Is there a think-tank somewhere coming up with this crap?
Anyway, onwards. Say I was forced to adopt a completely new diet due to a health scare or something similar and had to take on one cultures’ dietary habits as part of the rehabilitation…, who do you think generally (assuming Mc D’s is everywhere) has the healthiest cuisine as a nation?
I’m not picking America or Australia, but the Japanese? The Chinese? The Europeans?
What determines it? Longevity or general healthiness of being? Lack of meat and abundance of vegetables?
This may be better in Cafe Society. Not sure and apologies if so.
I vote for Korean food and I offer as evidence the heavy use and wide variety of vegetables, particularly leafy greens, and the general avoidance of fried things.
Doesn’t French cuisine often include a lot of dairy and egg?
I’d probably go with Mediterranean - tons of fruits and veggies and nuts, whole grains, and not much red meat.
Japan is definitely out of the running; a typical Japanese diet will include lots of fish, which assuming it’s vaguely local, stands a decent chance of being like a puddle of liquid mercury.
That’s why I said “rural.” It’s then basically the Mediterranean diet. Fancy French food is “Stuff Stuff with Heavy,” and kills. Tastes like crap, too.
I love Korean food, but it sent my blood pressure into the stratosphere. Kimchi was rumored to cause stomach cancer, but the consensus is that Korean men smoke too much and drink too much Soju.
I love kimchi too. I thought it was supposed to be one of those “superfoods.” The cancer-causing rumors are new to me. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it as a foodstuff. edit: Well, minus the salt content. But that varies from kimchi to kimchi.
I’m surprised India hasn’t been mentioned yet. Lots of vegetables, yogurt, spices, rice… pretty darn healthy to me! Not to mention that I LOVE Indian food! I could probably eat Indian food every single day if I had to.
Well, India (a) has a very diverse cuisine, so it’s a bit hard to compare, and (b) is infamous for it’s generous use of clarified butter, which separates all the good fats from all the bad fats in butter and… gives you the bad fats.
I’m ssomewhat keptical that the ingredients and style of food is that major a cause in the health differences between nations. Lifestyle habits–walking, low levels of stress, portion control–probably plays a much bigger role in healthiness.
That said: France France France. Not haute cuisine, but what people actually eat on a day to day basis.
As evidence goes, that’s kind of putting the cart before the horse. The way to go about this is to pick some measure of healthfulness (longevity of the people who eat it is the obvious choice), figure out from there which culture has the best diet, and then once you know who it is try to figure out why that diet is so healthy. It’s only when you get to that last step that it’s relevant to look at how many veggies a people eats. Putting that as your “evidence” of healthfulness right up front pre-supposes that eating lots of veggies is good for you. OK, it probably is, but that’s a conclusion, not an axiom.