Eating Well Living Better

By Vincenzo Ercole Valesi

The book delves into the food revolution that, in recent years, has led to viewing nutrition not only in terms of taste but primarily in terms of health, the body, and the spirit.
The author, a doctor, provides his professional perspective, offering analysis and data on various foods.
However, the way in which the material is presented offers insights not just for those keenly interested in cuisine, its ingredients, and their sensory characteristics, but also for those considering the overall psychophysical well-being.
Moreover, the saying "the pharmacy is in the kitchen" seems increasingly relevant. While it's not a new adage, it is particularly true in a historical period where we have become accustomed to treating every aliment or discomfort with pills and pharmaceuticals.
Vincenzo Ercole Valesi, a doctor, has developed over the years an integrated vision of the "two medicines", the "conventional academic" and the "natural" one. He is therefore attentive to the balanced mediation between these two aspects of the art of healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mnamon
• Release date: Dec 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9791280296306

Vincenzo Ercole Valesi

Il dr. Vincenzo Ercole Valesi ha sviluppato nel corso degli anni una visione integrata delle “due medicine”: quella “accademica convenzionale” e quella “naturale”, e la capacità di una mediazione equilibrata fra questi due aspetti dell’arte del curare.Svolge attività professionale a Brugherio, in provincia di Monza ([e-mail]).È moderatore del Forum di Sanihelp sulle Medicine naturali-

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Translations, reproductions, electronic storage on supports of any type, total or partial adaptations by any means of any part of the following volume may take place without the written permission of the Publisher.

This book is published by NEMS, Nuova Editrice Medica e Scientifica. NEMS is a division of Mnamon Editore

Scientific Director: Professor Doctor Virginio Salvi

© NEMS - july 2023

ISBN 9791280296306

We thank all those who have contributed to the production of this volume. Any fees are available to those entitled.

The authors, the publisher and all those who have contributed in various ways to the publication of this work cannot guarantee that the information contained therein is accurate or complete in every part; furthermore, they cannot be held responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of such information. Readers will therefore have to verify the information with other sources. In particular, they will have to check the specific information accompanying the pharmaceutical product they intend to administer to ensure that there have been no changes in the recommended doses, nor in the contraindications to its administration; this verification is particularly important in the case of recently introduced or rarely used drugs. Readers should also consult laboratories for normal reference values.

VINCENZO ERCOLE VALESI

EATING WELL, LIVING BETTER

A Journey to Vibrant Health

through Mediterranean Food

logotipo_nems

General Index

INTRODUCTION THE FOOD REVOLUTION

CHAPTER 1. A SPECIAL DAY (TWO MILLIONS YEARS AGO)

CHAPTER 2. NATURE DOESN'T GIVE DISCOUNTS

CHAPTER 3. EATING BEHAVIORS

CHAPTER 4. MAN IS WHAT HE EATS

CHAPTER 5. GOOD GUT HEALTH

CHAPTER 6. FOOD INTOLERANCES AND FOOD ALLERGIES

CHAPTER 7. THE BLOOD GROUP DIET

CHAPTER 8. SIBO

CHAPTER 9. SIBO THERAPY

CHAPTER 10. RESPECT THE INTESTINE

CHAPTER 11. EPIGENETICS

CHAPTER 12. MAIN FOODS AND NUTRIENTS

CHAPTER 13. ACIDIFYING AND ALKALIZING FOODS

REMARKS

CHAPTER 14. THE GLYCEMIC INDEX PROBLEM

CHAPTER 15. VITAMINS

Foods and nutrients listed in Chapter 12

Algae

Almonds

Amaranth

Apples

Artichoke

Bananas

Barley

Basil

Beer

Berries

Brain

Broccoli

Buckwheat

Butter

Cabbage

Cereals (grain)

Chestnut

Citrus fruits

Cocoa (theobroma cacao)

Coffee

Corn (maize)

Cucumbers

Cured meats

Eggs, chicken

Eggs, quail (rock partridge)

Fish, blue (oil fish)

Fried and soffritto

Fruit, dried

Garlic

Glutamate

Histamine problem

Homocysteine

Honey

Kefir

Legumes

Meat

Melon

Milk and cheese

Mineral elements

Mushrooms

Oats

Oil

Omega 6 and omega 3 ratio in the diet

Onion

Parsley

Peppers

Pine nuts

Polyamines

Polyols or polyalcohols

Pomegranate

Potatoes

Quinoa

Saponins

Raisins (sultanas)

Rice

Rosemary

Sodium chloride NnCl table salt

Solanaceae

Tomato

The verde (green tea)

Tuna

Watermelon

Yogurt

Zucchini

INTRODUCTION

THE FOOD REVOLUTION (FOOD REFLECTIONS)

I've always thought that teaching to fish is better than giving a fish

Food may be instrument of slavery in disease, or freedom in health.

