Dr Giuliano Poser on Messi’s GOAT Journey, Diet and Lifestyle Secrets

Dr Giuliano Poser exclusive: Lionel Messi’s specialist physician on what it takes to become the GOAT, the foods and habits to bring into your life or avoid, and what the Argentinian superstar is really like behind the scenes

Dr Giuliano Poser is a sports physician and kinesiologist famous for his work with Lionel Messi, to address the Argentinian’s recurring muscle injuries and vomiting problems during his time at Barcelona. Speaking to BetBrothers, the Italian health expert lifted the lid on what Messi is really like, what his work entailed and his advice for fans on how they can adapt their lifestyles and food choices to live like Messi.

In a wide-ranging interview, Dr Poser also gave his views on the future of football and why so many top players are continuing to play into their 30s such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Kane.

Read the full interview below.

How did you come to work with Lionel Messi?

As well as working at Udinese and Palermo, I’ve worked with lots of footballers from other clubs, including many foreigners, and for many years I went to treat promising young lads in Buenos Aires.

I went twice a year. I have worked with guys, many of whom still play now as professionals, or have retired. I knew Jorge Cyterszpiler, who was Diego Maradona’s original agent. Cyterszpiler, who is no longer with us, and a teammate of Lionel Messi’s in the Argentina squad who I won’t reveal, convinced Messi to come here and see me in Sacile, northern Italy.

For a few years Lionel came and worked with me, systematically. We arranged times for him to arrive when people wouldn’t spot him, to maintain his privacy. He came very regularly and our work together went very well. We’ve stayed friends.

How did you communicate with Messi?

I don’t speak Spanish. In Argentina I always relied on a translator. So therefore I understand Spanish but speak it badly.

Lionel is a very sharp, intelligent person. He understands Italian quite well, and I understand Spanish. I have to say, he’s a really good, exceptional person, who really cares about the people around him because every time he came, he brought friends, colleagues, friends and relatives.

Before his treatment, he would ask me to treat them first, with him translating for them. He’s got such a big heart. He’s genuinely such a generous person, always available for others. Like so many of these Argentinian footballers he made it to the top because he had so much hunger and desire.

He’s shy, and clearly that’s his character, he’s very private. But in friendship he gives a huge amount. You can write that!

Harry Kane, Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi himself are playing football at a high level even as they approach or pass the age of 40. Do you think this will become the new normal?

It’s very hard to answer this. You’ve named footballers with very different characteristics.

I don’t know Cristiano Ronaldo personally, but I have to say he’s someone who’s built his physique in an exceptional way. He is serious about his diet, his gymnastic capabilities, his technique whereas if we talk about Messi, he’s the opposite. He’s all technique, all instinct, pure class, and physically he has got just enough to excel. It’s more like art with Lionel.

Regarding Kane I don’t know, but I think he’s a bit of a mix of the two. I think, looking at him, physically he’s very strong, and looks after his body in a fitting way.

The problem with football, especially in Italy at youth level, is that they very often take players away from school. The lads are pulled out of school and there’s little culture around looking after your own body.

Very often they get their first injuries, at 20, 21, 22, 23, 25 before realising they need to do something else, and there’s no culture of teaching the right lifestyle or dietary choices, so I don’t know if we’ll get to lots of players going on until 40. I don’t think so, because football is going increasingly towards a very physical, very fast game, with lots of power. And power unfortunately creates muscle and tendon injuries.

You’d have to be a phenomenon like Messi, Cristiano or Kane, or like Luka Modrić to give you another example, who really live with that goal of reaching those milestones. But not everyone is like that.

A lot of people settle, and don’t grasp that their abilities are innate. If someone’s a professional footballer, it means physically they have a better build than the average person, that they’re in the upper part of the population’s potential curve. So they have to be treated like a car. A supercar isn’t something you just buy and drive without ever changing the oil, without checking the tyres and so on. You must have this culture, which some agents have, trying to teach their lads, telling them they must do “maintenance”. Maintenance means: “I have to eat the best food, I have to supplement what I need, I have to sleep enough, I have to live a lifestyle that gets me to the next contract.”

And to be honest, very often I see people at the end of their careers, with their contract running out, with physical problems, and no one signs them, and that’s a bit hard to see, because I think: but 5-6 years, or even 10 years earlier, couldn’t you have thought about looking after your body better, instead of only thinking about it now when you are struggling?

How do you start your work with an athlete?

When I see a footballer or athlete, very often I don’t ask them to do any tests. If they have previous test results, they bring them to me. Generally, the people who come to me have already been through a whole trail of tests, because footballers are checked constantly.

