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Too much bread in ‘healthy’ Italian diet is making children obese

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...obese-m9rtmvrgt

Quote:

It is credited with giving Italians longevity and a healthy complexion but they are now eating only the bits of the world-famous Mediterranean diet they like, resulting in soaring child obesity, a leading nutritionist has claimed.

Despite developing the healthy diet rich in vegetables, good olive oil, beans and fish, Italy is now raising a generation of overweight children, with obesity rates for six to nine-year-olds hitting 21 per cent for boys and 14 per cent for girls, among the highest in Europe.

The arrival of junk food in the Bel paese is often blamed, but an Italian expert said that was not the problem.

“Italian children eat little junk food and are given about one can of fizzy drink a week,” Valter Longo said. Instead he discovered children were being given far too much pasta.

“They are eating 500 to 600 grams of starch-rich food, meaning pasta, bread and potatoes, a day. A massive amount of starch that turns to fat,” said Professor Longo, 53, of the University of Southern California and the IFOM cancer research centre in Milan.

He added: “Around 60 per cent of Italian parents of overweight children are unaware their children have a weight problem, partly because they think they are giving them the right food. The Mediterranean diet can be damaging if you are convinced you are sticking to it but you are not.”

Italians need to limit the pasta and increase the beans and vegetables that are also part of the diet, he said. “Italian centenarians tell me that pasta was once expensive but beans were not. The ideal meal contains 70g of pasta, 150g of vegetables and 300g of beans, whether lentils, peas or chickpeas,” he said.

In Perdasdefogu, Sardinia, where people regularly live beyond 100, minestrone soup is a staple, while large amounts of rosemary in Acciaroli, south of Naples, have been linked to the numerous centenarians there.

Too much meat creeping into the diet of children is also a danger, Professor Longo said. “Kids get 70g at school and another 70g with their evening meal, twice the recommended amount of animal-based protein, which increases the risk of cancer,” he said.

Lorenzo Bazzana, an expert with Coldiretti, the Italian farmers’ lobby group, said that too many vegetables were being forgotten. “We have an abundance of vegetables, from artichokes to cavolo nero and types of cabbage which Italians increasingly find are too time-consuming and complicated to cook, and they don’t like the odour they create,” he said.