The ANNOTICO Report

I'll save you lots of time:

HEALTHY Food in  MODERATION!!!!!!!!

I have been telling my friends for 50 years, stay away from hard liqueur, sugar, salt, processed and refined foods etc, AND
if you don't put it in your mouth, you won't have to look at it bulging on your body.  But then that takes some self discipline.

Greg Critser, the author of the following article, has for the last few years been working on a biography of the 16th century humanist-merchant Alvise (Luigi) Cornaro.

Cornaro was a friend and mentor of everyone from Palladio to Cardinal Bembo, Cornaro is mostly unknown outside Italy and a few circles in the humanities. But for the last 450 years, his book "La Vita Sobria," the first book to seriously argue that dietary moderation can extend one's life, has never been out of print.

At its core, Cornaro's philosophy of moderation — his "divine medicine" — could be marketed in classic Oprah fall-and-redemption mode (with the added bonus that it is true). As a young man, Cornaro partook of the great feast of merchant life — eating, drinking, staying up late and spanking a few random maidens when he got a chance. Then came the piper: At 35, Cornaro found himself in such bad health — he probably had what we would call Type 2 diabetes — that his doctor told him that he probably would not live longer than 40 if he continued his ways.

Cornaro, couldn't abide by that and, rooting around in classic medical literature, came to b! elieve that if he ate moderately — and if he engaged in most things moderately, including work — he would live longer.

Carnaro's caloric intake was about 1,500 a day.

Advocating such a regimen, Cornaro intuited today's scientific inquiry, still ongoing, into caloric restriction and aging — how, in essence, too many burned calories lead to too many free radicals, leading to maimed body cells and illness and death.

But Cornaro was not about caloric restriction. He was about something much tougher, and much more honest: the recognition that to make a habit is viscerally human, but to control a habit takes something from above — the head.

It was a dietary guideline that got Cornaro, all but dead at 40, to age 83.

Los Angeles Times
By Greg Critser
Greg Critser is the author of "Generation Rx" and "Fat Land."
February 12, 2006

IN THE HALLS of academe, publishing and medicine, where national dietary policy grows like so many inedible mushrooms in my basement, it was a highly unappetizing week. A huge new study blasted a super-sized hole in the long-held notion that a diet low in fat can curb the risk of heart disease and cancer. Burp. You could almost hear the retooling of PowerPoints, the renaming of conferences and the reworking of grant proposals. Fat: good.

The fat-cancer link, to be fair, has always been weak, but the notion that one can't lower one's risk of heart disease by keeping the plumbing unclogged by eating low fat — that was the paradigm buster. As Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University in New York, put it, the study "should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information! we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy." The end of an era!

In a sense, "the era" was neo-Galenic, by which I refer to the 2nd century physician who believed that all bodily ailments could be righted by balancing bodily humors with the right foods, bleeding and herbs. Such is the function — if not the stated intent — of our focus on finding and popularizing perfect dietary content. Right food, right bodily reaction, right health.

Unfortunately, in the modern, consumerist environment of plenty, that seemingly reasonable tack was swamped by the twin admonitions of "eat all you can of this" and "avoid all you can of that." Any notion of promoting dietary moderation — a key to good health — was overwhelmed by three new social, political and economic forces: First, the newly agile food industry, which learned how to retool its products swiftly to use dietary guidelines to its benefit (witness new low-sugar Froot Loops); next, agile acade! mics who benefit from grants to research specific foods and who get to avoid the un-PC issue of dietary restraint (so moralistic!) by doing so; and, last, the health media, myself included, who would have a lot less to write about were it not for dietary villains. That's not to say that there are not any dietary villains. It's just to say that trying to banish just this or just that, without changing basic overconsumption, will never work.

Yet if the old, neo-Galenic moment is over, what will the new era bring?

I say: Bring back an old era — the Renaissance. And forget the tights and floppy hats. Let's look at how elites in another period of abundance and change thought about eating. For the last few years I have been working on a biography of the 16th century humanist-merchant Alvise (Luigi) Cornaro. A friend and mentor of everyone from Palladio to Cardinal Bembo, Cornaro is mostly unknown outside Italy and a few circles in the humanities. But for the last 450 ! years, his book "La Vita Sobria," the first book to seriously argue that dietary moderation can extend one's life, has never been out of print.

At its core, Cornaro's philosophy of moderation — his "divine medicine" — could be marketed in classic Oprah fall-and-redemption mode (with the added bonus that it is true). As a young man, Cornaro partook of the great feast of merchant life — eating, drinking, staying up late and spanking a few random maidens when he got a chance. Then came the piper: At 35, Cornaro found himself in such bad health — he probably had what we would call Type 2 diabetes — that his doctor told him that he probably would not live longer than 40 if he continued his ways.

Cornaro, who had the aspirations of a Donald Trump, couldn't abide by that and, rooting around in classic medical literature, came to believe that if he ate less as he aged — and if he engaged in most things moderately, including work — he would live longer. The key was not wh! at one ate but how much one ate and — here is where today's dietary gurus can learn — eating only what agreed with you. Although he never set hard limits, his focus was on routinely pushing back from the table before he was satisfied. As he put it, he focused on "not eating or drinking more than the stomach can easily digest, which quantity and quality every man should be perfect judge by the time he is 40."

So what and how much did Cornaro eat? Estimates vary, but most put his caloric intake at somewhere around 1,500 a day — but that was Cornaro late in life. The menu is what might be called Old Italian Man: some milk with bread in it for breakfast, broth with egg in it for lunch, a small piece of goat or veal meat and perhaps a vegetable later in the day.

And about two cups of wine (white and "new"). This last he termed "my milk."

Advocating such a regimen, Cornaro intuited today's scientific inquiry, still ongoing, into caloric res! triction and aging — how, in essence, too many burned calories lead to too many free radicals, leading to maimed body cells and illness and death. But Cornaro was not about caloric restriction. He was about something much tougher, and much more honest: the recognition that to make a habit is viscerally human, but to control a habit takes something from above — the head.

It was a dietary guideline that got Cornaro, all but dead at 40, to age 83.

http://www.latimes.com/news/
printedition/opinion/la-op-critzer
12feb12,1,7258753.story