the cells in our bodies. Humans cannot do without fats. Primitive man primarily consumed dry fruits/nuts, oily seeds, fish, and the fatty parts of the animals they killed. Our metabolism is excellent at burning fats and cannot do without them.