For Italian people starting a ketogenic diet, the main stress is above all their identity, they feel less Italian. The news comes from a study by Professor Matteo Corciolani of the University of Pisa - Department of Economics and Management, published in the Journal of Business Research. The research analysed the emotions and behaviour of people, who for various health reasons ranging from migraines to obesity, adopt this dietary regime mainly based on fats, under medical supervision. The effect is disorientation from their social and family context as it seems impossible to eat while abandoning the Mediterranean diet and giving up foods such as pasta, bread and pizza.
“In ketogenic diets, the big change is the consumption of carbohydrates, which occupy a very low percentage, usually roughly less than 50 grams a day,” explains Matteo Corciolani, “This implies a revolution in eating habits, especially for Italians. Whilst in other countries, where there are not so many pasta dishes the change is felt and experienced much less traumatically”.
Professor Corciolani’s analysis was based on an impressive amount of data from the activity of the Facebook group “Chetogenesi” users. Around 900 pages of content has been monitored for seven years - with the authorisation of the community’s moderators - to which were added in-depth interviews with ten members of the group. On top of that, a media contextual analysis through the LexisNexis database, which includes the main Italian newspapers and periodicals online was added. In particular, the interactions on Facebook revealed the fundamental role of the emotional component by analysing three feelings: sadness of giving up loved foods, anxiety linked to the fear that the ketogenic diet is actually unhealthy, due to the amount of fats to be consumed, and lastly also anger due to the fact that sometimes the desired outcomes arrive slowly. Starting from these assumptions, the research focused on how success and continuation of diet transform these negative feelings into positive ones.
"The support of other people, such as that of the Facebook virtual community, is the key to this change,’ Corciolani concludes, ‘because above all it helps the psychological process of reframing, i.e., framing what happens to us in a different and more positive way. Coming back to the issue of Italian-ness, in the face of rediscovered physical well-being, pizza and pasta are not so important, to the point of questioning the superiority status of the Mediterranean diet. From this point of view, positive emotions such as the joy of controlling one’s symptoms more effectively, the affection for the other people with whom we share the same experience or the surprise due to the discovery of new food combinations, become more and more frequent, up to replacing the negative emotions we felt at the beginning of the diet’.