«Good nutrition begins on the shopping list, that is my maxim»

With humor and scientific evidence, Marián García – known as Boticaria García – advises thousands of citizens on nutrition and other health issues. She does it through conferences, social networks, the media and her books, the last of which is titled ‘Your Brain is Hungry’. With him he visits the LA RIOJA Culture Classroom this Friday, at 7:30 p.m. at the Ibercaja Center in Portales.

– He opens his book talking about the five types of hunger there are (physiological, emotional, environmental, hormonal and Dragon Khan). How to train our brain not to be hungry, beyond physiological hunger?

– When we are emotionally hungry it is because of stress or because cortisol is elevated. Environmental hunger is that of ‘as I see, as I want’, that of dopamine, with which we are seeking emotional refuge in food. Science tells us that we can look for that dopamine in other sources such as personal relationships, music, listening to a podcast or walking, whose pleasure is not as immediate as that of a chocolate palm tree but if we incorporate them into our lifestyle they really are healthy and can make a difference.

– To the much vaunted gut-brain axis you add one more vertex: the muscle. He says that we have to work on the muscle because we have abandoned it.

– Yes, and not only because we associate it with being prettier or burning calories, but because with strength training myokines are generated, which I call ‘superkines’ because they have many properties in our microbiota but also in our brain and they are capable of generating neurons. These ‘superkines’ travel from the muscles to the intestine, where they stimulate the microbiota and good bacteria, and these generate compounds that in turn travel to the brain and generate satiety. Everything is interconnected.

– To do this, he proposes a strength exercise routine that he calls ‘Tris, tras and cucú-tras’.

– Yes, the ‘tris’ circuits are to strengthen the upper body (arms, shoulders, chest and back) and the lower body (legs and glutes), but in our house and with elements such as bottles or rubber bands. The ‘tras’ is a work on the abdomen and ‘cucú-tras’, on the body, quads and butt. There is scientific evidence that training 10-15 minutes a day or half an hour three times a week can achieve great metabolic benefits.

– When he talks about diets he makes a traffic light classification.

– At the red light we have diets that not only should not be done but can cost us our health, such as detox or monothematic diets. In amber are the diets that we can follow but with caution or with the help of a professional (intermittent fasting or keto diet). And finally those with the green light, which are healthy diets such as the Mediterranean, the Harvard plate and what I call the pillars of the diet, which is an adaptation of the Swedish Find your way method and explains which foods should be eaten more, which ones need to be reduced and which ones to replace. For example, changing refined cereals for whole grains or potato chips as a side dish for vegetables.

– Its premise is that there is no miracle diet, not even a more effective universal diet, and it contemplates a future based on personalized nutrition.

– Yes, and it will be designed based on many parameters such as the microbiota or genes, and there are the nutrigenetic tests, which will be increasingly developed because it has been seen that the predisposition to overweight or obesity depends between 40 and 70% on our genes. It is often said that genes load the gun but habits pull the trigger. In that we have a promising future.

– Have you ever dieted?

– Not really. There are times when I eat away from home or whatever because of work, and I try to redirect myself to the pillars of the diet. My maxim is that good nutrition begins on the shopping list and everything we have at home is foods recommended by the Harvard plate. That is, it is important that it looks like the flag of Portugal, with a lot of green and a lot of red (fruits and vegetables).

– But the shopping basket has skyrocketed in recent months. Is eating well still within everyone’s reach?

– In my book I propose a cheap and healthy shopping list, and there we include some foods that are a little outdated but that must be promoted, such as legumes or eggs, the highest quality protein there is, more than that of the sirloin. On the other hand, fresh produce is ideal, but frozen vegetables or fish retain their nutritional properties and are cheaper. There are also canned fish, local and seasonal products. And then there is something that is not taken into account, food waste due to poor food preservation or not knowing how to organize the refrigerator.

– Each chapter of your book begins with an explanation for ten-year-old children. How to tackle childhood obesity, which reaches 30% of this population?

– There are many angles, and a very important one is movement. In addition to participating in the school cafeteria menus, children must have spaces at school and in the city where they can move. Obesity has tripled in the last fifty years, and this is because as a society we have changed and advertising regarding children must be intervened more, as well as claims for unhealthy foods. There is a regulated part but the legislation should be stricter. The key is also in training.

– From his first blog to his latest book, everything he communicates is done with irony and humor. Is it something sought after?

– We disseminators launch health pills whose excipient, in my case, is humor, comparisons, metaphors… For me, humor gets the message across. There is nothing worse than leaving a consultation or a pharmacy without having understood what they have told us. That feeling, which delivers you into the arms of Dr. Google, is something that as healthcare workers we should consider. If we do not go to the patient through social networks, there will be others who will occupy this place and, from what we are seeing, it is quite easy to spread hoaxes without any type of evidence.

– Do you miss the pharmacy counter?

– I have a counter open on Instagram 24 hours a day and quite direct contact with the people who follow me. I miss the affection of many people from the pharmacy, but I don’t miss the guards, I tell you that too.