French women don’t get fat, Japanese women don’t get old and Italians live into golden old age…We are What We eat, so can changing the nationality of our Diet improve our health? HepHzibaH anderson investigates

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‘sprightly Italian grandmothers cavort in olive groves to advertise magarine’

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eat like a French woman and you’ll become sylph-like and ooh-la-la chic. To stay trim and ever youthful, trade your baguette for a bento box. Learn to cook like an Italian mamma, and you’ll live to a golden old age, surrounded by a legion of grandchildren.

We are what we eat, so it seems only logical that other nations’ cuisines should confer their most enviable attributes — wobbly logic, granted, but we’re surrounded by reinforcements. As we tuck into our telly suppers, sprightly Italian grand-mothers cavort in olive groves to advertise margarine, while a bobbed blonde tucks into her Petits Filous — all of seven years old, perhaps, and already a French woman. Flip channels, and there’s Antonio Carluccio, sidelined but smiley, as a wrinkled Tuscan senior does something amazing with gnocchi. Books have also played their part ever since Mireille Guiliano threw down the spatula with her smugly titled French Women Don’t Get Fat. First published back in 2004, it has ballooned into a mini empire complete with email newsletters and daily meal plans. Naomi Moriyama’s riposte, Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat, is fast catching up.

Unlike regular diets, this destination menu-planning carries the extra weight of escapist dreams. We’re not just eating the food, we’re consuming the entire lifestyle and feeding a far deeper hunger. As Moriyama promises: ‘This is not a diet plan, it is a whole new way of falling in love with food.’

However hard it is to whisper seductive sweet nothings when your breath is fragrant with garlic, we still expect French food to make us sexy. We expect Italian food to bring ebullience even if it’s just lonely old us and a giant bowl of pasta. And Japanese food? Well, my first ever business lunch took place in a Japanese restaurant, and it’s true that as I juggled maki rolls with my chopsticks, I felt very youthful indeed — about eight, regressing to six as another piece of sushi fell into the soy sauce with a small, staining splash.

But beneath the hype, is there anything to these diets, or are they as thin as they claim to make their followers? According to Guiliano, the French ‘embrace the virtues of freshness, variety, small portions, balance and always

pleasure.’ It’s the small portions that are key. In 2005, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that the average meal in France is 25 per cent smaller than its American equivalent. Similarly, a carton of yoghurt sold in Philadelphia was 82 per cent larger than the same product in Paris, a hot dog 63 per cent larger and a soft drink 52 per cent.

It’s a commonsensical answer to the riddle of the famed French paradox — the nation’s ability to delight in brie and croissants while keeping their waistlines in check. Yet is it really a uniquely French virtue? Greek mezze and Spanish tapas plates both licence slimline gluttony — small bites of everything with a good deal less of the cream and butter that still gives French food lots of its flavour.

Of those souls who’ve held the title oldest living person in the world, the most substantiated is Jeanne Calment, a French woman who actually lived in Provence where the diet is as Mediterranean as it is French. It’s rich in vegetables and legumes, which, as we all know, can reduce the risk of chronic diseases such as cancer, strokes and heart disease, and also help manage diabetes, delay the development of cataracts, and even reduce the symptoms of asthma.

Along with vitamins and minerals, fresh produce contains an array of complex plant components known as phytochemicals, which include flavonoids, glucosinilates and phyto-oestrogens. Some of these good ingredients double as antioxidants. If you think you’re getting all of this in the rosary of pills and capsules that you wash down each morning with your skinny latte, you’re wrong: it’s not only the individual components that make your five-a-day so healthy, it is also the way they interact. Whole grains and fish make for a good balance between carbohydrates and protein, and olive oil is a rich source of vitamin E and polyphenols, antioxidants that have been shown to protect the heart. Before Calment died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days, she revealed olive oil to be her secret, glugged over her food and rubbed into her skin (she also gave up smoking at 117, only to resume again at 118).

As a child, Italian chef Aldo Zilli was fed a teaspoon of olive oil every morning before he went to school. He has his own line now, but when he first arrived in the UK 30 years ago, he had to go to a chemist to find it. We’ve since embraced his national cuisine, though according to Zilli, we still don’t quite get it.

‘Italian food doesn’t really exist. It’s so regional that you move 10 miles and every recipe changes. In Britain, people think it’s all about pasta, but that’s only part of it. You’d become very unhealthy if you ate pasta every day.’

By picking wrongly and forgetting to mix, it’s perfectly possible to eat badly within even the healthiest diet. ‘Trends are no good,’ he insists, ‘You should go with seasons not trends. Italians use what’s local and what’s in season — lemons, aubergine, game, fish.’ Along with the ingredients themselves, the style of cooking and eating both play a role. ‘Food shouldn’t be treated as fuel, it should always be treated as a luxury and something to enjoy. We tend to eat a lot of food in a very short space of time, maybe twice a day. Food should be enjoyed more frequently in smaller amounts.’

