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New diet pyramid emphasizes nuts and other plant foods
There’s more good news for tree nuts - this time from south of the border: long-lived, healthy people from Latin America enjoy a diet rich in foods from plant sources, including nuts.
And the word is getting out: Latin American cuisine tastes good and is good for you. Up-scale restaurants featuring this style of food are popping up all over - from Manhattan to Los Angeles to Miami, and lifestyle magazines have gotten on the bandwagon with feature food stories such as Bon Appetit’s “America Learns Latin.”
We aren’t talking about fatty Tex-Mex beef and cheese enchiladas here, or lard-laced refried beans, or flautas loaded down with sour cream. Those Americanized versions of south-of-the-border fare bear little resemblance to the heart-healthy dishes and diets discussed last November in El Paso, Texas, at the 1996 International Conference on the Diets of Latin America - a conclave that may have had something to do with the current wave of interest in Latin American foods.
Traditional Latin American dishes are built, instead, on fresh fruits and vegetables, beans, nuts, potatoes, chilies, and corn. Sometimes there is a sprinkling of seafood, poultry and cheese. Only occasionally do red meats, eggs or cream figure in these simple but flavorful dishes.
Organized by Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust - a nonprofit educational organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts - and the Harvard School of Public Health, the El Paso conference highlighted the foods and lifestyles of Latin American people who enjoy the lowest rates of chronic diseases and highest adult life expectancy. Scientific studies of those populations provided the basis for the development of the centerpiece of the conference: The Latin American Diet Pyramid.
Diet Pyramid Concept
You have seen diet pyramids before. The first, introduced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1992, illustrates the Department’s nutritional advice. Foods are grouped in blocks according to the USDA’s idea of how many servings of meat, fruit, vegetables, and other foods Americans should consume in their daily diets. Foods at the top of the triangle should be eaten infrequently, while two to five servings a day are allowed for those in the middle, and six to eleven for those at the base.
The USDA’s pyramid created some controversy, because it allows for daily servings of meat and dairy products, and includes nuts (a vegetable protein and fat source) in the same category with red meat, poultry, and fish. Grouping nuts with meats sends the wrong message. Meats are associated with increased blood cholesterol and chronic diseases linked to animal fats. Research increasingly suggests that nuts (which do not contain cholesterol) have the opposite effect on human health.
Oldways and Harvard borrowed the USDA food pyramid concept in 1993 and introduced the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid, the first of three ethnic food pyramids that are based on dietary traditions historically associated with good health. That was followed by the Asian Diet Pyramid in 1995 and the Latin American Diet Pyramid in 1996. All three pyramids emphasize foods from plant sources, compared to the USDA’s greater emphasis on meat and dairy products.
Nutrition Message Lost
According to Oldways, there is no longer any serious doubt about what makes up a healthy eating pattern: lots more grains, nuts, vegetables, and fruits than most Americans are used to eating, and less of everything else that Americans are used to eating. But that message is not getting through fast enough.
Despite the expenditure of hundreds of millions of government dollars to develop and publish food guidelines, recent data shows that overweight Americans, now for the first time, outnumber normal weight and underweight Americans. The number of overweight Americans has accelerated in the last decade and the upward trend continues. The irony is that this is happening while Americans are gobbling up low-fat and no-fat foods in vast quantities.
Being overweight is clearly bad for one’s health, Oldways notes. Government reports indicate that mortality rates increase as body weight increases from the mean. Why then, with the flood of diet information and weight management foods and products now available, are people continuing to gain weight? The people whose health is at risk, as well as the health professionals who tend them, say that most nutrition information is communicated in a kind of exotic “nutrition-speak” that is hard for people to understand and put into practice. Most people find it difficult to apply information that emphasizes calorie counts, carbohydrates, grams and percentages, Oldways explains.
Make Food Fun
For dietary guidelines to be effective, the messages must refer not just to nutrients but also to real foods in their cultural contexts, Oldways believes. The foods must be familiar, readily available and inexpensive. They must also have strong taste appeal and be quick and easy to prepare. Eating well must be seen not as work, but as fun, pleasant, and nurturing. This is what is behind Oldways’ approach. The organization seeks out healthy traditional diets among the worlds’ diverse cultures to present in an appealing way to the public. Then it spends much of its energy teaching the nutritional, culinary, and ecological lessons of these traditions to health professionals, chefs, restaurateurs, and farmers, as well as the public.
Oldways’ pyramids are key elements in this process. They are meant to serve as visual guides to healthy eating that encourage people to become acquainted with different cultures and cuisines. Each pyramid was developed after a year or more of intensive research. Oldways identifies populations that have naturally lower rates of heart disease and cancer than Americans have and learns what they eat and drink and how much they exercise. This information goes into the development of nutritional guidelines and subsequently the construction of a diet pyramid for that cultural group.
The Latin American Diet
More than 200 international chefs, scientists, nutritionists, dietitians, and food journalists participated in the formulation of the Latin American Diet Pyramid, which incorporates the foods and culinary traditions of cultures from northwestern Mexico to Tierra del Fuego and across the Caribbean. It also takes into account the ethnic backgrounds and the educational, economic, and social status of the half billion people who live in Latin America, and it reflects the influences of waves of migration and spasms of conquest over the past five centuries.
This dietary model emphasizes the daily consumption of beans, grains, tubers, nuts, and fresh fruit and vegetables. These are the staples of Latin American cookery. Poultry, pork, seafood, milk, cheese, and vegetable oils may be consumed in lesser amounts daily or less often. At the top of the pyramid, in the “occasionally or in small quantities” category, are beef, lamb, eggs, puddings, cookies and creams.
The foundation of the pyramid is not a food group, however. It is daily physical activity “at a level which promotes healthy weight, fitness, and well-being.” This is one of the cultural characteristics noted in the research supporting the Latin American Diet Pyramid.
Other characteristics of the Latin American lifestyle include the daily preparation of meals at home, with a preference for locally grown foods prepared in a way that enhances micronutrient and antioxidant content. Limited availability of edible oils is an important factor. Fats are obtained by the consumption of fruits, nuts, and certain vegetables such as avocados. Also important is the daily consumption of chilies in small amounts, mostly as a condiment, much as Americans use salt and pepper. Chocolate is consumed daily, also, usually as a hot beverage. Poultry and fish are eaten less often, and red meat is included only a few times a month.
Common Food Ingredients
The basic foods of the Latin American diet are neither strange nor exotic. As Oldways points out, there is an “unconscious healthfulness” in many ethnic cuisines which “were created not specifically to be healthful, but to be as tasty as possible using available ingredients - largely grain, legumes, vegetables and spices. The resulting dishes turn out to be good for you.”
The Latin American Diet Pyramid was presented as a preliminary concept subject to revision. It will be discussed and reviewed by scientists, chefs, anthropologists, nutritionists, and public health officials before a final version is issued.
In the meantime, you can add the tasty foods of our southern neighbors to your repertoire of healthy culinary delights that include your favorite food and ours - almonds.
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