Il futuro di chi vive oggi con consapevolezza
Translator: Michele Gianella
Reviewer: Alessio Politi
We’re getting older and older.
There are 14 million
old people in Italy today,
out of a total of 60 million Italians.
That’s a very good thing.
We live longer and longer, think of it.
Over the last 40 years, life expectancy
has increased by ten years.
Today, we are elder people at 65.
However…
we are getting older,
but we are not in a good shape,
we are worn out.
70 percent of us are hypertensive,
70 percent of us are dyslipidemic:
cholesterol, triglycerides.
20 percent of us are diabetic,
15 percent of us got a cancer,
15 percent of us had
a heart attack, or stroke,
and 60 percent of us have some handicap,
mobility and vision problems,
hearing impairments
and communication problems.
And 90 percent of us
take medicines every day,
except for medicines
for the nervous system:
sleeping pills, tranquilizers,
medicines to survive:
it’s a phenomenal business!
It’s very important,
the economy is good and we boost GDP.
The more we get sick,
the more we boost GDP.
What can we do
to counter this perverse finance?
We should not get sick.
The main factor,
the main public health problem today
is the so-called metabolic syndrome.
What diabetologists used to call
the deadly quartet:
high blood pressure;
bad blood fat;
high blood sugar and abdominal obesity.
Having three of these factors gets you
a diagnose of metabolic syndrome
which results in
a chronic inflammatory state,
that favours all today’s diseases.
It favours diabetes and heart attacks,
it favours cancer, Alzheimer’s disease,
liver cirrhosis, hepatic steatosis
and many other things.
It’s not so much obesity, our body mass,
which cause diseases;
you see, this is the mortality trend
related to the body mass index.
Very thin and very fat people die more.
Those with an intermediate index die less.
I’m here on the extreme left;
to reach the lowest mortality point
I’d put on 10 or 12 kilos.
Actually, the body mass index
is just not as much important
as the waistline.
Look how, with the same body mass,
mortality increases
in relation to the waistline.
And so I’m pretty good here
because I’m on the extreme left.
Waistline and blood sugar,
among all other factors
we have considered,
are the most reponsible
for the onset of cancer.
We have studied all these factors
on breast cancer;
you see, people with metabolic syndrome,
with at least three factors
of metabolic syndrome,
they are more than twice as likely
to develop breast cancer.
And women who have
developed breast cancer,
if they have the metabolic syndrome,
are twice as likely to develop metastases.
And the medical world completely
ignores this information.
Because there’s no medical representative
who put these studies
to the doctor’s table.
What can we do?
We can abide by the
European Code Against Cancer,
drafted by a World Health
Organisation working group.
In it we have examined all the studies
on the relationship
between diet and cancer,
in order to come up
with recommendations for citizens,
to reduce the incidence of cancer.
There are the recommendations
on tobacco, on keeping slim,
on physical activity
and these dietary recommendations:
base your diet
on whole grains, legumes,
vegetables and fruit,
including nuts, hazelnuts and almonds.
And people are amazed, they say:
“how can you eat legumes every day?”
They are the ones who only eat
lentil with Zampone on New Year’s Eve.
But if you think about it,
up to 70- 80 years ago,
before the development
of the food industry,
all the peoples in the world
were eating cereals and legumes every day.
Our Pasta e Fagioli, our Ribollita,
couscus with chickpeas in North Africa,
rice with soya in the East and so on.
It was our way of eating,
it was man’s food.
The Code then recommends:
avoid driking sugary drinks,
limit eating industrial foods,
rich in sugar and fat,
avoid processed meat
like our cold cuts,
that you limit eating red meat.
We have classified the 500,000 people
who have been participating in our study,
in the last thirty years.
We have been following 500,000 people
in Europe for almost thirty years.
If they comply, and fail to comply,
with these recommendations.
We have seen that those who respect them,
die less from cancer,
and from heart attacks.
They die less from respiratory,
digestive and infectious diseases.
If the digestive system works well,
our immune system works well too
and we also die less
from infectious diseases.
And let’s look what happens
to metabolic syndrome.
This is the risk of metabolic syndrome,
based on the number of recommendations
in the European Code against Cancer
that we follow,
the European Code against Chronic Diseases
and the European Code
against Premature Mortality.
So what should we eat?
We should eat whole grains, fibre.
This is the mortality pattern in Europe,
as a function of fibre consumption.
On the right we have those
who eat more than 30 grams of fibre a day,
on the left those who eat
the standard of 10, 15 grams
of fibre per day.
By eating fibre,
we can reduce mortality by 20%.
We can reduce mortality
by eating fruit and vegetables.
Five portions of fruit
and/or vegetables a day
reduce mortality by 25%.
At the same age,
at the same factors
that influence mortality,
15 grams per day of nuts,
hazelnuts and almonds,
reduce mortality by 20 percent.