To that end, his new brasserie-style restaurant in Brighton’s MyHotel has a cafe area set off to one side. Sitting in the window so he can watch the passers-by, he explains that this is fast food Italian style. As well as the pasta dishes that his mother used to cook for him, there are focaccia sandwiches, freshly squeezed juices and salads ranging from butternut squash, peas, baby spinach and sun-dried tomato to smoked mackerel, new potatoes and poached egg. Next door, the menu includes chargrilled, whole, organic-farmed sea bass with olive oil and lemon, and meaty, prosciutto-wrapped monkfish with wild mush-rooms and grilled polenta. At the far end of the restaurant, fresh fish is arranged around an open grill, a larger version of the kind of open fire over which his mother cooked everything.

‘Young chefs in Italy are revisiting the old recipes and making them lighter — no one wants to eat pasta twice a day any more. There’s a lot of raw fish being served. In Britain, we like to overcook everything but overcooked food’s no good to you at all.’

Japan is ‘the food utopia of planet Earth,’ according to Moriyama — slender, youthful and spunky as her book’s title suggests. In terms of ingredients, the menu in this utopia is broadly similar to what you’d find in the Mediterranean, with added soya. As in France, portion control is crucial. Meals are eaten from bowls rather than giant plates, and a favourite Japanese saying translates as ‘eat until you’re only 80 per cent full.’ Ritual is another

key, visible in any decent Japanese restaurant. Even a cup of tea has its own ceremony with a role for each of the five senses, watching and listening as the brew is poured, touching the warm cup as you raise it to your lips, inhaling the scent and finally tasting — a teasing study in delayed gratification.

While books like Moriyama’s and the Oki­nawa Diet, which claims to distil the secrets of some of the world’s leanest, healthiest and longest-lived people, have transformed Japanese food into a brand, their canny marketing glosses over plenty. Earlier this year the Japanese government declared their intention to measure the waistlines of all the people between the ages of 40 and 74. Anyone whose midriff exceeds the set limits — 85cms (33.5 inches) for men, 90cms (35.4 inches) for women — will be given three months to shape up. After that will come the dieting guidance, with re-education for repeat offenders and financial penalties for companies and local governments. Obesity is a costly ill, and Japan’s leaders aim to reduce its population of people who are ‘metabo,’ as the tubby are known, by 25 per cent over the next seven years.

These super-diets also overshadow healthy eating habits from other parts of the world. In neighbouring China, for instance, the traditional diet is very different to the greasy noodles and artery-clogging Szechuan pork that fill the menu of your local takeaway. The

country’s newfound affluence has left it with the world’s second highest number of diabetes sufferers, but its dishes have historically evolved around vegetables, whole grains and soya beans, with small portions of fish or poultry and only shavings of red meat for flavouring. Research carried out at Cornell has found that in rural China, where villagers are still eating a traditional diet, it consists of just 20 per cent animal foods. It isn’t only the content, it’s the preparation that is good: leafy greens like bok choy are stir-fried or lightly steamed, quick cooking techniques that tend to preserve water-soluble vitamins like A and C.

Equally, America equals junk food in the minds of many Europeans, but we forget that lots of our good habits originated in Berkeley, California, with the maverick culinary genius Alice Waters. Her one not very big restaurant, Chez Panisse, has generated nine books, dozens of awards, and transformed the way millions think about food. As her biographer, Thomas McNamee explains: ‘Her insistence on the freshest ingredients, used only at the peak of their season, nearly always grown locally and organically, is now a ruling principle in the best American restaurants and for many home cooks. Her conception of a moral community based on good food and goodwill has helped to spawn a new generation of artisans and farmers committed to stewardship of the land and waters.’

aldo zilli; barcelona's boquería; Guiliano's and Moriyama's books on the secrets of French and Japanese cuisine. han lee De Boer/camera press, axiom

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‘there are no angelic foods and no devilish foods. there are good diets and poor diets'

Dr Eric Brunner, a University College of London-based epidemiologist specialising in nutrition, agrees that the Mediterranean and Japanese diets appear to be good, but points to exceptions among traditional diets: ‘Look at the Inuit — they eat berries in the summer, but in the winter it appears to be mostly fish and blubber, yet they live to a good age.’

Along with gastro tourism, a burgeoning food media of television shows, books, journalism and a cornucopia of online forums is making food an increasingly international melange. Even eating local is a global trend, visible on menus in Birmingham, Nice, San Francisco. Instead of national borders, it is likely to be class boundaries that define how we eat in the future. In the UK for instance, longevity is rising by around two years a decade but so, too, is the gap between the life expectancy of so-called manual and non-manual workers. In 1975, a male non-manual worker lived on average 2.1 years longer than his blue-collared counterpart; by 2005, that had grown to 3.3 years. Rising food prices will only accelerate this trend, Brunner suggests. While those of us who can afford it strive to eat like yesterday’s peasants, from fork or stream straight to plate, barely glancing a skillet or wood-fired oven on its way, the rest of society will be chomping on high-calorie, energy-dense junk — check-out cheap, but very costly indeed once you’ve factored in the associative heart disease, diabetes and other ills that obesity brings.

