This year, the just concluded Settimana della Cucina Italiana reached its 5th annual edition, with Italian consulates from across the US planning exceptional events about Italian gastronomy and the heritage of Italian food.
One of the biggest peculiarity of this year’s edition the celebration of the 200th birthday of Italy’s most renowned cookbook author, Pellegrino Artusi. Considered the inventor of Italian cuisine, his 19th-century work, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, remains a go-to recipe book in Italian households. The reprinting of his manual in countless editions and its translation into English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish and Japanese, is still nowadays used to help promoting our culinary tradition across the globe.
The second topic of this year’s edition was the Mediterranean diet, a nutritional model and a lifestyle inspired by the habits of the European countries of the Mediterranean basin. The discovery of the Mediterranean diet is due to Ancel Keys, an American biologist and physiologist who lived for over forty years in Pioppi, Cilento, testing theories on the link between the eating habits of local populations and the low incidence of cardiovascular diseases.
The principal aspects of this diet include proportionally high consumption of olive oil, legumes, unrefined cereals, fruits and vegetables; moderate to high consumption of fish, moderate consumption of dairy products (mostly as cheese and yogurt) moderate wine consumption, and low consumption of non-fish meat products. Olive oil has been studied as a potential factor for reducing all-cause mortality and the risk of chronic disease.
“The Mediterranean diet constitutes a set of skills, knowledge, practices and traditions ranging from the landscape to the table, including crops, harvesting, fishing, conservation, processing, preparation and, in particular, consumption of food.” Says Italian General Consul Silvia Chiave while moderating one of the virtual events about the Mediterranean diet. “This diet is characterized by a nutritional model that remained constant over time and space, consisting mainly of olive oil, cereals, fresh or dried fruit and vegetables. However, the Mediterranean diet (from the Greek diaita, or way of life) encompasses more than just food. It promotes social interaction, since communal meals are the cornerstone of social customs and festive events. It gave rise to a considerable body of knowledge, songs, maxims, tales and legends. The system is rooted in respect for the territory and biodiversity, and ensures the safeguarding and development of traditional activities and crafts linked to fishing and farming in the Mediterranean communities — of which Soria in Spain, Koroni in Greece, Cilento in Italy and Chefchaouen in Morocco are examples. Women play a particularly vital role in the transmission of expertise, as well as of the knowledge of rituals, traditional gestures and celebrations, and are crucial also of the safeguarding of techniques.”
But the Mediterranean diet doesn’t only bring pleasure to our mouths and social interaction at our tables, it has also been studied for its healthy benefits. Maura Fanti, PhD Postdoctoral Researcher at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, is an expert in the mechanisms of aging and age-related disease. “My focus is on understanding how nutrients influence the life span of our bodies. In our lab, we study the fast-mimicking diet that Doctor Valter Longo, the study’s senior author and the director of the USC Longevity Institute, developed in the past years. It is a periodic diet of 5 days, able to mimic the beneficial effect of calorie restriction in the long term.”
The fast-mimicking diet has been tested in several clinical and pre-clinical studies which showed it can help the reduction of pathologies like cancer and diabetes. “We are still exploring its potential in other conditions.”
As a Sardinian with a centenarian great-grandmother, another field of interest for Doctor Fanti is longevity. “Many of our studies came from observing lives of people that live longer than the average. I am talking about centenari,” she underlines. “In Italy we have one of the five areas of the world (it’s in Sardinia) where people live the longest. We found out that, in Sardinia, people have a special DNA, but that is not enough, because longevity is a combination of many factors: behavior, lifestyle, nutrition. I believe that, in the case of the Sardinian people, the combination of Mediterranean diet and DNA is a winner. I really like the fact we can learn a lot from them: something very interesting is that these people have four meals a day — but of just one plant-based dish — and a small amount of meat-based food. It’s a smart way to keep under control both weight and calorie intake.”
Urologist Laura Perin from the Children Hospital of Los Angeles joined the conversation by sharing her knowledge on kidney and pancreas diseases.
“Diabetes is affecting our population in a very extreme way: 40 millions Americans have chronic kidney disease, and 100 millions have diabetes.
I also like to study these two diseases together: in fact 70 % of people who have diabetes have chronic kidney disease, too. If you are obese, you can develop type 2 diabetes, which is a potential trigger for kidney disease.”
And how does the Mediterranean diet come into the picture? She explains it. “Food intake is extremely important for our health. We try to use different approaches like stem cell regeneration; we also have a collaboration with Doctor Valter Longo and his diet, a diet that eliminates food excesses: with that, we are able to reverse chronic kidney disease and also diabetes. We really hope, as scientists, that one day our patients won’t have to rely on insulin and transplants.”
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