Sarah, Duchess of York has revealed that she is set to collaborate with a health and diet expert in the future – after visiting a facility in Italy to learn more about nutritional research. Sarah was invited to visit the University of Padua by celebrity health consultant Gianluca Mech, who has since announced that the pair plan to work together in future. A release reads: "Following the visit, the Duchess was sufficiently impressed by the scientific research she saw. She has agreed to work with Gianluca Mech on a number of projects to promote their shared interests in healthy living."
Sarah and Gianluca
The Duchess also appeared on Italian TV show Tagada with Gianluca to talk about the project, and more recently on Spanish show Viva La Vida. The statement added that she was particularly interested in the cause because of her "longstanding interest in obesity and health and her work with various organisations, both commercial and non-commercial, over many years."
According to the website, Gianluca - whose 'Italiano Diet' uses herbal extracts that speed up the metabolism – is "the sole heir of his family’s long-standing herbal enterprise, which has been at the heart of phytotherapy practices since the late 16th century." He is now a health consultant to a number of Italian stars, and founded the Gianluca Mech Research Center with the objective to offer the same nutritional guidance to the wider public, too.
Sarah was recently pictured at the Bahrain Grand Prix with daughter Princess Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi
Sarah herself has spoken openly about her "weight problem" in the past, telling the Daily Mail in November: "It’s why I have total empathy with what it is like to be destroyed by self-hatred, because when you comfort eat you put on weight, and then beat yourself up for comfort eating. It is such a vicious circle. I comfort-ate all my life from the age of 13. I started when I was at boarding school, when I heard my parents were getting divorced. I got up to 14-and-a-half stone."