Jo's was a discreet but constant presence. She was practically always there, in the audience, listening to her husband, who spoke from the stage in front of crowds of theaters and auditoriums. And he, Franco Berrino, epidemiologist, director of the predictive medicine clinic of the Cancer Institute of Milan for years and author of very successful texts on longevity and healthy life, knows that she is still there, even if last February She was born in heaven. She knows it because it is the message that she left him on their last day, when she asked him to sing her Tibetan mantras (she had never done it before, I understood afterwards that it was her way to greet me) by letting herself be kept close in your arms. And it went like this, serenely. Because he was not afraid of death. But in order not to be afraid of death explains Berrino to Half an hour with Corriere (here the full video interview) you need to know how to live life well. Death does not scare those who have had a conscious life, those who have been aware, those who have realized they are living . Moreover, he himself already imagined his death and told it in his new book The food of wisdom What really feeds us , written with four hands with the Taoist master Marco Montagnani, and dedicated to his life partner (who in the soul guarded the shadow of the valleys and the light of the peaks, like our mountains) who comes out today for Mondadori: I dreamed of being dressed in a white tunic, which in real life I never wear, in a dojo, at the end of a group meditation session. In the end everyone leaves, except for a beautiful girl: she comes back to me, touches my shoulder and I simply disappear. The dress empties of my body and slides to the ground . He wouldn't know who that girl was. No, I didn't recognize her. However, we like to think that it could be his Jo (with him above in the photo of Enrica Bortolazzi) , which he tenderly continues to call my bride.

You say that those on death are among the most beautiful pages of your book We are experiencing difficult days. But I think the most terrible thing is not so much the number of the dead, but the fact of dying alone, intubated, without being able to hold the bride, the groom, a son by the hand. After all, the death had already been stolen from us by medicine, by medical assistance, by resuscitators. And above all it had been stolen from a culture that sees it only as something terrible and negative. Life is said to be the thing that goes by while you are busy doing something else. Death can be beautiful. Today in the medical environment it is thought that one dies only from illness. But a disease is not necessary to die: we can very well get to die from old and disease-free. Diseases are and have many causes, but we can do a lot to avoid them, with food or exercise .

You have long maintained that healthy eating is the best medicine Food has a great effect on the immune system. We need good food to feed our soil, which is then our intestines, where billions of microbes that work for us live. But in today's way of eating there is no good food for our microbes. Vegetable fibers are good food and if we eat them, we get sick less of diabetes, cancer, heart attack, diseases of the respiratory system of the digestive system and also of infectious diseases. The studies in this field are very clear: those who follow a diet rich in fiber get less ill. Also of infectious diseases, because we make the digestive system that is the seat of our immune system work better .

Among other things, in this period it seems that everyone is spending time eating. Do you know that the hashtag #andratuttostretto was coined by paraphrasing the slogan It will be all right? I suggest taking advantage of the time finally found to stay in the kitchen and prepare healthy things. Cooking whole grains or foods rich in fiber that, in fact, also defend us from coronavirus. Instead, sweets should not be eaten because they are not good for our immune system. And if you really want to do them, prepare them so that they don't raise the blood sugar level

You also offer recipes on your Facebook page, some with captivating names. Like the panzerotti della happiness, which are just sweets Serotonin is the hormone of happiness and something sweet is needed to get it to the brain. So I chose ingredients that contain large quantities of amino acids that stimulate it: tofu, dates, nuts. The result was a sweet baked with whole wheat flour, which is a healthy concentrate of happiness .

How do you live this confinement period? Net of the situation healthcare, it's fantastic to be in Milan with clean air and silence. My apartment has a small terrace, which I had never used much in the past, only my wife sometimes looked after us with flowers. At noon it is in the sun. I'm going to have lunch there and it's a beautiful thing: you can taste the feeling of a city without pollution, which has certainly played a role in this epidemic. Then every day, in contravention of the rules a bit, I go upstairs to the friends who have a big TV screen and together we do aerobics: 40 minutes of aerobic exercise. You must always be active, even physical exercise helps us not to get sick, it has a great effect on the immune system .

Silence is something that in fact we all have a little rediscovered these days. Yes, and it is very important. It is not only silence understood as distance from sounds but from all the things that disturb our intimacy, our ability to look inside ourselves, our internal hygiene. Silence is indispensable to free the mind. The great masters can also meditate in the midst of traffic, but the less gifted people really need silence to find themselves. And finding yourself is very important in this world where we are always distracted by something, noise, images, television. TV is a truly perverse tool, it seems that it was invented on purpose so that, always remaining in operation, it prevents us from thinking and reflecting. Do you think that Gandhi remained silent one day a week, even when he had great political responsibilities and if there was an urgency he responded by writing on a ticket. I occasionally do a day of silence, a day when I don't speak. Silence helps us to realize that we are alive, that we exist .

A chat with Franco Berrino is never just an interview. It is a small journey that takes unexpected directions, a sort of journey without a specific destination. Like what he did for an entire day with Marco Montagnani, a Taoist teacher, in the Casentino woods, addressing the theme of life and that of death, that of fear (I was born in '44 under the bombing, I learned to know fear from the beginning ) and that of destiny, that of simplicity and that of gratitude. And also that of love. Love is like the sun, it is love for everything underlines Berrino -. Many of our hardships depend on the ego that we built in our mind, on the personality that we created to be accepted by our parents, people, employers. That ego that is so selfish that it hinders us in the search for the deep truth that is within us. At some point it is good to go the other way, to dismantle our ego. And that's when we will discover love. Because, as my Taoist master says, love appears when the mind dies .

Excerpt from:
Berrino: Death can be beautiful. But first you have to learn to live (long) - Surfacing Magazine