Obesity, a phenomenon that for years seemed not to concern our country. Now, however, even in Italy the problem is clearly growing.
Obesity, a phenomenon that here too is assuming worrying numbers and contours. A problem that contains many others within it. A matryoshka full of sickness.
Food and bad nutrition are only the tip of an iceberg on whose depths the most diverse situations of discomfort rest. We need to start from there, because once those existential problems are resolved, unhealthy food will disappear along with the problems.
Obesity, what a danger
For many years we seemed locked in our ivory tower. Beautiful, with lean physiques, thanks to the legendary Mediterranean diet. When we passed foreign tourists who ate improbable sandwiches and drank drinks from strange people, we thought “we never like them”. Times have changed, now the world is one huge metropolis. A virus that started from the Chinese and it took him a few hours to land in Europe and therefore also here.
Globalization has changed everything. We dress, we think, we share the same musical tastes with our peers who live in Australia or Norway. And we exchange the same bad eating habits but, above all, the same moods, the same fears, the same insecurities and bad life. Obesity seems a sort of compendium of all this evil of living. The World Health Organization has presented a report which specifically concerned the issue of obesity, the numbers of which are particularly alarming.
From this report it emerges that the 59% of European adults both overweight and even 1 in 3 childrenalmost equally divided between males and females, is overweight or affected by obesity. Now we can no longer hide since obesity is considered, to all intents and purposes, a disease. To make the picture even more dramatic is the underlining of how obesity is among the main causes of death and disability. Deaths from these pathologies reach 1.2 million every year.
Lifestyle change
In this respect too, the Covid-19 pandemic has done a lot of damage. The forced quarantine to avoid contagion has had the deleterious effect of making everyone lazy. Healthy daily habits have been lost, or almost so, such as walks in the open air. “Devastating” laziness and “junk” food increase the risk of obesity. But there are also other triggering reasons, perhaps even more serious.
Stress and insomnia can be other serious triggers. The evening and night hours become particularly dangerous because they are the ones in which it is easier to eat less healthy foods. What is notoriously called “nervous hunger”, consisting in assuming a quantity of food not required by our needs.
Signs, small and large, of a profound malaise. It is therefore necessary to open, one by one, these dolls that contain lives and worlds full of contradictions, of apparently incurable fractures, but which it is mandatory to try to heal. For their own good and for the good of those who love them.
