The Italian Reset Diet - Dario Polisano

Dario Polisano

The Italian Reset Diet

The Italian Reset Diet

First Edition

Authored by Dario Polisano

Translated by Giuseppe di Martino

English edition published by Tektime

Graphics, DTP and cover:

V. Riccardo Puglisi

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© 2020 Dario Polisano

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PREFACE

I am not a medical doctor, nor do I want to be. I am proud to be a nutritional biologist. My profession does not allow me to prescribe drugs or diagnose pathologies; those are tasks for doctors. I am a firm believer in our own bodies vital force and self-healing power. My job, or mission, is to enable that power through proper nutrition, an important factor which is, unfortunately, often underestimated.

Todays technology helps us with innovative solutions in all fields. It also helps in the biological-nutritional field with, for example, the use of supplements, or non-synthetic molecular concentrates found in nature. A nutritional biologist can advise supplements, when essential, in order to help a patient recover more quickly. Unfortunately, often enough, what happens is that people get the mistaken idea that supplements are good for everything, without any negative effectsand that notion is absolutely false. Supplements act like actual medication. It is true that when a woman takes folic acid during her pregnancy, she avoids possible conditions such as spina bifida for her baby, but it is also true that the misuse of supplements can lead to damage instead, by causing the activation of gene mutation from its dormant to its hyperactive phase, with often disastrous consequences for our bodies. Guidance regarding the subject of dietary supplements is always best left to a conscientious and competent expert.

In this book you will also find testimonials from some of my patients, who were healed thanks to the lifestyle changes I suggested, as nutrition plays a crucial role in obtaining an optimal state of health.

Please do not misunderstand meI am not some sort of strange quack. I just believe, as a nutritional biologist and researcher, that alongside the expertise and methodologies of a doctor who prescribes medical treatments, one must also practice proper nutrition from the very beginning of a medical condition. I assert that improper nutrition is often the root of all ills, and that healing takes more than just medical prescriptions, which more often than not hurt the development of the physical processes in our bodies. Medications are often allopathic, meaning they turn off symptoms but do not take all the side effects into account.

I would say that my method is interpretative, a sort of decoding of the signals the body sends in order to try to find balance and promote self-healing. This way, the value-ranges will tend to improve, and once a physician sees that the patient is getting better, he or she may reduce the medications. And why not? He or she may even do away with them altogether.

This is often not appreciated by those doctors who do not see a link between healing and proper nutrition. Often patients are even laughed at by their own physicians for this, thus causing them to have a real psychological crisis to the point of doubting the food choices recommended by the nutritionist. Those doubts are quickly done away with by patients when, by going back to their old way of eating, they see that their old symptoms, which were maybe either totally gone or at least kept at bay with a proper food regimen, show up again.

I have often been accused of being a charlatan, but results are what matter. You will surely have noticed that I am slightly argumentative, but I believe that, when it comes to evidence and concrete results for your health, by being argumentative in a constructive way, it helps to put in question the claims certain experts make.

These are situations that truly occur every day. Many of my patients are told by their doctors to interrupt the food regimens I suggested for them, even though they see positive results. I consider this sort of professional rivalry useless and damaging, and I always ask myself why we cannot walk hand-in-hand to reach common goals.

I am always willing to cooperate with doctors for the exclusive benefit of the patient, but I rarely receive the same courtesy. I could go on and on about the medical professionals who never took into consideration what their patients told them, even when they described the benefits of a personalized diet, and who asked themselves why they had to settle for the temporary effects of drug treatments, without receiving any answer.

I want to clarify that drugs were no doubt a very important discovery, but they are often used when there is no need. It is normal practice for a doctor to prescribe something immediately, as soon as they see a value out of range, without caring to know what the patient eats. They do not even consider that those values can go back to a normal range through a proper diet. This happens because a drug prescription is sometimes the fastest way of seeing results, but trust me, they will not be long-lasting. Sooner or later, the body will manifest other symptoms and the onset of another illness. This is when patients will find themselves taking up to 6-8 different types of medication a day.

My polite yet resolute position does not salvage the Mediterranean Diet, the one discussed daily on TV or read about in magazines or on the Web, which is totally different from the original Mediterranean Diet. For some experts, it is enough to eat bread and pasta for them to say that you are following the Mediterranean Diet. For example, I have seen diets where a gentleman was advised to eat white bread and creamy cheeses for lunch by his doctor, who objected to and criticized some of my dietary recommendations (which included legumes and fish).

On the other hand, I can say that, out of intellectual honesty, often on my career path I have encountered doctors and colleagues who appreciated my work very much and trusted my intuition and foolproof scientific evidence, so much so that they entrusted those who were dearest to them (wives and/or kids) under my care.

I will also tell you, briefly, what happens inside a nutritional biologists office, where we look for the most suitable solution to improve a patients state of health, even in the presence of discouraging news.

I have seen obese people with sky-high glycemia continue to eat ready-made food or food made with white flour every day, pushed by their own doctors to go back to their old diets which they deemed reliable, because mine did not follow the standards of the hypothetical Mediterranean Diet.

I am a simple, social and honest person who has never had an agenda, ulterior motives or monetary interests, especially when it comes to health. I will try to explain to you not only my truths as a nutritional biologist, but also the everyday objective truths regarding health problems.

My food system is not called the Italian Reset Diet for no reason; the word reset has a specific purposeto reset your body gradually and bring it back to proper nutrition in a controlled manner. Justifiably, you may now be thinking that all of this is based on dietary deprivation and constraints, but you will change your mind once you have read the last part of the book, which is about how you have at your disposal an infinite variety of food products typical of the peoples who have lived in our Italy: eggs, legumes, fish, seasonal fruits, ancient whole grains and much more.

