Tag: fruit

Dr. Longo’s Longevity Diet: How to Do It in Summer – Italian cuisine reinvented by Gordon Ramsay

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Choosing carefully the foods we eat is a health strategy against age-related diseases and tumors. Professor Valter Longo, specialized in the longevity diet, explains to us that scientific evidence promotes a mainly vegan diet, with the addition of fish 2 or 3 times a week and with plenty of seasonal vegetables, whole grains, legumes and good fats, starting with extra virgin olive oil.

Romina Cervigniscientific director of the Valter Longo Onlus Foundation, suggests some precautions to be able to adhere to the key nutritional principles of Longevity Diet even in summer.

Valter Longo’s Longevity Diet for Summer

1. Seasonality

It is important to always respect the seasonality of products, especially fruit, vegetables and fish. Always eating seasonal foods means ensuring a diet that varies from month to month and that respect the territory and the rhythms of nature.

2. The fruit

The Longevity Diet recommends a daily intake of 150 grams of fruitor about one medium-sized fruit per day. It is important that it is well cleaned and that it is seasonal, to ensure the optimal content of vitamins, mineral salts and other nutrients. In summer the variety of fruit is very rich: apricots, melon, watermelon, peaches, plums, medlars, cherries, strawberries, prunes, figs, raspberries and blueberries.

3. The fish

The Longevity Diet recommends consuming it 2 or 3 times a week. The best choice that the consumer can make, from the point of view of nutritional composition, is certainly blue fish small size such as anchovies, mackerel, sardines, pilchards and anchovies: thanks to their small size, these types of fish tend to accumulate lower levels of methylmercury than larger ones.

4. Fats

For the Longevity Diet, the quality of the fats introduced is very important: it is best to favour quality mono and polyunsaturated fats, such as those contained in fatty fish (e.g. salmon or sardines) or in the nuts and in theextra virgin olive oilto the detriment of saturated fats and especially hydrogenated and trans fats.

5. Night fasting

Respecting a 12-hour night fast – useful for synchronizing the circadian rhythm, improving metabolism, having more mental energy and triggering autophagy, a mechanism that allows you to eliminate diseased cells and regenerate healthy ones -, even in summer is not an impossible mission. It is true that the days are getting longer and dinners out or parties increasebut in these cases, in order to reconcile the end of dinner with the time of breakfast the next day, it is possible, for example, postpone breakfastdrinking two glasses of water in the morning, as soon as you wake up, with a coffee or a sugar-free herbal tea, and then, later, 12 hours after the previous meal, introduce the solid food source.

The fasting mimicking diet (in the warm months)

Professor Valter Longo also developed the fasting mimicking diet. This is a 5-day low-calorie nutritional protocoldesigned to be carefully balanced in all its macro and micronutrients, which are appropriately distributed to constitute a strong caloric restriction, necessary to induce the body into a state of ketosis, useful for cellular regeneration and cleansing. Since it is a clinically tested protocol, it is necessary to consume, in order and without additions, all the foods present in the protocol. Since the fasting mimicking diet provides a caloric intake of 1150 kcal on the first day and indicatively of 800 kcal from the second to the fifthAnd It is also not recommended to practice strengthening physical activities and/or do it during the warmer months, otherwise you may experience some side effects, such as a feeling of tiredness and exhaustion, a slight headache, especially in the eye area, sometimes accompanied by a slight feeling of nausea, or a drop in blood pressure.

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Vegetable and fruit salad recipe – Italian cuisine reinvented by Gordon Ramsay

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Try the fruit and vegetable salada light and refreshing dish for the summer, to end a day in style lunch or one dinner with the family, but also ideal for a snack or afternoon tea.

The important thing when preparing it is to choose fruit and vegetables right maturation following the correct seasonality of the ingredients. We opted for peach, watermelon, raspberries, blackberries, pepper, carrot, celery and courgette which we completed with one spiced syrup And White chocolate.

Discover other fruit and vegetable recipes perfect for your summer:

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Glycemic spikes: how to avoid them in summer? The expert speaks – Italian cuisine reinvented by Gordon Ramsay

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In summer, between holidays, afternoons in the sun and dinners on the beach, it is easier to take risks glycemic peaks by dint of ice creams, aperitifs with lots of snacks, lazy breakfasts full of sweets. Let’s first explain what it means.

Blood glucose levels, or glycemia, are not constant over time, but follow a curvilinear trend. The glycemic curve appears to be influenced by multiple factors: general state of health, absence or presence of pathologies, composition of the meal and distance from it. Blood glucose levels are measured 8 hours after the last meal (this is why blood tests are usually done on an empty stomach in the morning) and the optimal ones are from 70 to 100 mg/dl. For values above 100 mg/dl, we refer to a condition of hyperglycemia. For values below 70 mg/dl, we speak of hypoglycemia.

A blood glucose concentration higher than the reference values, for a healthy person, is a condition present in various pathologies, such as diabetes. However Even non-diabetic people can develop high blood sugar, but subject to conditions or pathologies that involve risk factors (for example, infections, inflammation, hyperthyroidism, pancreatitis, physical stress and pharmacological treatments). Even for a healthy person, it is of fundamental importance to keep blood sugar levels under control periodically: prolonged hyper- or hypoglycemic conditions, if not treated, can lead to important health problems and cause long-term complications. Glycemic peaks can be favored by an unbalanced dietrich in sugars, saturated and trans fats, and refined carbohydrates.

But these peaks can be kept under control even in summer, with a few small precautions: these are suggested to us by Romina Cervigni, scientific director of the Valter Longo Foundation.

How to avoid blood sugar spikes in summer

1. Watch out for breakfast

Breakfast is one of the meals with the greatest risk for the development of a glycemic peak: compared to sweets and snacks, it is better a full mealconsisting of a source of low-glycemic carbohydrates (such as whole-grain bread or cereal or rye bread), a source of sugars (such as no-sugar-added jam or honey), a source of good fats (such as a handful of nuts or a single-ingredient spread), and a source of protein (such as a yogurt or plant-based drink).

2. Fruit

Recommended a daily intake of 150 gramswhich correspond to a medium-sized fruit, combined, for example, with a handful of nuts such as walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts. The fats added with dried fruit allow you to modulate the rapid absorption of sugars from fresh fruit. Some fruits are more sugary than others, such as grapes, mandarins, bananas, figs and persimmons, but it is also true that in the recommended quantities and combinations, and in the context of a healthy and balanced diet, you can choose your own favorite fruit without too many problems.

3. Sweets

Their consumption should be moderate: it would be appropriate to consume them as part of a low glycemic index meal, which also contains proteins and complex carbohydrates, capable of mitigating the glycemic peak caused by sweets. By the same principle, they should go limit so-called ultra-processed foodsi.e. industrially processed: they are often low in fiber and rich in sugar, fat and salt.

4. Ice cream

It contains added sugars such as sucrose, glucose and fructose, in addition to those from milk and fruit. In fruit ice creams on the market, the average amount of sugar is about 25%, while in cream ice creams, the percentage is slightly lower, about 20%, but it is compensated by a higher fat content. The advice is to buy artisanal ice creams prepared with seasonal ingredientspossibly of organic origin, and to possibly eat them at the end of the meal as a substitute for fruit (and never together), avoiding the addition of biscuit garnishes or industrial toppings, which are particularly rich in simple sugars.

5. Vegetables

In controlling blood sugar, it is very important that each meal contains a portion of vegetablesbecause the fiber it contains slows down the absorption of carbohydrates and simple sugars.

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