If they have problems they come with ultrasounds, MRIs, blood tests. But I have my own method, which is the kinesiological method, that uses the relationship in our organism between muscles, the energy meridians of Chinese medicine and organs, to understand how they’re functioning and what they should take in as food, what they shouldn’t, and also the vitamin and mineral supplementation they might need.

My method serves both to assess biomechanically where there are imbalances, and in that case to do manual therapies to rebalance the body biomechanically. Let’s call it neuromuscular-tendinous. So with exercises, manipulations, plus I do chiropractic and osteopathy and these tests also allow you to look at the whole nutritional and supplementation picture.

Applied kinesiology is a science in which you do muscle tests, exploiting the muscle in its relationship with the organ and the Chinese meridian. I use applied kinesiology as a diagnostic, to understand the cause of the problem and try to remedy that cause. Afterwards, the therapy might be to strengthen the gut, a detoxifying therapy, or a very common antiparasitic therapy. The therapy is decided on the basis of these tests.

Over the last twenty years, how much of your processes with top athletes have changed, and what do you consider your successes?

On the first question, I have to say it’s not the last 20 years, but the last 40.

As I work, I add knowledge, month after month, year after year. Conversely, in normal medicine, very often the student gets a degree, becomes prepared, and then unfortunately over time loses curiosity, because they settle into doing the same things.

The way I work is an evolutionary medicine: as I learn, as I understand certain things, I apply them to the person who comes to me next, or the following week. Because you must never tire of learning, you learn something every day. You mustn’t have fixed mantras all your life, written truths that then force you to work the same way throughout your whole career.

Medicine is about doubt. As you understand that something isn’t right, that something in what you do isn’t working, you have to work on it, find solutions. And on this, I really want to talk to go into detail on wheat, particularly the wheat you use to make pasta, bread, pizza, desserts and so on. I have done the same things for many years in terms of diagnostics: I integrate clinical and laboratory data with tests that I do myself, and the tests are the same, they use the same tools as 35-40 years ago. Go back 15-20 years ago and I used to find a wheat intolerance in my patients every 10 days. Now half the people who come into my studio are intolerant to wheat, and I advise them to eliminate it from their diet.

If 20 years ago someone had told me that in 2026 a restaurant in Italy wouldn’t be able to open unless it had food for coeliacs too… 25 years ago coeliac disease wasn’t known. When I graduated 45 years ago, six years of study and then four of specialisation, no one spoke to me about coeliac disease. We have to ask ourselves: what is coeliac disease? Clearly there are plenty of predispositions to it, but there are plenty of predispositions that, if we didn’t intoxicate the gut, didn’t ruin it with low-grade inflammation, wouldn’t come out. So the problem is that we’re consuming a wheat that isn’t what it once was, essentially.

In the post-war period, when there was the demographic crisis after millions died across Europe and the world, the problem of world hunger arose, there were masses of people with nothing to eat. What happened? They took wheat seeds and treated them with X-rays, created hybrids, sowed the seeds and then selected the ones that produced the largest amounts and were most practical for making pasta and useful to pastry chefs, bakers, pasta makers and so on.

This wheat they engineered has got a very long ear, extremely rich in gluten, and a very short stalk so it can’t be knocked down by bad weather, storms, rain, wind and so on. And we’ve been eating wheat like this for many years. When I was a small child, wheat was 150, even up to 180 centimetres tall. Now it’s 50 centimetres tall in the fields.

All of this has been done at the expense of quality, because if the wheat is this kind of quality and has lots of gluten, it’s a very important business, better for the whole pasta-making, pastry industry and so on. And we eat this thing which is ruining the guts of a great many people. That’s why I see this difference. The quest to maximise profits created this problem

What is your greatest success as a physician? Is it Messi?

My biggest successes aren’t the ones the papers talk about. There are lots of successes every day with young men and women, who make a commitment, who have problems, but maybe then become professionals and come back to me once or twice a year. They are playing their sports, some from Spain, some from England.

So many successes with people whose names I can’t say because we want to keep anonymity. But they are famous. There have been failures too, because in the past I’ve treated great sportspeople who didn’t follow my advice, people we see on television now, and some are in a bad state physically because they didn’t listen.

You don’t like to be described as Lionel Messi’s nutritionist. Why does it bother you?

Firstly, it bothers me a bit, because I’ve never claimed to be a nutritionist. It was simply taken from what they knew about my work with famous footballers. I’m a sports physician and a specialist in sports medicine, and I take a 360-degree interest in athletes’ health, in a holistic way.

So being presented like that seems very reductive to me. I’ve never described myself that way, but I’ve read it many times in the papers, and on TV and radio, during the period that they were talking quite often about me.

