The Pioppi Diet, which is followed by the residents of a sleepy village in the Mediterranean, holds the key to combatting the twin epidemics of Type 2 diabetes and obesity, say Dr Aseem Malhotra & Donal O’Neill
Don’t Fear Fat was the tagline to Cereal Killers. If it seemed an outrageous and rebellious message at the time (one national broadcaster was keen to commission a remake, ‘only with much less fat’), public feeling has shifted in the interim. When we pointed the camera towards athletic performance and to the remarkable Sami Inkinen for our follow-up documentary, Run on Fat. There was no grand plan to make a third movie. But then I read about Pioppi in Nina Teicholz’s excellent book The Big Fat Surprise, and I wondered if there was a story waiting to be told in this tiny, long-forgotten Italian village. When internet searches came up with nothing on the subject, I got very excited indeed.
It was June 2015 when we arrived, unannounced, in Pioppi to film The Big Fat Fix. The brief was to capture the very essence of a sleepy little village where the people forget to die. This proved to be straight forward on the one hand, but almost impossible on the other.
Where there was food, we would shoot it. When we enjoyed food, we would discuss it on camera. But in our bid to recover the true secrets of Mediterranean longevity, we were planning to go beyond food. Way beyond. As we opened our senses to invite the magic of this environment to seep into our bones, we came to identify and peel back those forgotten layers of lifestyle - the treasure referred to by the mayor - which had been buried by decades of misinformation.
When I sat down to a seafood lunch on that first day with Aseem - by then my co-producer, co-author in waiting and leading global anti-obesity campaigner - I stopped thinking there might be a story and started to believe there might be much more than that. We both did.
The restaurant we chose to focus on was la Caupona, in the heart of the village, and the hospitality we enjoyed that afternoon set the tone for a remarkable stay in this magical place. We spoke no Italian, and the elderly gentleman who greeted, served and waved us goodbye spoke no English. His mode of communication was his enormous smile, but we nonetheless navigated our way to a remarkable feast of seafood, grilled vegetables and an abundance of olive oil.
As Aseem smoothly extolled the heart-healthy virtues of olive oil to the camera, Marek, the cameraman, salivated behind it. As a general rule, when the guy behind the camera is genuinely interested in what’s happening in front of it, you’re probably winning, so this was a good start. like all good directors, our director, Yolanda, likes to plan shooting schedules carefully, but when nobody speaks English and you don’t quite know what you’re looking for in the first instance, sometimes you have to go with your gut. This is not how documentaries are typically made, of course, but it very often makes for a better film.
When Professor Tim Noakes referred to The Big Fat Fix as exceptional. The best health movie ever and Aseem secured a worldwide premiere screening to members of the British Parliament in Westminster, we felt that we had successfully navigated our way to a solid end result. Of course, on our first day of filming, we had no idea that this was to come.
There was a lot we didn’t know.
After lunch, we drove around to familiarise ourselves with the area while the locals retired for their siesta. We would come to appreciate the potential - and very powerful - health significance of that cultural daily rite, but, like many of the lifestyle elements we identified in our time in Pioppi, it is impossible to isolate any one factor as an elixir of the remarkable health and longevity the people of this region have traditionally enjoyed.
When you read about the longevity research and findings of those scientists who followed in our footsteps, we would urge you to take their recommendations of singularly magical herbs with a pinch of sea salt. Our movie and this book recognise Pioppi as a very special place where impeccable traits of medical, nutritional and environmental science coexist, collide and combine with the physical wisdom of the very long-living in a perfect storm of human potential. The reality is simple enough. Science knows much less than we think and the people of Pioppi know a lot more than we have given them credit for - until now.
Pioppi is a place where time stretches, cradling you into a very compelling sense that not much matters beyond the minuscule borders of the village. The still and quiet of our first night there was a silent wrecking ball to our typical nocturnal environments. No noise. No lights. No disturbances of any kind at all. Just complete, idyllic serenity.
We woke the next day to a collective realisation that our impromptu visit was becoming an immersion into something very special indeed. How to convert that into something tangible for the viewer was our next major hurdle. On that crisp, clear morning in southern Italy, it struck us that there was only one way to start that process. Coffee.
The espresso bar in the centre of the village sits across the small open square from the restaurant where we had dined so well the day before. We successfully sign-languaged our way to espressos, cappucinos and in keeping with the plan, filmed the process. The science behind coffee as a health-positive, habitual drink option is increasingly compelling, so we needed some cutaway visuals to back this up in the movie. If the coffee itself was magnificent, there was a much more powerful message awakening in each of us that morning.
Scientists don’t like to use the word stress because it is not something they can accurately measure (the closest useable proxy is heart-rate variability (HRV), which we will discuss in more detail later). Although it is a very loose, catch-all term, stress is something we each have an innate understanding of. We intuitively know when we ourselves, a family member, close friend or partner might be stressed and, over time, the implications of this on health can be profoundly deleterious.