You are what you eat

HUGO ARNOLD

MONITOR: Indian cuisine has much to teach us, healthwise

AM I OBSESSED by what I eat? My son thinks I might be certifiable, my daughter is convinced, my wife seems happy enough to enjoy the fruits of my labour. But none, I think, quite realise the degree to which I so fervently believe in the power of food, not just to satisfy and keep us alive, to calm and restore, but to influence our health and wellbeing, too.

It is hard to quantify, to be objective and scientific, and easy to slip into old wives’ tales and folklore. But the facts speak for themselves. Curcumin is an oil found in turmeric. Research has shown that in animals curcumin enhances the activity of an enzyme that might prevent or slow the progression of neuro-degenerative disease. India, the world’s highest consumer of turmeric, has among the lowest rates of Alzheimer’s.

My mother suffers from Alzheimer’s. Yet her diet has always been broadly healthy, based on daily cooking and fresh, largely seasonal food. But did she eat enough turmeric? I can’t help wondering. Or rather, if she had eaten more turmeric, would she be able to remember more?

Our decisions about what to consume have a vital influence on our health. I once watched Rose Gray, joint owner with Ruth Rogers of the River Café in London, take a petrol station sandwich from a television producer who had turned up for the day’s filming and put it in the bin. Not, she said, while you are filming with me. Rose died last year and had battled for five years with cancer, but she was obsessive about diet. If she had eaten differently would it have mattered?

In Rose Gray’s case I cannot see how she could have eaten more healthily. She took the essence of simple Italian food about as far as it can go. Yet while Italians are certainly very focused on diet – from a health as much as a taste point of view – it is in India where you really get a sense of diets actually being created round their health-giving properties. It is something that happened so long ago it has become an ingrained aspect of most Indian’s lives.

Are chillies, for example, used extensively, because of their sweat-inducing properties, or because they contain more antioxidants than oranges? Spicy food is generally seen as being hot, and yet spices and some vegetables fall into two camps; coriander, onion, cumin and coconut are considered cooling.

Want to put some of this into practice? Try sparkling water in a glass with the juice of two limes, a teaspoon of sugar, a pinch of salt and a generous pinch of ground cumin. It’s as good as lemonade. And while a pinch of ground cumin may not seem a lot, over time it adds up to quite a lot.

This is where I can’t help but feel the Indian approach to eating has something to teach us. It is so embedded in the culture. We, on the other hand, seem besieged by temptation every day, so health becomes something we consider occasionally. We are reactive rather than proactive, when the whole point of diet and its importance from a health perspective is that it must be constant and forward looking.