The word “longevity”, when associated with the diet, often evokes uninviting images: soups for the preceded, sad salads, dishes that promise health at the price of taste. To overturn this imagination will take care of the next World Congress of Nutrition Iuns – ICN 2025, which will be held in Paris from 24 to 29 August and which every four years gathers experts from all over the world. In the program of the symposium for the first time since 1948 it has made its official entry into the scientific program, culinary medicine, a discipline that tries to unite what has been kept separate so far: nutrition and gastronomy.
To lead the symposium there is Chiara Manzi, a pioneer of this subject in Europe, together with Dr. Daniele Mandrioli, director of the “Cesare Maltoni” Cancer Research Center of the Ramazzini Institute. The chosen title is eloquent: “Culinary Medicine: Gastronomy Joins Nutrition for A Sustainable and Delicious Diet”. A manifesto that announces a change of pace: the diet not as a path of deprivation, but as a sustainable practice, based on pleasure and awareness.
The symposium promises to translate a simple and disruptive thesis into recipes and practical methods: there is no dish that cannot be reformulated in a healthy key, without renouncing the taste. Indeed, the kitchen can turn into a prevention tool, to become an integral part of medicine. Carbonara, pizza or ice cream – often branded symbols as “enemies of health” – are rethought in the light of scientific techniques that allow to reduce sugars, fats or critical substances, keeping the pleasure of the table unchanged.
It is not a theoretical exercise. The program includes not only scientific relationships, but also practical tools: recipes, videos, cooking methods, guidelines useful for health professionals, chefs and ordinary citizens. In other words, culinary medicine does not aim to build yet another diet, but a daily approach to food that marries rigor and pleasure.
Mandiali’s contribution brings to the table the work of years of research on the effects of the chemicals present in food – from pesticides to sweeteners – with a network of collaborations that goes from the International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC) to the World Health Organization. Manzi, on the other hand, translates science into the practice of the stove, with particular attention to the Italian gastronomic tradition. Not surprisingly, the symposium looks to the Mediterranean cuisine as the ideal model for combining taste and well -being.
Behind the formula of “happy longevity” there is the idea that health is not measured only in years earned, but in the quality of the time lived. A perspective that tries to overcome the equation between well -being and sacrifice, which for decades has conditioned both medical protocols as well as domestic habits. The new frontier, explain the promoters, is not living for a long time by renouncing, but living better without guilt in front of the dish.
The congress then marks the entry of a vision that is candidate to change the rules of the game: the cuisine no longer reduced to a contour variable in public health strategies, but recognized as a central prevention tool.
A kind revolution, which does not only concern scientific workshops, but anyone who sits at the table.
Because, after all, the question from which everything is elementary: what sense does it make to talk about health, if the way to get it takes away the joy of eating?