Who is Francesco Rubino, the Italian in London among Time's 100 most influential people in the world of health

At the beginning of his career he didn't exactly want to become an obesity surgeon. Yet today, thanks to his 25-year career and experience in this field, Francesco Rubino , 53, is one of the 100 most influential people in the world of health for 'Time' magazine. Being included in the 2025 list (leader category) "was a double satisfaction: not only a personal recognition, but a recognition to the Lancet Commission , 56 experts from the US to Australia, from all continents, with whom we undertook years of work, started in 2019, to define the diagnosis of obesity for the first time . A diagnosis that distinguishes between clinical and preclinical obesity. We did it spontaneously and without compensation, with the same passion that you have when you enter medical school", explains to Adnkronos Salute Rubino, head of Metabolic and bariatric surgery at King's College London.

"Until now - the expert underlines - we didn't have a clinical diagnosis of obesity, we had a classification based on weight. And it's not easy to use a classification that, with the body mass index, doesn't reflect the health of the individual". How do you explain to people what obesity is? "It's a spectrum of conditions - Rubino explains - There are people who live with moderate obesity and don't immediately have health problems, maybe they have a risk of having them in the future and this risk must be treated with different strategies. But there are people who have a real disease, here and now, not a future risk. People who can't walk, can't breathe, can't work. Unfortunately, they are often not recognized as having this state of illness, very often they don't have access to care, and even more often they are also victims of stigma. This is why it was necessary to recognize obesity as a disease too". The work of the commission therefore goes "against prejudices" .

Prejudices that go "in two practically opposite directions. On the one hand, there is what has meant that it has not been possible to consider, until now, in a globally recognized way that obesity is also a disease - Rubino reasons - And on the other hand, the contrary prejudice of wanting to paint all obesity as a disease, perhaps an involuntary error. The point is that this is a problem that affects so many people and we need to decide in a concrete, scientific, medical and ethical way how and to whom to give priority for drugs and surgical interventions that cannot be given to everyone, and to treat everyone in an appropriate manner".

Rubino explains that he himself had, at the beginning of his journey, "a wrong idea" about the issue. "I thought it was very much linked to lifestyle, something to be addressed by exercising and eating less. 'Why have surgery?', I said to myself - he says - Then I realized that I was wrong both about the causes of obesity and about the interventions, I realized that it wasn't all that simplistic. And I specialized in this surgery". In short, it is "an important problem, on which in my opinion we have made a step forward, but it is a step forward that still requires many people to change their way of living and seeing obesity a little, including some health professionals". There are those who take sides as if it were a matter of opinion, "instead it should be a problem treated according to scientific evidence. The commission has found a way to recognize a reality that is, all things considered, clear for all to see, and that is that obesity can be a risk factor and can be a real disease that compromises the functioning of organs in the same way that other diseases do, so these people should not be discriminated against".

Rubino was a 'globetrotter' of the medical-scientific world . Around the age of 28 he packed his scalpel and flew overseas. Born in Cosenza, he attended Medicine in Rome, at the Catholic University - Policlinico Gemelli. "Here I graduated and specialized in General Surgery and already during the last years of specialization I began to gain experience abroad - he says - Then I left Italy to do further training in the United States, at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, at the Cleveland Clinic". Then there was a 7-year parenthesis in France, in Strasbourg. At that point "they offered me a job at Cornell University in New York", where there was one of the first centers for diabetes surgery in the world. "My previous research had highlighted a mechanism by which surgical interventions performed for obesity actually also change sugar metabolism, independently of weight loss. So in some way I had developed this concept of surgery to treat type 2 diabetes".

The expert directed this center at Cornell "for about 7 years". And the Big Apple is also the city where he met "by chance" his wife Christin, "American from California, two completely different stories ours". She "is an opera singer and I, for a conference I organized in New York, called the Juilliard School to have a singer who would perform for the occasion. She arrived". The rest is history. The couple has lived in London since 2013 and today has a 9-year-old son. Italy? "I miss it, but I go back whenever possible, to visit my dad who lives in Calabria and is 87 years old". (by Lucia Scopellit i)