I’m fortunate to have parents that place importance on good quality produce, growing their own vegetables in the 1970’ s before it became fashionable in Melbourne and buying the best quality of food available. Mum and Dad love cooking, and mum in particular experiments with recipes from different cultures. She can whip up a mean lamb curry and is one of the best cooks I know. Dad’s amigthalota (Almond biscuits) are a renowned Ithacan specialty and at 79 he continues to make them for relatives and friends. Growing up in a Greek household, meant copious use of olive oil, garlic, oregano, tomatoes, feta, bread and olives. My favourite meal is moussaka and it combines some of my favourite ingredients and sauces; lamb, eggplant, potato, bechamel, and garlic, despite these ingredients being shunned by various food fad followers. White flour in the bechamel, and potato would send low carb dieters into a tailspin, whilst lamb and butter would cause anxiety to proponents of low fat eating.
My first memory of cooking was at seven. I stirred rice pudding (risogalo) over a flame on the stove, whilst standing on a stool stirring the rice listening to my mother’s instruction. Food has been linked to celebrations, events and major turning points in my life. I eat for nutrition, I eat when I’m happy, I eat when I’m sad, I eat for no reason other than I love food. It’s no surprise that food and cooking are two of my passions. In all cultures, food brings families together and is considered one of the great pleasures in life, so why are we so obsessed with diets that remove entire food groups to improve our health?
Fad diets such as Paleo (Paleolithic) have become popular and fashionable amongst hipsters and the general community. The growing popularity of cooking shows and myriad of restaurants based on these diets is also perpetuating peoples interest in food, cooking and sadly fad diets. It puzzles me that people blindly follow food fads to lose weight and to follow a healthy eating plan without looking at scientific evidence to support these diets. Where has our healthy skepticism gone? How do we know the impact of Paleo (Paleolithic), Vegan, Low fat, Low carb, Sugar free and variations on these themes, years down the track? The trend of activating foods is something else I don’t understand the logic reason behind. We’ve been eating nuts, beans, pulses and grains for thousands of years and until now they were considered perfectly healthy. Soaking supposedly gets rid of phytochemicals that inhibit their nutritional value, but so far this remains unproven. Proponent of activated almonds, chef Pete Evans has recently come under scrutiny. His Paleo book for babies; “Bubba Yum Yum: The Paleo Way” has been dumped by its publisher, due to warnings from health experts about the risks to babies. Evans advocates the use of bone broth and liver as a baby formula which can pose potentially dangerous health risks.
In the article “Can we say what diet is best for health?”authors D.L Katz and S. Meller compare the impact of fad diets on human health including the ones mentioned above in their article in the Annual Journal of Public Health, and their findings show that eating healthy, unprocessed foods rather than relying on a diet, that removes certain food groups is the way to optimal eating. Katz and Meller write, “We need less debate about what diet is good for health, and much more attention directed at how best to move our cultures / societies in the direction of the well-established theme of optimal eating, for we remain mired a long way from it.”
Fad diets without the support of solid scientific evidence can potentially be bad for your health, not to mention depressing for your mental wellbeing. There’s nothing better than biting into a flaky, rich, almond croissant and washing it down with a cafe latte, which I confess to on a sunny Autumn Sunday afternoon a few hours ago at my local French bakery. Removing food groups from your diet, sucks the joy out of enjoying food, and life. Be wary of diets that avoid certain foods groups, eat everything in moderation, eat healthy unprocessed produce, and go lightly on the moussaka.
Full article “Can we say what diet is best for health?” here;
Moussaka photo by Anna-Maria Megalogenis.