So five almonds for breakfast,
fie almonds for lunch
and five almonds for dinner.
And how does the mortality rate increase
with the consumption of cold cuts?
200 grams per day
double the mortality rate.
How does the mortality rate increase
with the consumption
of fresh red meat?
Less than cold cuts, but it does.
Red meat is associated
with diabetes, heart disease,
cancer of the intestine and stomach.
How does the mortality rate increase
as a function of
the number of soft drinks,
sugared or artificially sweetened drinks?
Two glasses per day
increases mortality by 17 percent,
in our large study;
but a 30 percent increase
in cardiovascular mortality.
And what surprised us a little bit is,
“zero” drinks are even more harmful
than sweetened drinks.
And there’s a reason for that.
We must not forget physical activity,
because here we see the influence
of the Mediterranean diet,
the bottom line,
and physical activity.
And you see that the more
the Mediterranean diet increases…
These recommendations
of the European Code Against Cancer
[are] basically the traditional
Mediterranean diet.
The more Mediterranean the diet,
the more mortality is reduced.
But if you don’t do physical activity
there is still a rather high mortality.
Conversely, if you eat very badly
your risk is lowered by physical activity.
Let’s not forget tobacco,
this is a great study
on millions of English women.
And you see how it increases -
these are age-dependent mortality rates.
The older we get, the more
mortality increases, of course.
But the upper line is
the smoking women,
the lower line is the mortality
of non smoking women.
There’s a lifespan gap
of no less than eleven years.
Heavy and light smokers, on average,
sacrifice ten years of life.
But man does not live on bread alone.
This is a beautiful study
made by my colleagues
at Harvard University,
who 40 years ago recruited
120,000 nurses in the United States.
These nurses, every few years
fill out a questionnaire about their life,
what they eat and their physical activity.
It’s a very important study,
that gave us a lot
of very useful information,
to establish that we can reduce
the incidence of chronic diseases
by at least 70 percent.
Well, in the questionnaire
was also a question:
how often do you go to your Temple?
Because they were Catholic,
Protestant, Jewish and so on.
And the nurses who said
that they were going to the temple
twice a week or more,
all else being equal -
age, tobacco consumption,
food habits, family income,
physical activity,
social support indexes -
all important factors to prevent death -
die 33 percent less.
And what do these nurses do
when they go to temple?
They pray, probably,
they make acts of devotion.
Prayer is, in a sense,
the Western form of meditation.
The studies on meditation
couldn’t be clearer:
with meditation, we can act on our DNA.
We cannot change our DNA,
but we can switch on or off certain genes.
Dozens of genes change their activity
after an hour of meditation.
And in particular,
we shut down inflammatory genes,
which underlie today’s chronic diseases.
An interesting finding of this study is,
African American women
were much more protected
than white women.
And what do black women do
when they go to church?
They sing, they sing gospel.
And when you sing, you clear your mind.
And all meditation techniques
are head-clearing techniques.
I was very impressed and amazed.
When I was a kid,
I saw my old aunts going
to pray the rosary, every night.
“This is so lame!” I used to say,
(Laughter)
but they were clearing their head,
activating the vagus nerve.
They were going
to hone the baro reflex,
and reduce the inflammatory state.
Nothing can grant us
that we’ll live a long and healthy life.
But there’s so much we can do
to live long and healthy lives.
There’s so much we can do
by choosing foods.
There’s so much we can do
by choosing food
and by not choosing
industrial processed food.
Let’s go back to the kitchen and cook!
People say they don’t have time to cook,
but they have time
to watch cooking shows on tv.
(Laughter)
Physical activity does a lot.
Again, people say they don’t have time
to spend half an hour a day
for a quick walk on Siena’s walls.
We have time, let’s turn off
the television, we have time.
The more we watch tv, the more we die.
Studies are very clear on that.
And we also have the spiritual way,
the way of meditation.
The way of joy, the way of smiling.
Those who have an attitude
for smiling, die less.
But, what if we are already sick?
If we’ve already gotten sick,
we can often go back.
At “La Mausolea” we organize
15 or 21 days periods
where we practice these three ways,
to reach the healthy age.
We obtain fantastic results,
taking care of all metabolic disorders,
blood pressure and bowel functioning.
And above all,
we give people the awareness
that they can have
more strength, more flexibility.
And they can gain confidence
in the possibility of becoming old,
and eventually die,
peacefully, free from diseases.
We have this possibility.
And it is the best gift
we can give our children.
The gift of not spoiling their lives,
running for years
after a parent with Alzheimer’s.
Or a parent who is bedridden,
or confined to a wheelchair,
or someone who needs constant care.
You know,
people talk a lot
about their “right to health”.
Well, we have no right to health!
We have a responsibility for our health!
No ifs and no buts.
(Applause)