Leonardo da Vinci, the Golden Ratio and What's for Dinner

The Diet Code: Eat Bread, Drink Wine, Lose Weight
by Stephen Lanzalotta

Eat bread and cheese, drink wine-and lose weight!
The secret lies in an ancient mathematical formula now transformed into ... The Diet Code

As a master baker and craftsman, Stephen Lanzalotta had been applying the mathematical principles of the Golden Ratio for more than twenty years. His realization that this ancient, universal formula, used by Da Vinci and other great geniuses of the Renaissance, also held the secret to optimal nutrition and health led him to apply it to his own diet and the menu at his popular café. The weight loss and sense of well-being that he and his customers experienced convinced him that he had cracked the diet code, discovering a simple, natural, and nutritious approach to healthy eating that is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

His revolutionary Mediterranean-style eating program uses the Golden Ratio to link the proper proportions of everyday foods to boost metabolism and spark weight loss. Combining a three-phase eating program with detailed menu plans, mouthwatering recipes, Renaissance lore, and Italian-inspired lifestyle advice, The Diet Code is a unique health and weight loss program from the ages for the ages.

In it readers will:

• Crack the diet code-discover how the Golden Ratio can work for you to boost metabolism and maximize nutrition and weight loss

• Forget about the math-it's all done for you, and the net result is deliciously simple: 1 part grain carbohydrate, 2 parts protein, 3 parts vegetables at every meal

• Enjoy bread again! It really is the staff of life-as long as you eat it along with the right amount of fat or protein

• Experience natural weight control-choose and properly prepare healthful, readily available foods as they did during the Renaissance.

The Diet Code is a unique approach to eating well based on a mathematical phenomenon that's been around for centuries but has never before been applied to diet. Now prepare to lose weight and get healthy by asking yourself, "What would Da Vinci eat?"

Chapter 1

The wisest and noblest teacher is nature itself.

— LEONARDO DA VINCI

Man achieves the height of Wisdom when all that he does is as self-evident as what Nature does.

— I CHING

Milan, Winter 1492

The pencil drops from Leonardo's left hand as he picks up a chunk of bigio, or whole grain bread, to soak up broth from a steaming bowl of minestra, a Milanese broth featuring the region's distinctive savoy cabbage and a mix of root vegetables and their greens. He distractedly stabs at a bit of turnip with the fork in his right hand. Within reach are some thin slabs of creamy Taleggio cheese and a flask of wine from the vineyards of his patron, Ludovico Sforza, duke of Bari.

Momentarily focusing on his soup, Leonardo reminisces about his native Tuscany and the Florentine minestrone, spicy and meaty from a soffrito mix of minced and sautéed chicken giblets, pork and peppercorns. The duke had been suitably surprised by the dish when Leonardo prepared it for him. The Lombard ruler is quite fond of meat from the pig and well knows of Leonardo's reputation as a brilliant cook, but it was the last meal he expected from a vegetarian's kitchen.

Leonardo isn't painting much these days, because the duke is presently more interested in civic planning and engineering — moats, walls, war machines and the like. But the duke has been suggesting a fresco for the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and Leonardo is already plotting the depiction of another meal of bread and wine. Unbeknownst to his patron, the artist has in mind to use the fresco to convey a message so grand, so unexpected and so shocking that its deepest meanings will have to be encoded if the fresco is to be painted at all.

That will come later, though. Now, Leonardo occupies his peripatetic mind with plotting the geometry of what will become one of his greatest works. Lifting the bowl to sip the last of his soup, he contemplates proportioning the enormous work by what he calls secto d'aurea — golden section or, as it is later renamed, the golden ratio. He visualizes the way lines will relate to each other, forming key angles. If the numbers governing the structure of a painting are right, he knows, the aesthetic will resonate deep within viewers.

Leonardo lifts the bowl to his lips, sips the last of his soup and mops up the final drops with a crust torn from the loaf, enjoying a secret latent in his lunch: the key to long life and good health is literally in his hands.

In this imagined scene, one of the world's great geniuses finishes a meal as ideally proportioned as any of his master works. What Leonardo da Vinci brought a tavolo (to the table) was as balanced as anything he consciously designed during his long career — a career in which he devoted much energy to exploring and exploiting an ancient mathematical formula that's come to be known as the Golden Ratio. Leonardo's application of the Golden Ratio was arguably quite calculated when it came to his art, but it was likely intuitive when it came to his meal planning. Leonardo simply chose from the variety of fresh whole foods available to him, nourishing his body and mind with ease in a way we seem to have entirely abandoned today. The effect of proper proportions is just as powerful on the plate and in the body, however, as it is on a canvas. Leonardo dined on the particular ancient triumvirate of bread, wine and cheese, which makes up the trinity of essential macronutrients — carbohydrate, protein and fat.

Leonardo, for one, reaped the benefits. He was slender throughout his long life and famously strong. (He was said to be capable of bending horseshoes with a single hand or stopping a horse running past him at full gallop with his bare hands.) That's not to mention cultivating perhaps the most amazing brain ever — one of the keenest, most synthetic and far-reaching intellects of all time!

