“Intermittent fasting is bad for you”

PADUA – No al intermittent fasting and skipping meals, especially for younger people trying to lose weight, and a commitment to healthy lifestyles as a key element for the longest possible health trajectories. They write it four directors of the Degree Course in Medicine of the University of Padua, which on 22 May will present the “Padua Charter for the health of young people” to 800 high school students in the city and province. To share the document, published in the international journal “Frontiers in Pediatrics”, are Eugene Baraldidirector of the Women’s and Children’s Health Department, Liviana Da Dalt, of the Didactic Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, Michelle Catof Child Neuropsychiatry e George Perilongo, Director of the Pediatric Clinic. “The combination – write the teachers – of a badly placed and above all badly told emphasis on the need to avoid obesity, and therefore to adopt extremely varied diets, with a growing narcissistic attitude of our society and a concept of beauty that is more sometimes the ideal, detached from reality, is favoring dangerous and distorted elaborations of the concept of eating. The consequence is a constant increase in eating disorders in adolescents and in particular of potentially very serious anorexic disorders”. In this panorama «intermittent fasting is associated in a scientifically significant way, especially in young women, with psychopathological eating disorders». Furthermore, skipping dinner 4-5 times a week «corresponds to depriving a family of an important ritual, which is sitting together around the table in the evening, with possible deleterious implications for the children and the family itself. Not having dinner together – they conclude – to adhere to diets that include skipping the evening meal is at the risk of creating isolation”.

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in Il Gazzettino