Food can be destabilizing and revolutionary. Revolution means overthrowing, overturning paradigms, imposed choices, clichés. This isn’t necessarily a negative concept, but to evolve it is necessary to change: first, within us. Someone then might think that any change is useful, but attention! First, you need to see to whom it is useful. And then if there is respect for information, the real one, the one that illuminates the whole room, not just the comfortable corner. No free choice is possible if there is no complete information, even the uncomfortable one. And there are uncomfortable truths whose concealment in the depths of consciousness sooner or later makes us sick, in body and spirit. Every man is born to be free. There is a very close relationship between eating habits, lifestyle and freedom, its realization, and the ability to defend it.

True freedom is not that which is told to us and offered by the media on the comfortable plate of complacency, but that which derives from the crisis of one's own: the weak light of doubt that heralds the rising of the sun of spiritual liberation. The divine light of truth and knowledge.

This relationship goes through health, and health is intimately linked to what we eat. Food is not only material, but also spiritual. Let your food be your medicine, said Hippocrates.

Food and nourishment are not the same thing.

Food can make us sad and sick, nourishment almost always heals.

You can't be a real doctor, not even of yourself, if you are not also a psychologist and above all a philosopher. The ancient physicians, the fathers of medicine, were also philosophers. They cared in body and spirit also through nutrition. Looking at the past does not mean giving up the present. Philosophy means love for wisdom, for knowledge, for the search for truth: which are the most powerful instruments for the realization of freedom.

This book is aimed primarily at readers of the so-called civilized Western industrial world. Before even talking about science, we need to talk about socio-economic and cultural aspects. Everything is global in today’s world and everything is connected, in the world, in the relationships between individuals, in the strategies of induction of consumer behavior. So the people have become users and a consumers: of material goods, of services, of ideologies. The userman must consume to turn a production chain and this thing if not well managed, makes him sick, ferrying him from the simply nutritional to the necessarily pharmacological. The multinationals that have shares in the food chain, also have them in the pharmaceutical industry, in the oil market, in the gold market, in the most varied commercial sectors and in many newspapers, that direct the orchestra of induced opinions: this is a real problem for freedom.

In this sense, there could be a conflict of interest between an obsessive induction to buy food whose health properties can be discussed, and the consequent consumption of drugs that are then necessary to manage situations that subsequently make them indispensable. It is not actually convenient for a certain type of extablishment, to emphasize the concrete risks of an incorrect diet in a quantitative and qualitative sense; nor sincerely promote virtuous, healthy behaviors capable of prolonging life and improving its quality. Paradoxically, it even becomes socially dysfunctional and irritating. But I don't want to accuse anyone: mine is only a sociological and economic hypothesis.

If less is consumed, companies could close or otherwise downsize, many workers would find themselves without employment, monetary purchasing power would weaken. It would create very serious imbalances on the economic balance between states, on debts, on GDP, on social stability. This could disrupt the global world with repercussions of impoverishment of peoples and further suffering (for the poor). This is what some great sages think. The logical consequence is that, if we want to be politically correct citizens and in compliance with all the regulations, it is for us a gesture of great solidarity towards the economic network, to continue to eat a lot, badly, and consequently to get sick: good toy soldiers who sacrifice themselves for the common good. Let me laugh. Ask these gentlemen who love humanity so much to go home, sell everything they have and give it to the poor: perhaps at this request they will lower their heads. There is no freedom without health, nor health without freedom, of body and spirit.

The real problem of today's eating behavior is above all the unnatural and non-physiological amount of food that we can dispose of without any difficulty at very low costs. We thus find ourselves managing often conflicting relationships with nutritional principles towards which real addictions are established, socially accepted if not even culturally emphasized, which, in terms of numbers, create much more damage to health than the so-called classic addictions such as alcohol, drugs, smoking, and even many infectious diseases.

I limited myself to reporting the top 14 of the 25 most frequent causes of death detected by ISTAT models in Italy in 2014.

It is a real war bulletin of diseases almost always directly related to nutrition, lifestyle, environmental toxicity!

On a total of 598,670 also referred to other causes that are less significant in percentage terms. These are impressive numbers, which should make us reflect.

Starting from the assumption that, as Hippocrates said, food is a factor of health and disease, each dietary strategy must be modulated and adapted because of each individual case, according to specific individual needs.

We are bombarded with multiple food proposals, where everyone trumpets supposedly miraculous diets and establishes methods and rules. Extrapolating what, as Pliny the Elder said, is good in every book, we will elaborate and learn to build the ideal diet for each of us, and the main characteristics of some commonly used food principles, so that we can exercise a free choice. Based on science, on reasoning logic, and common sense.

Developing our level of awareness and knowledge, becoming subjects and no longer targets. What? Thinking.

Behind the advice of the belly there is the promise of consolation and the achievement of an impossible happiness.

Behind every statement there must always be an explanation and not acts of faith, habits, clichés.

Now I want to tell you a fairy tale, which I beg you not to take literally but to extrapolate the metaphor, not so far from reality. The probable tale of our ancestor of two and a half million years ago.

