With cold, flu, and covid season upon us I thought it relevant to introduce our subscribers to Luigi Cornaro possibly the first professional dietician.  Cornaro was born in 1464 in Venice and lived to be 102 years old, a feat he credited to a meager diet.

He wrote a book on the subject when he was 83, titled Discourses on the Temperate Life (La Vita Sobria), updating it four times until he was 95.  He claimed that he changed his life at age 35 while living in Padua partaking in a decadent lifestyle.  He was born with a delicate stomach (“cold and moist” – whatever that meant) which made him vulnerable to frequent abdominal pain and a constant low-grade fever.  By age 40 his suffering led him to accept medical advice to adopt a temperate and orderly life.  That included a strict diet and reduced stress.

Eventually, Cornaro limited himself to 12 ounces of solid food a day and 14 ounces of ‘light’ wine.  He would consume these in four meals: a little beef/veal, egg yolk, vegetable soup, coarse, unrefined bread, salads, and fresh seasonal fruits.  He avoided fish, pork, and chicken, as they didn’t digest well.  (Living in northern Italy, Cornaro had no pasta on his menu.)  This Spartan diet worked wonders for his health, so at age 70 he figured he could add another 2 ounces of solid food.  He figured wrong, and the additional food overwhelmed his system so he reverted back to 12 ounces.

He claimed not only good health but lost none of his strength or senses as he grew older.  His book was an instant success, translated into many European languages.  Its simple theme: never leave the table satisfied.  Gluttony is the quickest way to a short life.

In recounting his interaction with the medical profession of the time, Cornaro shunned the usual treatments of bloodletting and purgatives.  This alone made him a revolutionary.  Bloodletting survived well into the 19th century (George Washington presumably died from it.)  Nor was he enticed into drug treatments. Physicians often used opium, tobacco, arsenic, and mercury as medicine.

From our modern standpoint, Cornaro knew nothing of calories, cholesterol, or vitamins.  The 12 oz he consumed were foods that agreed with his digestive system, yet he seemed to understand a Protein-Carbs-Veggies balance.  Ultimately, he found that egg yolks were the most reliable source of health.  He didn’t waver in his wine drinking although he made a point of shunning “dry” wine, thinking the alcohol content was higher than “new” wines.  A glass of wine today is generally 5 oz, which means Cornaro was drinking close to three glasses a day.  He made no mention of beer as a meal accompaniment – his northern European followers had to take their chances.

From an Italian perspective, Luigi Cornaro is to be pitied for his limited digestion.  Even in the 16th Century, Italians had produced an amazing array of food products and a cuisine so envious that when Catherine de Medici married a French king she brought Italian chefs to France to improve that cuisine.  Yet, Cornaro’s diet is missing any of Italy’s famous cheeses.  It included milk but no cheese or egg noodles.  (Tomato sauce wasn’t invented in Naples until a century after Cornaro’s death.)  Nor did Cornaro mention prosciutto which was a northern Italian staple since Roman times. 

Finally, you would think that severely limiting one’s diet might lead to anorexia, but I found just the opposite in this title cover of Chinese study from 2018. -JLM