2023-05-11 12:35:17
“Beware of the dangers for young people” of new food trends, which “between intermittent fasts and skipped dinners” risk aggravating eating disorders, a growing emergency. The alarm was sounded by four professors from the University of Padua, who warn against “the combination of a badly placed, and above all badly told, emphasis on the need to avoid obesity and therefore to adopt extremely varied diets, to a growing narcissistic attitude of our society and to a concept of beauty that is most often ideal, detached from reality”. A mix that “is favoring dangerous and distorted elaborations of the concept of eating. The consequence is” precisely “a constant increase in eating disorders in adolescents, in particular potentially very serious anorexic disorders”.
The warning was signed by Eugenio Baraldi, director of the University Department of Women’s and Children’s Health; Liviana Da Dalt, Director of DIDAS Women’s and Children’s Health; Michela Gatta, director of the UOC of Child Neuropsychiatry, and Giorgio Perilongo, director of the UOC Pediatric Clinic, all of the Paduan university, who intervene as they are “committed – they explain in a note – to a campaign for the adoption by young people of healthy styles of life as a fundamental element for setting up and founding health trajectories that are as long-lasting as possible.Only by leveraging the ‘beauty’, on what is true, natural, fun and sunny, can children, adolescents and young adults be educated to adopt healthy lifestyles”. And “among the beautiful, true, natural, fun and sunny things – they specify – there is also healthy eating and eating together as a family”.
A message that the experts will try to convey to 800 high school students in Padua and its province, to whom they will speak on Monday 22 May in the great hall of the Palazzo della Ragione in the Venetian city. The speakers will share with the students the contents of the ‘Padua Charter for the health of young people’, published in ‘Frontiers in Pediatrics’ in 2022.
The journal ‘Eating Behaviors’, reported the four Paduan teachers, “has documented, for example, that intermittent fasting was found to be associated in a scientifically significant way, especially in young women, with psychopathological eating disorders. The numerical data produced, according to the authors of the study, underestimates the real extent of the problem. The result is not surprising” the experts, “in consideration of the fact that in themselves all restrictive or containing diets have long been recognized as the main risk factor for the development of eating disorders and , among these, in particular intermittent fasting which is the most regimented and fashionable way to contain the amount of food”.
With regard to intermittent fasting, the professors also remark that “the all-encompassing recommendation to skip dinner 4-5 times a week corresponds to depriving a family of an important ritual, which is sitting together around the table in the evening, with possible deleterious implications on the children and on the family itself. evening meal is at risk of creating isolation.It is amply documented by years of scientific research that eating together in the family is among the behaviors that improve the self-esteem and academic performance of children, and prevents anxiety, depression, alcoholism, violent behavior, use of substances and suicidal thoughts”, the teachers insist, urging parents to impose precise “rules” at the table, such as “avoiding the use of smartphones, the television on, and favoring dialogue as much as possible”. Because “dinner together has been defined as ‘a seat belt to travel the road full of potholes of childhood and adolescence'”.
“Health is a global concept which requires, in order to be such, the well-being of the body in its totality of systems and functions”, the experts continue, also addressing those who disseminate: “Great attention must be paid to talking, to narrating about health” , they remark, “aware that – above all due to the overabundance of information available on the Net and unfortunately not always certified reliable – people, especially the young and fragile, not having yet developed interpretative tools suitable for assessing what is proposed, are more exposed to the risk of the easy promises that abound on the Net. It takes wisdom – they conclude – discretion and a little humility in transmitting knowledge about health and interpreting the complex reality in which we live”.
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