I travel widely for my work. In 2012, I studied and lectured in Finland, Sweden, the USA, Australia, Greece, Turkey, New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, and India. I always try to eat local food, and I am constantly surprised by the variety of dishes that different cultures have to offer. Stinky tofu stewed with clotted pig's blood in Taiwan was a high point, a dish so chock-full of highly bioactive polyamines that, like the fermented fish dishes of northern Norway and Sweden (surströmming) it accelerates the healing process (ie Brzozowski et al ’93, Rao et al ’12); but can also speed tumour growth (ie Soda ’11).
A large part of the ageing process as we experience it today is driven by chronic inflammation, and the major dietary and other factors that either slow or accelerate this process are well characterised. I had often wondered how people manage to live well in such different environments, consuming such different diets.
How can an Indian and an Inuit, for example, both maintain an anti-inflammatory internal environment, and thus both achieve healthy old age? And what implications might this have for regional health issues as the juggernaut of fast food franchising, which combines empty calories with pro-inflammatory toxins (Gillis & Gillis ’05, Cordain et al ’05, Bengmark ’12), rolls over the globe?
Finally, a few months ago, I gained nutritional enlightenment while visiting an IT college in New Delhi. In South East Asia, and in the tropical and sub-tropical regions in general,
intakes of the essential omega-3 fatty acids are very low. There are no cold water fish, and the only omega-3s available to the inhabitants of these areas are in plant oils, which are notoriously poor sources; so they tend to have very poor omega 3 to 6 ratios in their blood (Amo & Eide, ’12). However, they do consume large amounts of spices, in almost every dish and at every meal, and the spices are excellent sources of flavonoids. In contrast, Northern Europeans eat a diet relatively high in omega-3s but low in spices—Scandinavian food is often very bland!
Flavonoids and omega-3 fatty acids have potent but different anti-inflammatory effects, and it seems that if you eat enough of at least one of these nutrient groups, you gain a reasonable degree of health protection. For total protection, however, you need both.
Fast foods have had serious public health consequences in the West, but we have a residual degree of protection against chronic inflammation due to our intakes of omega 3 in oily fish, from salmon to sardines. The Asians do not have this protection and rely on the anti-inflammatory flavonoids in the spices they eat. The problem is that there is ageneration of IT and office workers all across Asia who have left their native cuisine behind, and combine a sedentary lifestyle with cigarettes and a diet consisting mainly of burgers, fries, pasta, pizza, and soft drinks. They are consuming no omega-3s and hardly any flavonoids, and thus have no anti-inflammatory protection at all.
The impact of this is just starting to emerge. I believe that the surprisingly high frequency of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and hypertension I saw in the young IT students will soon grow into a tsunami of degenerative disease in urbanised Asians, which will overwhelm their healthcare capabilities. Their situation may be made even worse by specific metabolic factors linked to the so-called ‘thrifty gene’ (i.e., Bhopal & Rafnsson,’09).
Modern medicine can do nothing to prevent or cure these problems, and ‘re-setting healthcare priorities’ is tantamount to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Nutritional, dietary, and lifestyle re-programming is the only way to ensure that India and China do not sink under the burden of bad Western dietary habits and unnecessary disease.
References:
Amo T, Eide O. Industry data, personal communication ‘12
Bengmark S. Gut microbiota, immune development and function. Pharmacol Res. 2012 Sep 16. doi:pii: S1043-6618(12)00166-1
Bhopal RS, Rafnsson SB. Could mitochondrial efficiency explain the susceptibility to adiposity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases in South Asian populations? Int J Epidemiol. 2009 Aug;38(4):1072-81.
Brzozowski T, Konturek SJ, Majka J, Dembinski A, Drozdowicz D. Epidermal growth factor, polyamines, and prostaglandins in healing of stress-induced gastric lesions in rats. Dig Dis Sci. 1993 Feb;38(2):276-83.
Cordain L, Eaton SB, Sebastian A, Mann N, Lindeberg S, Watkins BA, O’Keefe JH, Brand-Miller J. Origins and evolution of the Western diet: health implications for the 21st century. Am J Clin Nutr. 2005 Feb;81(2):341-54.
Gillis L, Gillis A. Nutrient inadequacy in obese and non-obese youth. Can J Diet Pract Res. 2005 Winter;66(4):237-42.
Rao JN, Rathor N, Zhuang R, Zou T, Liu L, Xiao L, Turner DJ, Wang JY. Polyamines regulate intestinal epithelial restitution through TRPC1mediated Ca²+ signaling by differentially modulating STIM1 and
STIM2. Am J Physiol Cell Physiol. 2012 Aug 1;303(3):C308-17
Soda K. The mechanisms by which polyamines accelerate tumor
spread. Journal of Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research 2011, 30:95