In the tanned skin and small, athletic appearance of Rafael Guzmán (Ciudad Real, 51 years old) are the keys that have made him a reference in preventive medicine and nutritionism in Spain.
From a corner of Córdoba, Guzmán cares for patients who travel from very distant parts of Spain with multiple pathologies.
His predicament involves returning to the most primitive version of the human being: sunbathing again, fasting for much of the day and consuming only original foods from our ecosystem can save us many visits to the doctor's office.
This expert in psychoneuroimmunology, director of the Metódica clinic in Córdoba, has transferred his studies of human behavior to
Your body, your home
(Espasa), a book that explains how the environment in which we live and our simplest habits can compromise our health. .
He receives EL PAÍS for the interview at nine in the morning.
Ask.
I slept little to travel to Córdoba early and I just had a coffee.
We started bad?
Answer.
You start off very badly, because going below seven hours of sleep, even occasionally, has very negative consequences.
Just one hour less already compromises the cardiovascular system considerably.
Today your probability of suffering a cardiovascular accident has increased by more than 24%.
Q. And the coffee?
A. Coffee is considered a drug that modifies our behavior.
If you have insomnia, this coffee is
hacking
a metabolic pathway and, for example, will affect your sleep.
Everything you do during the day has an impact at night.
Under the best conditions, it takes the body 11 hours to eliminate caffeine.
If you have slept little and there are stressful situations, we can go to 20.
Q.
He also does not recommend juices or bread... What have you had at this time?
A. I have to say that I never have breakfast.
Fasting is as extremely natural as sleeping, it is implicit in the life of human beings.
What is not physiological is eating five times a day.
Our genes were forged in an energy-deficient environment and what our brain expects to receive is what it has received for hundreds of thousands of years: hours of fasting.
Human beings have never gone hunting with a full belly.
But hey, in any case, a healthy breakfast should include proteins.
Scientific studies ensure that people who eat protein in the morning are better able to make correct decisions throughout the day.
Raw nuts and healthy fats too.
Regarding carbohydrates, I only banish refined products.
You can take pure buckwheat or rye.
To drink, chicory, which is a prebiotic, accompanied with coconut oil and butter, which is what is known as
bulleprof
.
Q.
Are we doing it all wrong then?
A. The problem is that we live absolutely against the laws that govern our lives and that translates into illnesses.
Our society is sick: Already today, February 19, 1,150,000 people have died from cancer in the world this year.
More than 1.7 billion are overweight and 900 million are obese, and more than 144,000 have committed suicide.
Regarding Spain, around 62% of the population over 15 years of age is diagnosed with a chronic pathology and takes medication.
Many people are sick, and this is because we are breaking the laws that govern our lives.
Q.
How did we come to this?
A. In principle, we evaluate the risks very poorly and we believe that nothing will ever happen to us.
But without a doubt, one of the great problems of human beings is self-reference.
We live in this time frame, dragged by the agri-food and technology industry that has made an artificial world a normality and the problem is that we have empowered it and we no longer question whether what we are doing is right or wrong.
We let ourselves be carried away by the decision of the pack.
We are tribal beings.
We are not governed by the laws of nature, we are governed by the laws of industry.
Guzmán poses during the interview at the Congress Palace in Córdoba, on February 19. PACO PUENTES
Q.
In this book you are not here to make friends: you leave the agri-food industry, but also the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industry, in a very bad place.
A. Well….
That is why at the end of the book I put an extensive bibliography.
We Europeans are exposed daily to 75,000 toxic substances, from food, deodorants, and creams.
And drugs are there to be used when they are really necessary, what harms us is their misuse.
Our society and our healthcare are pharmacocentric: human beings live today in the age of
Yaism
, we want a quick, easy solution that does not involve energy expenditure.
So, does my head hurt?
I take a pill.
Am I not very fertile?
I get hormones.
But we do not analyze our lifestyle habits, and that is where the explanation for almost everything is found.
Q.
Are we what we sleep or are we what we eat?
