Analysing the concept of illness is a rather complex task. Just like for the concept of health – presented by the philosopher Hans - Georg Gadamer as a “[…] general feeling of personal well-being [which] appears mostly when we, in our feeling of personal well-being, are open to new things, are ready to start new business, without considering demands made on us” - there is an important dimension of relativity that needs to be considered: it could be stated that, in the presence of illness, there is a significant change in the functionality of an organ or the entire organism. W. E. Boyd maintains that “illness is a change of the condition in which the organism is in perfect harmony with its environment […]”

The concept of illness has evolved. In the past, it was linked to the presence of microbes. Later, the emphasis was placed on the constitution and the environment. Nowadays, illness is seen as a system that the body puts in place to find again its lost balance. In ancient times, feeling ill concerned the individual only; today, a state of illness can be diagnosed by a physician by objective criteria. Therefore the concept of illness can be seen from many different perspectives.

It is interesting to note that, in the English language, there are three terms to indicate a pathological state: illness, which identifies the personal emotional state connected to the loss of health; disease, which refers to the objective, biological and measurable dimension of it - strictly linked to the physician’s activity - and sickness, which refers instead to the public dimension of the disease and highlights the link between illness and society.

Compared to the ontological model, which aims at eliminating the symptoms, the functional/relational model considers the illness as a dynamic event, an endogenous reaction to the break of a balance. In this perspective, body and mind are inseparable: it is the entire organism that becomes ill, not the single organ. In this model, the physician/patient relationship is crucial, and the physician promotes self - healing processes. Western medicine fully adheres to the so-called scientific method, intended as a set of rules that governs the process of acquiring knowledge. Key elements of the scientific method are the experimental observation of a natural event, the formulation of a general hypothesis in which this event occurs, and the ability to control the hypothesis through subsequent observations.

Science, after a long period in which it was interpreted as true in an absolute sense, completely changed after Albert Einstein, who, with his theory of relativity, laid the basis of quantum physics. Almost simultaneously, the aetiological agents of infectious diseases were discovered, and the first effective remedies to control them were introduced. At first, the arsenical compounds discovered by Paul Ehrlich – which were capable of inhibiting bacterial growth - and then the first antibiotics. Medicine thus became somewhat omnipotent, promising a free-from-pain society. The discoveries of the new physics did not affect the certainties of twentieth-century medicine. This lack of integration has led the scientific - medical thinking to the reality we experience today.

The relationship between health, nutrition and environment

We cannot speak of health and illness without considering the issue of the environment. As stated by Paul Crutzen – who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 – we might call the geological age in which we live as Anthropocene, that is the era ruled by men. For thousands of years, human beings used for their nutrition and needs plants, seeds and animals: a whole biological world, the result of millions of years of evolution. The richness and variety of our food is the result of extraordinary natural biodiversity. With the arrival of the Modern Era, gradual extinction of animal and plant species has begun. Alterations and destructions have become exponential: over the last fifty years, we lost more biological heritage than in any previous era. Furthermore, the disappearance of a plant or an animal involves the impossibility of survival of other species connected to them.

In the nineties, some multinational corporations put on the market a variety of genetically modified (GM) corn, soybean and cotton seeds never seen before in the entire history of farming. To date, no epidemiological investigation has ever been conducted to reassure the general public on the effects of GMOs on human and animal health.

GMOs do not exist in nature: they are the result of a manipulation that - to a certain extent – removes the natural barriers between species. An example of how genetic manipulation might influence the health of entire populations is the one concerning the manipulation of cereals.

In the last few years, the use of hyper-fertilised wheat has led to an artificial increase of its gluten content: plus 12% compared to a standard one. Gluten is a lipoprotein found in wheat flour which mainly derives from the combination, through water, of two molecules: glutenin and gliadin. This increased concentration of gluten proteins, often three times more than the one our ancestors’ organisms were used to, makes the wheat very different from the “old” and best-tolerated ones. The selection of such wheats is surely the cause of many gluten-related health problems. Our organism has not evolved enough to digest a large amount of these substances. Gluten sensitivity and the coeliac disease are only two of several pathologies related to this issue.
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