The nutrition hygiene as a mission of the departments of prevention

black clouds are approaching the Italian National Health Service (Servizio Sanitario Nazionale or SSN), the perfect storm is getting closer: drowning will be a common fate if no changes will be put in place. The signs are all there: dramatic ageing of the populations, health trends toward chronicity, increase in need and demand, decrease of financial and human resources. This situation is unbearable both from a social and an economic-financial standpoint. The new direction will have to move economic and human resources from the cure of illnesses to their prevention: this is the recipe suggested by some Authors, together with the proposal of re-thinking the whole SSN, through the training of a new class of preventive healthcare professionals while changing all the structures already present and placing them online. On the opposite side, we find the CENSIS-Unipol recipe: «Welfare Italy. Impact and growth potential of white economy». According to this Report, the social-health pillar, which is not intended as a mere cost, can become a strong economic-productive tool to re-launch growth. Population’s health ceases to be a right granted by the State and becomes goods “produced” by a “strong economic-productive tool”, with private companies (clinics, labs, etc.) which almost substitute the whole public health network. Private companies should take care, in a residual way, of all those performances which would not generate private profit: ER, serious and/or debilitating illnesses of low-income population, etc. Whatever direction we take, the problem of expenses, which is present in all the countries providing a public, equal and global healthcare service, must be faced. In the United Kingdom, for instance, balance sheet deficit reached 1.6 billion pounds (almost 2 billion Euros) in six months, from April to September 2015 and in a year it will get to 2.2 billions of pounds (3 billion Euro). This did not happen because of a bad management or due to inefficiencies, which are nonetheless present, but because of structural factors, as population ageing.