A. We are what we sleep in the first place, because sleep is life: the more you sleep, the more you live.
And we are not what we eat, we are what we manage to absorb from food.
I'll give you an example: legumes, so considered and loved, inhibit the enzymes that our pancreas releases and serve to absorb nutrients.
This is why people who eat legumes later in the afternoon feel heavy and gassy.
The body protests.
You will never see an insect bite or eat a legume, because they know they die.
Very few bugs tolerate the chemicals in legumes.
That foam that comes out when we put chickpeas in water is called sapolina and generates many intestinal problems.
Q. And what are we going to do in Spain without spoon dishes then?
A. One thing happens here: legumes got us out of hunger in the post-war period and are deeply rooted in our culture.
In our minds, legumes are a superfood and it is difficult to get them out of our heads and kitchens.
Everything that is commonly used is normalized and empowered, we do not question it.
But applying common sense, we have to realize that when everything in the body works well, there are no symptoms or signs.
But if we eat something and then have flatulence, gas or heaviness, it is a sign that the body is talking to us.
It's common sense.
Eating them every 10 days would be fine.
Q.
You also mention in your book that the human body is not prepared to eat foods from other latitudes.
A. In principle there is also a sustainable claim here: if I stop to think about the energy expenditure required to bring a pineapple from Costa Rica to Spain, my conscience does not allow me to eat it.
Although there is also another explanation: the sun is what provides energy to food and when the sun that bathes my skin is the same that ripens the food that I am going to eat, there is a vibrational coherence of the electrons provided by the sun that , translated into biochemical language, means that the foods I consume from my region, which are bathed in the sun that I receive without there being a plastic layer in between, will provide me with more energy and more nutrients than those that come from out.
Q.
Why have we made the sun our enemy?
A chapter of his book is titled
Where the Sun Enters, the Doctor Does Not Enter
.
R.
It's ignorance.
We have considered the sun as if it were only ultraviolet radiation, when it is an infinitesimal part.
And we have removed the rest of the electromagnetic wavelengths it has from that light spectrum.
But when the skin is exposed to the sun with all that range of waves, it becomes our friend, and it is our protector: it regulates more than 1,300 genes, of which the bulk belong to the immune system.
As I say in the book, studies on the danger of the sun have been done on individuals who have spent months indoors, in offices working, and who in the summer months are suddenly exposed to the sun, without taking into account nutrition and other factors. possible factors of those people.
We have been tremendously reductionist.
There are studies that claim that people who work in the sun are those who suffer the least from skin cancer.
The key is gradual exposure to create a sun shield: we eat well and expose ourselves to the sun a little.
That's the key.
Q.
Is the night only made for sleeping?
A. All the daytime activity we do at night causes us social
jet lag
.
Eating and playing sports are daytime activities.
Doing it once the sun has gone down is breaking a natural law and, therefore, has health consequences.
Q.
One of the pieces of advice you give to your patients is that if they sleep as a couple, they should take off their pajamas.
A. If you are accompanied, I advise you to leave your pajamas in the drawer, the human being has a wonderful tissue, a source of secretion of hormones and neurotransmitters, which is the skin.
An organ measuring two square meters with the capacity to produce practically everything that a human being needs to live.
There are two substances that are released when we have skin-to-skin contact: serotonin and oxytocin.
The first is the hormone of happiness and balance of mood, clarity and making correct decisions.
It also protects us from skin pathologies, it is a very cheap way to avoid having to consult a dermatologist.
And oxytocin is the hormone of empathy, attachment and loving bond.
Interestingly, the higher we have oxytocin, the less desire for sweets we have.
Q.
Doctor, we're 45 minutes into the interview.
Is it time to quit, or at least get up and do some type of exercise?
R.
Definitely.
I don't do it during appointments because they last an hour, but the rest of the day I set an alarm.
Every 40 minutes I get up and do two minutes of intense exercise: squats, push-ups... Any exercise that promotes the sudden contraction of muscle masses.
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