Italian society begins to deal with over two years of restrictive measures, the strictest in Europe, imposed to contain a virus with low relative lethality.
In fact, it seems that in our country about 42% of children between 5 and 9 years old are obese or overweight, with a figure that is by far the worst in the European Union, where the average is 29.5%. To this is added another chilling comparison with the recent past: according to a report by the Higher Institute of Health, compared to 2019 in Italy there is an increase in the mass of tobacco smokers, with about 800 thousand new subjects who have established this dangerous addiction to cigarettes of all kinds. Even the consumption of those with heated tobacco is tripled. In fact, it was since 2006 that the number of smokers did not experience such an increase.
As for the alarming data on children’s obesity, it emerges from an analysis by Coldiretti on the 2022 Report of the WHO European office. A situation that has aggravated an alarming phenomenon – underlines Coldiretti – since the numbers show how weight problems affect young people in our country. In fact, in the age group between 7 and 9 years, an obese 41.9% overweight compared to a community average of 29%, and in that between 10 and 19 years the percentage is 34.2% compared to 24.9% of European adolescents. The forced decrease in physical activity and the increased time spent at home and in front of the TV in two years of pandemic – Coldiretti underlines – have been added to the adoption of wrong consumption models within families with the worrying abandonment of the principles of the Mediterranean diet.
All this can only represent a potentially devastating constraint for the future health of these young people, who have been imposed a disease prevention model based on a substantial immobility with a lot of mask, hand washing and distancing. Nothing to do with the warnings expressed several times by the World Health Organization itself, which, especially in relation to the two-month Chinese lockdown imposed in the beautiful country in the spring of 2020, declared in gold letters that “sport and ‘physical activity in the open air represent an irreplaceable safeguard of psycho-physical health. “
And today, as widely expected by those who considered the measures imposed by an elusive public health committee dominated by the Speranza / Ricciardi fear combination from the beginning, we are reaping the fruit of their choices, with almost half of our children showing an evident obesity, thereby laying the foundations for a whole series of serious and very serious future pathologies. Pathologies which, just to remember, represent the real fatal risk for anyone who contracts a low lethality virus such as Sars-Cov-2, as well as the numbers of over two years of pandemic demonstrate absolutely incontrovertible. Mortal risk that certainly the aforementioned increasing trend of smokers does not decrease on a general level, also in consideration of the fact that every year in Italy over 80 thousand people die from causes deriving from this unhealthy addiction.
From this point of view, the great opportunity lost by our embarrassing health authorities regarding the increasingly misunderstood theme of a correct lifestyle to be imparted to young people is clearly highlighted. Correct lifestyle based on the two pillars of a healthy diet and a correct and continuous physical-motor activity. The classic men in a healthy body which does not seem to belong to the wealth of knowledge of those who imagine an immobile and perpetually distanced and masked society. A sedentary society in which the message that you can eat and smoke at will is passing, so then medical science will always find an adequate drug or therapy to make us continue our “exciting” purely biological existence.
Claudio Romiti, May 31, 2022