
Eliana Liotta
BIOGRAPHY
Eliana Liotta, a writer, journalist and science popularizer, is the author of best sellers including La Dieta Smartfood (Rizzoli, 2016), with the scientific stamp of the Ieo, published in more than 20 countries, and L’età non è uguale per tutti (La nave di Teseo, 2018), written in team with doctors and researchers from Humanitas University Hospital. Her latest essay is Trials of Happiness (La nave di Teseo, 2019): collecting 25 science-recognized ideas for living joyfully, in collaboration with the University and San Raffaele Hospital in Milan. She signs two weekly columns in Corriere della Sera: one in Corriere Salute and one in Io donna. In Milan, she is the vice president of the Dal Verme and Arcimboldi theaters and she is part of the scientific committee for the City’s 2020 cultural program schedule I Talenti delle donne. In 2017 she won the Premiolino, Italy’s oldest journalism award, and in 2019 the Bologna Award for the communication of environmental sustainability.
For La nave di Teseo she published her latest book, The Food that Will Save Us (2021).
PUBLICATIONS
Title:
Il cibo che ci salverà
Publisher:
La nave di Teseo
Release date:
08-04-2021

There is a food that is both kind to the body and kind to the planet. It is smart food, fit for the Anthropocene, the era in which we live and where humans are the ones influencing nature’s events. The Food That Will Save Us, the new book by Eliana Liotta, shows how essential an ecological turn at the table is to help the earth and health. To save the environment, it is no longer enough to ride a bike, buy a hybrid car and remember to turn off the lights. It is not enough to think only about oil and coal. As the UN warns, global warming cannot stop without changing the food system, on which one-third of greenhouse gas emissions responsible for rising temperatures depend. What is extraordinary is that the lunches and dinners advocated to curb pollution and climate run amok are exactly the same ones that protect health and boost the immune system. We tend to forget this: we are part of the whole.
In this essay, the author presents for the first time a reflection from a dual scientific approach, ecological and nutritional, with advice from the European Institute on Economics and the Environment and the San Donato Group Foundation’s EAT Project.
Five diets were proposed, both ecocarnivorous and plant-based, capable of mitigating pollutant emissions and improving our figure and our health. Hundreds of answers offered to curiosities about the impact of food, from intensive farming to fishing, from avocado cultivation to synthetic steak prototypes. We are what we eat, and what we eat can change the world.
This book has scientific input from the European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE), directed by Massimo Tavoni, and the EAT – Sustainable Food Project of the San Donato Group Foundation, chaired by Gilda Gastaldi.
Title:
La rivolta della natura
Publisher:
La nave di Teseo
Release date:
25.06-2020

Extreme heat, hurricanes, torrential rains, wildfires, aggressive new viruses like the one that scarred the entire world in 2020. Nature has begun to rebel. And there is no more time: man’s impact on our planet now carries an unsustainable burden. Many infectious diseases of recent decades, from Ebola to AIDS, from hendra to dengue, are not just tragedies dictated by chance. There is a deep connection between their spread and climate change, deforestation, pollution and even social inequality, because poverty and hunger are allies of viruses. This book embraces for the first time in a single glance the infinitesimal vision of microscopes and the great breath of the Earth.
Narrating is science journalist and writer Eliana Liotta, who reflects with one of the most highly regarded medical virologists on the international scene, Massimo Clementi. Studies on the inseparable relationship between human health and the health of the planet become living matter of narrative, validated by the European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE), the European institute engaged in economic and environmental research. With the clarity of parents who are good at answering their children’s questions or those professors who know how to explain to students, the authors make a rigorous point about the real causes of modern epidemics and possible cures, with an in-depth look at foods that support the immune system. We must learn from our mistakes and act now to correct them. The climate of a future that in some ways is already present can turn vast swaths of the earth into incredible incubators for mosquito larvae. Melting polar ice caps can threaten us with giant viruses re-emerging from glaciers. In degraded ecosystems, pathogens adapt to the few remaining wild species and are more easily able to make the leap from a bat or rodent to us. In polluted areas, microorganisms find paved highways to settle and multiply.
Nature asks us to make peace with her. Let’s listen to her.
Part of the proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to scientific research at IRCSS San Raffaele Hospital in Milan.
Title:
Prove di felicità.
25 idee riconosciute dalla scienza per vivere con gioia
Publisher:
La Nave di Teseo
Release date:
30-05-2019

Happiness is a gift we should give ourselves. After all, we deserve it.
It is said that we are born to suffer, but studies prove that human history advances in pursuit of joy, our life principle. This is evidenced by art, music, falling in love. A full smile is the best identifiable expression on the face: perhaps because those who can recognize it find a friend, and friends train good humor. A hug sedates stress, having lunch in company stimulates the production of endorphins. With the closeness of others, cascading, the risks of depression, heart disease, and hypertension drop.
The new essay by Eliana Liotta, author of the bestsellers Age Is Not the Same for Everyone and The Smartfood Diet, suggests 25 ideas for trying to live joyfully: they are Trials of Happiness. For the first time, a book brings together relevant scientific evidence on the topic, feedback from laboratories and population surveys. And for the first time, doctors and researchers from a major scientific institute and university hospital, San Raffaele in Milan, are collaborating on a project that explores an unquantifiable yet essential ingredient in a person’s health.
Trials of happiness are the attempts that each of us can experience. Individual gestures, sometimes simple actions that can teach us to derive satisfaction from everyday life. Despite difficulties, losses, illnesses. Happiness is a choice and is in our gaze.
But chemistry matters, too. Our mood is like a palace, whose pillars are nothing but combinations of atoms and whose building blocks are proteins and hormones, foremost among them serotonin. Even at the dinner table we can cultivate happiness by choosing foods that influence smiles and body well-being: happyfoods.
Title:
L’età non è uguale per tutti
Publisher:
La Nave di Teseo
Release date:
17-05-2018

Everything depends on others. Only time is our own.
(Seneca)
Can youth be dilated? The answer is yes. A picture book that teaches how to defend our bodies and our health, with practical suggestions for diet and exercise.
Can youth be dilated? And reverse the aging process? The answer is yes, age is not the same for everyone. For the first time in Europe, a psychophysical program to improve the quality of life is being developed with the contribution of different specialists from a large clinical and research center, led by Alberto Mantovani, the scientific director of Humanitas, the most cited Italian scientist in the international literature. Why does it happen that biological age does not coincide with registry age? What is the secret to retaining the golden years of body and mind? These are the questions of those who care about aesthetics and those who want to ward off diseases such as diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular, rheumatological and neurodegenerative diseases.
The key is to extinguish inflammation, to throw water on the small fires with a two-faced nature that burn within us: sometimes protective, sometimes destructive like any self-respecting flame. Eliana Liotta recounts as in a novel the clashes between good and evil that take place in the recesses of our bodies, with the soldiers of the immune system engaged in a daily war that no one imagines fighting. In the second part of the book, each reader will find an easy and practical guide, with explanatory illustrations, for applying the results of scientific research to his or her everyday life: from diet to exercises. A unique project in Europe, with the scientific stamp of Humanitas, a world reference for immune system research.