While I can't guarantee that eating the same way will turn you into a great painter, inventor, architect, engineer, botanist, anatomist, astronomer or sculptor, I can promise that consciously re-creating the quality, combinations and proportion of foods Leonardo relied on will help you become lean and strong. Put these new proportions inside your body, and you'll soon see new proportions outside. All you have to do is crack The Diet Code — master the simple formula that unlocks the secret to easy weight loss: maximizing nutrition and metabolism.

As a self-taught baker raised on my grandmother's rustic Italian cooking, I've thrived on meals much like those on which Leonardo must have supped. I make breads hardly different from those he would have known, using the exact same technology as bakers in Leonardo's time did. More directly, I've admired Leonardo's polymath mind and strived for decades to take what insights I could from him and apply them across multiple aspects of my life. Again and again, I've circled back to that one formula, famously encoded in the angles of his spread-eagle Vitruvian Man, among many of his other works, not to mention a litany of designs dating back to the earliest human civilizations: the Golden Ratio.

The Golden Ratio guided Leonardo in designing the famous fresco (The Last Supper) that I imagine him contemplating in the opening of this chapter and has been given credit for the enthralling effect of his Mona Lisa. He used it in his more practical undertakings, too, proportioning garden schematics, city planning layouts, everyday engineering plans and the like. In doing so, he was rediscovering wisdom from ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia, which had at that point been all but lost; among Leonardo's many extraordinary achievements count rescuing and revitalizing this vital knowledge.

The latest cutting-edge science and technology has proven just how deep this mathematical wisdom goes, documenting the Golden Ratio in everything from the pattern of galaxies and the shape of ocean waves to the spiral of seashells and the arrangement of petals in a rose. The same natural laws of design also dictate the form of human genetic material (the DNA double helix), the development of the human fetus and many details in the architecture of the human body. The Golden Ratio has been successfully applied by humans in so many arenas simply because they affirm the greater wisdom of nature when they do so.

This ancient formula has guided me in designing my own woodworking tools as well as whatever I create with those tools. The Golden Ratio gets credit for the impact of my abstract paintings, even fixating people who don't "like" modern art. As I later turned to bread making, what I'd learned about ideal proportions and numerical, geometric and mathematical relationships helped me perfect the breads I turn out daily at my bakery café.

And now, after decades of experimenting with applications like these, gradually extending the use of the Golden Ratio into new aspects of my life, it's finally impressed me most in the most mundane area: what I eat. I learned to use the same "magic" that perfected my tools and keeps my bread in such demand to balance my diet and fuel my body better than I'd ever done before. In tinkering with the Golden Ratio, I've discovered it describes the diet that is most closely aligned with the needs of the human body, providing foods and nutrients in the exact proportions that dictate the inherent design of the body. Once I'd figured out how to use the numbers this way, it seemed it should have been obvious: The food that's best for the body is the food that follows the same blueprint as does the human body. Of course the same formula that dictates how you are put together should also dictate how you feed yourself. And when it does, you are working in harmony with your body's systems, and the natural result is optimal health and ideal weight.

Beyond that, a diet laid out in the Golden Ratio meets — in fact, exceeds — all accepted nutritional standards. It also looks gorgeous on the plate, tastes amazing and satisfies completely. And it stabilized my weight right where it was while I was a high school football player, even as I hit my mid-40s! All that, plus I can fix dinner in less than half an hour. And my children will devour it.

Drawing on this same formula, The Diet Code is a complete, balanced, satisfying and sane way to eat. And the only thing it has you do without entirely is the denial and extremes of fad diets. It is the feeling of deprivation that makes fad diets — even those on which many find short-term success — unsustainable. The Diet Code is flexible enough to encompass what you like to eat. This plan can be followed by vegans, vegetarians or those who, like me, enjoy a good steak. If you like wine or beer with your dinner, that fits in, too. You can indulge your sweet tooth (I'll show you how) without fear of undermining your results. Yes, you can fly in the face of recent decades of dietary advice. Eat bread! Eat butter! With its unique, proportional harmony between food groups and practical advice distilled into plans for truly balanced meals that are as simple and quick to make as they are delicious, The Diet Code is perfect for a post-Atkins America.

But it's not meant to be a quick fix. Rather, The Diet Code is a lifetime plan that honors both the art and the science of eating well. It provides exacting information for maximizing metabolic power and nutritional impact while you luxuriate in the pure, sensual pleasure of eating truly good food — foods that are easily acquired and prepared to suit people living today's hectic lifestyles. Drawing on traditional Italian foods — and, as important, traditional Italian ways of cooking and eating — The Diet Code guides you toward freedom from food fads and fears with an Old World perspective that requires you to eat for pleasure.

Copyright © Stephen Lanzalotta

About the Author

Stephen Lanzalotta is a master woodworker, painter, baker, and chef. He studied microbiology and biochemistry at the University of Vermont. After working for fifteen years as a woodworker, he opened Sophia's, a popular eatery in Portland, Maine, where customers savor the ancient principles of The Diet Code in his famous breads and foods.