My method does not want to replace conventional medicine, but it should work side by side with it, guaranteeing, at worst, an improvement in the patients quality of life and a reduction in drug treatments, and at bestsomething not rare if an illness is caught in timecomplete healing.

INTRODUCTION

My journey as a therapist began in early 2011. At the time, I was a young man studying Pharmaceutical Science at the University of Messina. I was then, and still am, a great sportsman, but back then I did not have my current professional knowledge.

As often happens with athletes, I made serious nutrition mistakes. I trained four times a week to gain muscle mass, and was a big consumer of high-quality protein, derived from milk and cheeses: caseins. I drank more than 1 liter of milk every 24 hours. As a matter of fact, thanks also to my genetic predisposition to building lean muscle mass instead of fat, I soon saw results: 10 kg (approx. 22 lbs.) of lean muscle mass in six months, impressive numbers in the eyes of any personal trainer. Unfortunately, the muscle mass came with my first organic disorders.

One evening, around 10 pm in January 2011, I was sleeping at home in Messina, when I suddenly woke up to a violent intestinal colic. Alone, frightened and panicking, I did not even think to go to the emergency room; I remained there for hours with that devastating intestinal colic. Early the next morning, around 4 am, exhausted by the pain, I called my parents, who, frightened, rushed over almost immediately from Caltanisetta. It took a two-and-a-half-hour car ride for them to arrive, and they immediately took me to the city hospitals ER while I was almost unconscious from the pain and violent spasms. The health protocol applied there was symptomatic treatment: painkillers, antispasmodic drugs and antacids.

From that day on, the attacks hit me weekly and grew more and more intense: toxic states characterized by nausea, diarrhea and vomiting. At night I slept pretty poorly; my nasal turbinates were always irritated and swollen, and my doctors were pushing for a surgical solution. Plus, I had cervical pain and vertigo all the time. No one could explain to me the cause of my ailments, and oddly, we talked about everything except for nutrition.

Despite these debilitating issues, in March 2013 I earned my degree and decided to take six months off before continuing my studies. I always thank fate and my tenacity for taking that free time, which I used in the best possible wayby trying to understand and resolve my health issues. Clicking away at my mouse, my battle to take back control of my health began with the discovery of Dr. Piero Mozzis diet. In just a few days, I regained control of my health almost 100%: no more vertigo, no more toxic states, an exponential increase in muscle strength (which had been previously diminishing), and the total disappearance of my nasal swelling and migraines. I came to understand the great power of food, this secret medicine no one had ever told me about, and that I myself, a fanatical Pharmaceutical Science student, had ignored. The only remaining problem was my irritable bowel syndrome, which was somewhat under control without any real colics, but ever-present with the changing of the seasons, or any type of mental or physical stress. I began a new course of studies in Food Science and Human Nutrition as passionately as a fanatic of the blood type diet, but the desire for knowledge inspired me to search for all those food molecules that led people, especially ones loved ones, to a bad state of health.

I embarked on an endless search of all existing diets: macrobiotic, vegan, Kousmine, paleo, etc. I asked questions to people on particular diets in order to understand the various health issues they had resolved. I found myself with thousands of pieces of data to cross-reference where people, though on very different diets, managed to resolve their problems anyway. What was the least common denominator that allowed these people to resolve the same issues with totally different diets? Despite my study work load, and the time I needed to devote to it, I still managed to find the time for my research: nighttime. I will admit that I went a bit overboard for a while, but I noticed that by eating correctly, I was able to overcome any stressful event. I graduated in 2015 and started to work, and through gathering accurate medical histories on my patients, the data became clearer.

CHAPTER 1

THE HEALTHY MEDITERRANEAN DIET

Premise

The end of the Second World War was a very important and significant event in the history of mankind. Other than redistributing the population map of the West, in the early post-war period (around 1950), a true food revolution began to put strain on our bodies. The human body functions like a well-oiled machine, but when atypical dietetic conditions occur, it needs time to make the best of these new conditions. Yes, our genes do not mutate easily; it takes thousands of years for significant change in the human genome. When we input something in our immune system that is not recognized, the body does not work properly. It is up to us, maybe with the help of a nutritional biologist, to bring everything back to normal.

The consequences of this food revolution presented themselves almost immediately. In fact, from 1950 to today, numerous new pathologies have appeared, and they are putting the best researchers in the pharmaceutical field to the test. We used to fight bacterial infections; today these are gone, making way for metabolic, tumoral and autoimmune diseases, whose causes they say are unknown. To name just a few: type 2 diabetes is affecting 246 million people, and in Italy alone there are 6 million patients with thyroid dysfunctions. In addition, there are 3 million people with multiple sclerosis, and 1,000 tumor cases are discovered in Italy every day. We could go on and on with these dismal statistics, but better to stop and make sense of it all. Despite these frightening data, we continue to believe that medicine has taken several steps forward and that life-spans have increased; honestly, I do not believe that it is anyones dream to live to 85 if it means being a depressive slave to ten medications, with fewer organs than before and with an inability to walk autonomously. Do you? I really do not think so.

Even today, we continue to ignore the close connection between the explosion of illnesses and the aforementioned food revolutionon the contrary, we are constantly invited to follow the healthy Mediterranean Diet, recognized ever since 2010 as being on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. The consequences of these facts are devastating: I find myself in the office writing up food regimens for children with fatty livers, and rebalancing the bodies of adolescents dealing with the onset of lupus erythematosus, psoriasis, and various autoimmune diseases. What saddens me the most is that every day, when I ask new patients about their medical history upon their preliminary analysis, many of them sit down and say that there is nothing wrong with them. Considering their (maybe even a tad advanced) age, I find myself insisting they reflect on their condition: