Il benessere alimentare ad Agrigento: i risultati della ricerca

In advanced industrial societies, nutrition has changed a lot in a direction that seems to present two interconnected phenomena. The first is that poor nutrition no longer stems from more or less pronounced forms of food deficiency but, on the contrary, from excesses. Overweight and obesity are on the rise in the world. Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorders are spreading. The other ongoing process would be the loss of commensality, the table is losing its role as a place of gathering and conviviality around the world, more in some places and less in others. If one spends less time at the table, and perhaps even alone, it is certain that the act of eating ends up being reduced to its mere physiological function, losing that which is linked to the well-being of the person. If the dissociation between eating and being with others at the table really does spread, it means that we are losing the social, convivial function of producing social cohesion that the meal has always had. That is, we would be in the presence of a segment of a more general process of fragmentation and loss of cohesion and social capital that has long been lamented. The loss of social capital jeopardises our well-being, including that of food.