I define myself as a sports physician who takes a holistic interest in health, with an almost obsessive search for the root cause of problems. For example, the conditions that most drew me in from when I was young were the difficult ones: groin strains, chronic inflammation of the heel, the foot, the knee.

That always pushed me to work by looking for the causes, and the causes are many and not always the same in everybody. I’d say I’m a student of the chronic inflammation that affects athletes in various parts of the body. Someone might have chronic low-back pain, or simply headaches, because athletes get headaches too, or a groin strain, heel pain, bilateral or unilateral tendinitis.

My interest has always been to seek the cause, and not to stop at therapy – at common physiotherapy with various machines or manual work, or even at just using drugs, which I try to use as little as possible. If possible, I try to understand what should be done to eliminate the problem at source and not just use symptomatic drugs that very often harm athletes, or only calm the problem momentarily, meaning it systematically returns.

Why is inflammation so bad, and why does it cause so many problems?

Very often, when there are muscle or tendon problems in athletes, or even problems at the surface of the bone, and you also get fractures, which are called stress fractures. At the root of the problem is what we call, in complementary medicine, low-grade inflammation. That is a general inflammation of the body that gives no obvious symptoms. The symptoms come out where there are problems of imbalance, of stress, of overload. But underneath, these people have a low-grade inflammation that most of the time comes from an imbalance in the gut microbiota.

Eubiosis means balance of the gut microbiota; dysbiosis is the imbalance. They determine the presence or absence of this silent inflammatory state, which over the long term is very often a cause of chronic problems.

When we see an athlete who often gets injured, who often has muscular fatigue, fractures, who starts to have muscle tears, very often the deep, hidden cause is low-grade inflammation. On these low-grade inflammations we try to optimise nutrition, and that’s probably why the media has labelled me a nutritionist, which I’m not. We try to eliminate the substances in that diet which create inflammation. And we try to increase intake of all the foods that have an anti-inflammatory capacity.

What are the foods even non-athletes should avoid to deal with these problems?

In general, there are substances contained in foods, and foods themselves, that create inflammation in practically everybody. But in my method there’s the possibility, through particular tests, muscle tests, exploiting the reactivity of the neuromuscular system to understand which foods, in a given individual, are causing the most problems in their specific case.

You can also draw up a general list of foods, but the important thing is to individualise the problem. Each person’s therapy, especially if they’re a high-level athlete, has to be individual and subjective. So therapy and diet are things to personalise.

In broad terms I can say that all foods related to sugar, that resemble sugar, all refined foods, all super-processed foods, generally inflame our body, our gut, our muscles and our tendons. If I look at my history as a doctor, which began 45 years ago, I have to say that especially in these 45 years, maybe a few more, nutrition has changed completely.

When I was a child in Italy food came from agriculture, so directly from the farmer. Now food all passes through industry, it’s all processed, and it contains a load of substances that didn’t exist 40 to 60 years ago, and 60 years ago there was no cellophane, there was no vacuum-packing machine, and nothing could be preserved long-term.

So we ate fresh food, but it deteriorated quickly. Now, with food all passing through industry and being bought at supermarkets, every supermarket has 3,000 cellophane-wrapped food products, and most people eat this, these are the foods that broadly speaking cause inflammation in most of us.

On the other hand, foods that counter inflammation, well, there are plenty of useful foods. First of all, foods that contain lots of enzymes, vitamins, minerals, fundamentally vegetables, if possible raw or cooked very briefly, left crunchy, and fresh fruit. And certainly grains, but wholegrain and not ultra-refined, avoiding sugar and grains that already contain sugar. And above all fish, olive oil, oily nuts, oily seeds. If possible, fresh things, from producer to consumer, as much as possible.

The famous Mediterranean diet, so heavily promoted as a diet rich in pasta, pizza, etc doesn’t have its effect because it is rich in wheat, its positive effects are because it’s rich in olive oil, fish, vegetables, nuts and seeds. So I’d like to debunk this idea of the Mediterranean diet meaning pasta and pizza and bread. That’s not the pathway to health.

I heard first hand that some chefs to very famous sports people remove normal pasta, even wholegrain, and give clients red lentil pasta. What do you think of pasta?

I don’t agree with this at all. I agree on reducing wheat flour, wheat, pasta, pizza ,I try to limit these with athletes because they do harm. I don’t agree with the idea of eating pulse pasta, because I prefer people to eat different grains, especially whole grains. Because the more we process a product, as I was saying, the more toxic that product becomes. So if we put whole grains in our mouth and we chew them, salivate them, work them with our own mouth, these are undoubtedly less toxic than that grain which has been processed by industry into a pasta.

