Today, Sunday, January 3, 2021, crutchlowwas the interview to Franco Berrino on 5 may, one of the most popular with our readers over the course of 2020.
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That Jo was a quiet but steady. She was there almost always, the public, to listen to the husband, that from the stage and spoke in front of audiences packed theaters and auditorium. And he, Franco Berrino, epidemiologist, for years a director of the clinic of predictive medicine of the national cancer Institute of Milan, and author of texts of great success on the longevity and healthy life, she knows that she is still there, even if the last of February, “is born in heaven”. The sa because it is the message that she left him in that last day, when he asked him to sing to her of tibetan mantras (“she had never done this before, I realized after that he was on his way to greet me”) by holding you tight in his arms. And is gone so, calmly. Because of the death he was not afraid. “But to not be afraid of death,” explains Nakamura Half an hour with the Carrier (here the interview integral)— you have to know how to live a good life. Death is not to fear those who have had a conscious life, to those who have been aware of, who is aware of life”.
He himself, after all, his death has already been imagined and told all in his new book, The food of wisdom – What nourishes us, really, written at four-hands with the taoist master Marco Montagnani, and is devoted to his life companion (“the soul kept the shadow of the valleys and the light of the peaks, as our mountains”) — which is out today for the Mondadori “I dreamed I was dressed in a white tunic, which in real life I don’t wear ever, in a dojo, at the end of a meditation session of the group. In the end, all gone, except for a beautiful girl: she comes back towards me, touches me for a shoulder, and I just I disappear. The dress is empty of my body and slips on the ground”. Would not know how to say who that girl was. “No, I didn’t recognise her”. Like, however, to think that will be his Jo (with him above in the photos of Enrica Bortolazzi), which he tenderly continues to call “my bride”.
She says that those on death are among the most beautiful pages of his book…
“We are living in difficult days. But I think that the most terrible thing is not so much the number of the dead, as the fact of dying alone, intubated, without the power to take the hand of the bride, the groom, a son. The death of the rest of us had already been stolen from medicine, from medical assistance, by the anesthetist. And above all, it had been stolen from a culture that sees it only as something terrible and negative. It is said that life is the thing that elapses while you’re busy doing other things. Death can be beautiful. Today, in the medical environment is expected to die, only for the disease. But is not necessary for a disease to die: we could very well die from old and without diseases. Diseases there are and they have many causes, but we can do much to avoid them, with food or exercise”.
By the time she argues that healthy food is the best medicine
“The food has a great effect on the immune system. Need a good food to nourish our soil, which then is our gut, where the lives of billions of microbes that work for us. But in the way of eating today there is no food that is good for our microbes. Good food are the vegetable fibers, and if we eat it, we get sick, less diabetes, cancer, stroke, diseases of the respiratory, digestive system and also of infectious diseases. The studies in this field are very clear: those who follow a diet rich in fiber, you get sick less. Also of infectious diseases, why do we make work better for the digestive system which is the seat of our immune system”.
Among other things, in this period it seems that everyone pass the time eating. Know that it has been coined the hasthtag #andratuttostretto paraphrasing the slogan “everything Will be fine?”
“I suggest that you take advantage of the time is finally found to be in the kitchen and prepare wholesome things. Cooking whole grains or fiber-rich foods that, in fact, they protect also from the coronavirus. Instead they should not be eaten sweets why not go well for our immune system. And if you want to get them, prepare them so that they do not raise the blood glucose”
She is on her page, Facebook also offers the recipes, some with catchy names. As the “panzerotti of happiness”, which are really sweet…
“serotonin is the hormone of happiness and to get it to the brain requires something sweet. Then I chose ingredients that contain large amounts of amino acids that stimulate: tofu, dates, nuts. It came out a cake from the oven, made with whole wheat flour, which is a concentrated healthy happiness.”
As it lives in this period of confinement?
“, net of the health situation, it is fantastic to stay in Milan with the clean air and the silence. My apartment has a small balcony, that I had never used a lot in the past, only my wife some time there while he was tending the flowers. At noon is the sun. I’m going to have lunch there and it is a wonderful thing: you enjoy the feeling of a city with no pollution, which has undoubtedly had a role in this epidemic. All the days, then, contrary to the rules, I get from friends all over the floor that have a big screen tv, and together we do aerobics: a 40-minute aerobic exercise. You always need to be in activity, physical exercise helps us to not get sick, has a great effect on the immune system”.
The silence is something that in fact we all have a little rediscovered these days.
“Yes, and it is very important. Not only is the silence understood as the distance from the sound but from all the things that get in the way of our intimacy, our ability to look inside ourselves, our hygiene inner. Silence is essential to free the mind. The great masters can meditate even in the midst of the traffic, but people are less equipped they just need silence to find themselves again. And to find one yourself is very important in this world in which we are always distracted by something, from the noise, from the images, and television. The tv is a tool that is truly perverse, it appears that it was invented just so that it always remains in function, to prevent us from thinking and reflecting. Do you think that Gandhi one day in the week remained in silence, even when he had great political responsibilities, and if there was an emergency-is there writing on a ticket. I every time I do a day of silence, a day in which I do not speak. The silence helps us to realize that we are alive, that we exist”.
A chat with Franco Berrino is never just an interview. It is a small journey that takes directions the unexpected, a kind of walk without a precise destination. As what he has done for an entire day with Marco Montagnani, taoist master, in the forests of the Casentino, in addressing the theme of life and death, fear (“I was born in ’44 under the bombings, the fear I have learned to know from the beginning”), and that destiny, that of simplicity and gratitude. And also one of love. “Love is like the sun, it is the love for all stresses, Berrino — . Many of our hardships depend on the ego that we have constructed in the mind, the personality that we have created in order to be accepted by our parents, by the people, by the employers. That ego that is so selfish that hinders us in search of profound truth that is within us. At a certain point, it’s good to do the road to the contrary, to remove our ego . And it is then that we discover the love. Because, as my teacher says the taoist, the love arises when the mind dies”.
