(ANSA) – NAPLES, SEPTEMBER 24 – “Healthy longevity means living a long time and well. We work on it and we live like this by investing in professionals and methods that work, in concepts that have never existed before in the US and also in Italy”.
This is how Valter Longo, professor of biogerontology and director of the Longevity Institute of the USC, one of the world’s leading authorities on longevity, explains the birth of the new department at Villa Betania in Naples together with the Valter Longo Foundation. A new path that “has never been taken – explains Longo – and in fact both here and in the US we see the catastrophic consequences of wrong paths. Today longevity brings years in which the majority of the population lives really badly. Today 75% of US inhabitants are overweight and obese and even Campania is slowly reaching those levels that obviously bring effects on healthcare that are catastrophic especially if you only have the doctors to whom the patient goes and ends up experiencing problems that are potentially irreversible”.
For Longo, the paths to follow are simple: “we start – he explains – with nutrition and physical exercise, but above all nutrition really changes your life but you need people who follow you and who know how to enter homes in the right way. You don’t need doctors who only know how to write books on the subject, as I did, to provide methods. You need people who know how to do that job. Today we are starting here in Naples with the first healthy longevity clinic in southern Italy and we will see the effect it will have, but we already know from our work in Los Angeles and Milan that this path works. You simply need to accompany the person, especially those who don’t know much about healthy nutrition and don’t have the socioeconomic conditions to focus on this, helping them to go back to what was done in Italy 100 years ago, when diabetes didn’t even exist. It didn’t exist in the US or even in Italy, and yet people were poor, today we need to go back to looking at what was done once, obviously with the technologies and methods that science has taught us in the last 50 years”.
For Longo, the elderly are not a wall to bang against: “We rarely find walls between people,” he says, “we often find obstacles from those who want to do things old-fashioned, like I wait for the person to get diabetes and then give them drugs for the rest of their life, this is not a method to follow. Other times the person doesn’t know what to do, says they’ve been on many diets without success or doesn’t know how to best live a period after an operation, and therefore goes into a moment of confusion. They need a clear path to follow to live well.” (ANSA).
2024-09-24 22:00:45