As for lentils, beans, chickpeas and all that, I have to say that not everyone can tolerate pulses these days. Why? Because legumes contain substances called lectins, which harm many people’s guts. So we absolutely can’t promote pulse pasta as a universal cure-all. But as always, there are no cure-alls that are the same for everyone. When I hear that something is good for everyone, I’m always suspicious, because there’s nothing that’s good for everyone. There’ll be someone it does good for, someone it doesn’t affect, and some people it harms. Nowadays pulse pasta is a business, promoted from a nutritional and dietary point of view. And it is very expensive in my opinion. I don’t agree that it should automatically be considered the right food.

What do you think of blueberries? Are they a superfood that’s good for almost everyone?

Let’s say the same argument applies with blueberries too. They certainly have great properties, like many other red and black berries. There was a period when people were promoting concentrated beetroot juices, another period of pomegranate juice, another period of a Brazilian fruit called açaí. When something gets promoted at the global media level, it means that industry has already appropriated it and made a business of it. I believe there are many substances that do good, many foods of this type, truly rich food, truly exceptional. But it’s not only blueberries. There are lots of other things: pomegranate, blueberries, raspberries, pineapple, all with interesting properties; papaya too. But it’s not the case that blueberries alone solve all problems.

I try to explain to everyone that starting the day by eating fresh fruit that isn’t too processed, and oily nuts. Also, if possible, not too preserved, and oily seeds, is a good start to the day. Because we’re putting in vitamin C straight away, other B vitamins, proteins, omegas and vitamin E, which are fundamental for physical activity, for recovery from sport, for the antioxidant action they have, and so on. So I’m in favour of blueberries. But I think our patients can also eat other kinds of fruit and vegetables that are just as good, just as healthy, alongside blueberries.

Where do you stand on reducing your intake of dairy, as Cristiano Ronaldo has done?

I agree with the dietitians, with the nutritionists. Though I have to say we need to spend a couple more words on it. Both cow’s milk and from other animals, certainly has different characteristics from human milk. The casein of various animals, which is the protein, is obviously different from that of breast milk. So I’d say that at least after weaning, we should broadly avoid consuming milk, because in most cases it creates inflammatory problems. As for cheeses, though , where tolerance is tied to the milk proteins called caseins, the main protein, I think the discussion is fairly individual.

As a general rule, I ask people not to drink cow’s milk, or the milk of other animals, because I see from my tests that in most cases it creates inflammatory problems in the gut. Plus if we’re also to return to why milk is bad, remember that the elephant has enormous, very heavy bones and doesn’t drink milk apart from its mother’s when it’s small, after which, clearly, it stops, and the same goes for the tiger, the lion, the dog, the cat and any other mammal.

But we also have to say that these days there is another big factor that’s very important: animals, cows in particular, aren’t fed what mother nature has provided for them to eat. If a cow eats grass and hay all its life, I can agree that opportunistically drinking its milk, for someone with no proven intolerance, isn’t that harmful. But we have to say that most of the milk that arrives in our supermarkets has extremely negative characteristics.

Cows eat silage, which is practically food made from corn cobs, from maize ground up together with the whole stalk, along with soya, which is a legume, a pulse. Why do we do this? Because these feeds are extremely high in protein, and we give herbivores masses of protein to eat. Why do we do it? So they grow very quickly, and so cows produce huge amounts of milk.

That’s why, when we then cook the meat of these animals in a frying pan, it shrinks very quickly, because it loses all the water it holds inside. These cows, these calves, are full of water because water is held inside our bodies when we’re intoxicated. If we have a lot of toxins, we swell up, because the more water we have in the body, the more the toxin is diluted and the less harm it does to our brain, to our central nervous system. These cows, these calves, these bullocks are all full of toxins and they have these characteristics.

That’s why, not just milk, but that kind of meat too is very harmful. It’s harmful to us, because if the soya harmed that animal, and we’re intolerant to pulses, as I find in so many people, the meat of that animal, or the chicken and turkey that ate soya, also in most cases, GM soya,, that soya will harm us too if we’re intolerant to soya, on top of everything else. And eating toxic things is no good: we have to eat foods that have a great energy, that vibrate, an energy that has to bring energy to us too. In these cases we’re eating foods that are dead, they carry no energetic oscillation. That’s for dairy, but also for meat in general. So I ask people to eat meat from small farms, from artisan farms where they don’t use hormones, where they don’t use masses of medicines.

Consider that chickens and turkeys are given 10 different antibiotics to keep them alive to slaughter. All this matters, because it goes into our body. In us there’s a transfer of energy: what we eat has to become energy in our muscles and bodies.

You are 70 but look much younger. What’s your secret?

I simply try to eat well, drink a few glasses of good wine, and do a lot of physical activity. I run marathons, half-marathons. In recent years I have run, and before that I cycled. I do endurance sports regularly.