Dense Nutrition PLUS La Dolce Vita
But we won’t ask you to sacrifice the enjoyment of being in community and enjoying tasty meals and treats. We don’t want you to sacrifice la dolce vita—the sweet life—in communion with others who support us and help us have fun, laugh, play, and thrive because we need to enjoy our lives and not just militantly monitor our diets like drill sergeants on a mission to get us healthy. La dolce vita also helps us heal.
We know from scientific investigation that optimal health is far more than just what you eat. In Roseto, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, the Italian immigrants who resided there ate meatballs fried in lard, smoked like chimneys, boozed it up every night, and pigged out on pasta and pizza. Yet, shockingly, they had half the rate of heart disease and much lower rates of many other illnesses than the national average. It wasn’t the water they drank, the hospital they went to, their DNA- and they couldn’t afford the fancy olive oil they ate at home in Italy. So, what made the people of Roseto so resistant to heart disease? Researchers concluded that their secret to longevity was that nobody was ever lonely. They had each other.
Optimal health isn’t just about nutrition and food as medicine, as some folks might tell you it is. But we also don’t need to throw what we know about dense nutrition out the window just because some Italian immigrants had unusually good health outcomes with foods that we know can also impair healing. Imagine if the people of Roseto had also consumed green juice, raw foods, salads made from their gardens, and other high-density nutrition while eating communally, laughing, playing and celebrating together, protecting each other from social isolation, mending their relationships, healing their trauma, and learning to love the parts of themselves that might eat poorly? What if we tried that? Then what might be possible?