Everyday Systems

I just came across a funny (but also serious) article here about the 16th century humanist-merchant Alvise Cornaro and his diet book his book “La Vita Sobria.” It's never been out of print, apparently, for over 400 years.

http://159.54.226.83/apps/pbcs.dll/arti ... 14027/1049

A lot of familiar stuff... some highlights:

The menu is what might be called Old Italian Man: some milk with bread in it for breakfast, broth with egg in it for lunch, a small piece of goat or veal meat and perhaps a vegetable later in the day.

(Count the meals!)

Cornaro was not [merely] about caloric restriction. He was about something much tougher, and much more honest: the recognition that to make a habit is viscerally human, but to control a habit takes something from above — the head.

And he even did "glass ceiling:"

And about two cups of wine (white and “new”). This last he termed “my milk.”

As he aged, he got a little too hard core for my taste. I think I'd prefer death to the single egg a day he reportedly subsisted on in his nineties.

I just checked and and [url=ttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1564596 ... k_code=as1]English translation[/url] is available at amazon.com.







Reinhard

Well, actually Reinhard, a single egg has a lot of stored energy...
Really!
Okay, it's an early experiment on how the body and it's cell structure is affected by free radicals... Another experiment which was done on monkeys showed that with the same environment, but a significant calorie restricted diet did, indeed, change the animals on a cellular level and they had the bodies and energy of animals 20 years younger than their actual age...
But please, by all means, have two eggs!
LOL..
Thanks for that!
Oprah will be interviewing you before you know it!
Love,
Deb