CHAPTER 1. A SPECIAL DAY (TWO MILLIONS YEARS AGO)

A new day is about to begin for me, Homo erectus from the Paleolithic. The rays of sun that filter through the entrance of the cave where I spend cold and humid days abduct me from the magical world of dreams, of whose substance, as Shakespeare said, we are made. I find myself projected into what is now called the real world; whose differences with the world of dreams I am not able to distinguish, because these two worlds in me are confused and continue into each other, like the alternation of day and night. I live with my female, companion of my life, and with some puppies of my species, with whom I communicate through cries, moans, guttural sounds, smells, looks, winks, grimaces, teeth grinding, contractions of the emotional muscles of the face, crying and tears; I am still not able to express a complete language, a syntax, much less to write.

Although I have not learned to master the use of words nor to entrust them to the judgment of posterity through symbols engraved on wax tablets or sheets of papyrus, the beginning of the History, I am able to feel emotions and feelings, joy, pain, anger, fear: to rejoice for a birth and cry for a separation.

If it happens to hold a fragment of red earth, I enjoy imitating on the walls of the cave where I sleep and spend cold and rainy days, images of life, seasons, and nature that surrounds me: animals, hunting scenes, females of my species emphasizing their attractive sexual attributes. I have a single, great, eternal problem: that of providing me and the individuals of the herd that follows me, precisely by virtue of my ability, the food and water that will allow us to live; I also learned that together is easier than alone. The water will quench my insatiable thirst, much more tormenting than hunger: therefore, I am willing to run every day for 20 kilometers in the savannah. Others follow me and respect me, for my cunning and my strength, which I put at their service.

I have not yet learned to grow plants or raise animals, yet my species survives like the birds that chase everything to get what they need, and whose eggs I often take. Of course, I cannot wait for what is necessary to come to me from heaven, nor from that fiery globe that rises and falls every day, alternating its warm and burning light, with the cold light of the silvery disk that illuminates the darkness of the night. I have not yet learned to communicate with delegating gods to a few initiates the right to administer the laws of heaven on earth. My power comes from muscle strength, speed, ability to solve more easily problems for me, and for others.

In the savannah, in the forest, in the cold and humid steppes or among the ice, I will begin, barefoot and naked, or covered with skins that I have torn from animals found dead or killed by, a long and hard daily journey, to find and steal everything that can satisfy my basic needs.

I get up, stretch, rub my eyes and start walking, sharpening my sight around, listening, sniffing, to see if there is something interesting: I do not yet know how to hunt, meaning by hunting an organized activity, planned and aimed at killing other living beings, with the help of sharp tools, stones or blades, alone or in groups. I still don't know how to kill animals, especially big ones. I haven't developed a real sociality yet, so the last thing I could think is hunting a mammouth or a saber-toothed tiger, or even a gazelle that runs much faster than me. So what I try to do, together with my females and my older puppies, are the simplest things: collect directly with my hands what I can most easily find around. Oh, what luck! What a joy! I see ants, some tasty earthworm, so simple to eat and rich in protein and energy, which I need so much... stop everyone, I see on a branch a very fast and agile grasshopper: if I'm good enough I'll catch it with my own hands: it's very tasty!

Further on, a snake crawls from the ground on the branch of a tree and in the pond some small fish swim on the surface of the water: these too can solve the problem of hunger. Sometimes I happened to come across the carcass of some large animal and, overcoming my reluctance and for the need to put something under the teeth, I tried to chew those hard muscles that predators leave because they prefer the best part: the viscera. All raw, dear friends: I don’t yet know what one day you will call fire: Prometheus has not yet stolen from the gods of heaven the sacred flame of lightning and the sun. Beautiful those red and dark berries on the bushes that I can easily reach with my hands because they grow low or at most at my height! They are sour and pleasantly sweet. And this sweet substance produced by those strange flies so aggressive and prickly, which I can only dispose of in small quantities and when I am particularly lucky: I have not yet learned to breed even those! I tried sometimes to diversify my diet, if only out of curiosity: I saw a sharp ear of wheat, and since a voice said that one day it will be bread, I tried to chew it; the ear is pungent and unpleasant, the grain as hard as a stone that cracks your teeth: no taste, no smell and a lot of pain. I can't understand why birds ok sky find it so interesting.

Sua cuique (to each his own) said the ancient Romans. The grain is food for birds. What sense will scarecrows have one day? Let's learn to read between the lines: Nature and birds can perhaps teach us many things. Through a book written not with words, that often deceive, but with the virtues of observation, reasoning and common sense.

I cannot understand how in many thousands of years, it will become one of the main foods. What do you find so interesting? I have never seen golden fields, rice fields and mills in nature: in nature you can only rarely see a few ears isolated here and there. Even if I feel like cracking my teeth and hurting my tongue and throat, for something that does not give me any pleasure, I can guarantee you that a beautiful earthworm, a root, a fruit, a seed, an egg is much more pleasant and appetizing. I have also seen what you will call beans, very few to be honest, not concentrated in crops. One day I tried to peel some and eat them, after which I was seized by violent stomach pains, which seemed to me to die: never again will I do it, better those larvae and those flies that persecute me attracted by my sweat, better those tasty grasshoppers, of those damn and very hard seeds. They are much easier to digest, especially when I lose my teeth when I am old, like my ancestors.

I pick up everything I need, I take, and eat as it is, natural, according to the seasons. I am not able to preserve food. Cooking I can't even imagine what it is. I do not use simple