Food anxiety has turned us all into amateur chemists, but it’s still hard to know what to eat as we struggle to square health with ethics, sustainability and environmental concerns, never mind price. Those organic green beans from Kenya, for instance — good because they’re organic and you’re supporting a fledgling economy, but what about the air miles? For virtually every supposedly beneficial ingredient, a counter argument exists. For instance, soya products are renowned for their anti-cancer properties, but it’s also been suggested that modern soya beans may actually leave our bodies needing more vitamin B12 and interfere with the thyroid gland. Fresh fruit and veg are antioxidant rich but what if they’ve been doused in pesticides? Chocolate and red wine may contain antioxidants, but they’re still chocolate and wine. Salmon is packed with omega-3 fats — great, except that they’re jostling with mercury and PCBs. And just what is a PCB anyway?

Have we become too neurotic about our

food? One man who thinks so is Dr Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. Earlier this year, his book An Apple a Day leapt up the Canadian bestseller charts, pledging in its subtitle to expose ‘the myths, misconceptions and outright exaggerations about diet, nutrition and the foods we eat.’ As he tells me: ‘Nutrition is of course important, but it is not necessary to critically examine every morsel we put in our mouths. There are no angelic foods or devilish foods. There are good diets and poor diets.’

Rather than single out any one national diet, he’d rather extract their common wisdom. ‘The more whole grains, fruits and vegetables we eat the better. What we should strive for is three servings of whole grains a day and at least seven of fruits and vegetables.’

For breakfast, Schwarcz eats porridge topped with blueberries, strawberries and a spoonful of ground flax, as well as juice and whole grain toast. Lunch might be a cheese and salad sandwich with hummus and fruit, supper a bean and barley soup, chicken with a spinach salad, and strawberries and grapes for pudding — maybe dipped in dark chocolate. ‘And then I’ll go to sleep and dream of a smoked meat sandwich, French fries and a dill pickle. (Occasionally I’ll even make this dream come true). Oh yes, I forgot, something that I do make a point of having every day: an apple.’

Ultimately, we need to accept that there are limits to what our diets can do for us. ‘Diet is one of the important behavioural factors, but it is not a panacea,’ says Brunner. ‘You can’t compensate for an unsustainable lifestyle using vitamin supplements, for example.’

The world’s healthiest cultures do share some habits. They eat small portions of a large variety. They eat fresh and they eat local. They pile their plates with fruit and vegetables, add a little meat or better yet fish, and make sure they get plenty of whole grains. But there is one other trait that we tend to lose sight of: enjoyment. Think about how good even the simplest food can taste when you’re on holiday and relaxed enough to really taste what you’re eating. Giant, sun-guzzling Provencal tomatoes, sliced directly into a baguette — the real kind, chewy centred and airy beneath a sharp crust — and eaten on the beach, seasoned with sea spray. Or Long Island corn on the cob, so sweet that you don’t care if butter’s dripping onto your thighs. With that in mind, Schwarcz’s healthiest meal of the day might well be the sandwich that he wolfs down in his sleep.

What’s in your basket?We examine the health impact of three average national diets…

Mediterraneanthe typical Mediterranean diet takes on a far greener hue than

the others, with avocados, lentils, tomatoes, walnuts, houmous

and muesli all ensuring our Mediterranean cousins enjoy a far lower morbidity rate from obesity, heart disease and certain cancers

than those following the american diet. olive oil also makes an

important appearance. Jeanne Calment, who holds the record

for the world’s longest confirmed lifespan, attributed her longevity to olive oil, which she would pour all over her food and rub into her

skin. the moderate consumption of red wine has also been linked to

several beneficial health effects.Calories: 3,671 a day

Meat: 92kg a yearFish: 26kg a year

Fruit and vegetables: 298kg a year

JapaneseFish and vegetables dominate the typical Japanese basket. oily fish, such as salmon and fresh tuna, provide massive doses of Vitamins a and d, as well as omega-3 fatty acids. rice takes centre stage, offering a good source of carbohydrate and protein (and a far healthier option than white bread, the american favourite), and the nutritional benefits of staples such as green tea, soy sauce, miso soup and cabbage go a long way to explaining why Japan has one of the longest life expectancies in the world.Calories: 2,761 a dayMeat: 44kg a yearFish: 66kg a yearFruit and vegetables: 162kg a year

aMeriCanFull of sugary food, red meat and dairy products, the typical american diet is dangerously high in calories and fats, but also high in protein, calcium and iron. to start the day, processed sugary cereals — one cup of Froot Loops contains six teaspoons of sugar and 120 calories — and bacon and eggs are by far the most popular breakfast choices. For the rest of the day, a bottle of Coke and a doughnut ups the sugar quotient further; the cheddar cheese, milk and sirloin steak offer more artery-clogging fats with fruit and vegetables low on the agenda.Calories: 3,774 a dayMeat: 123kg a yearFish: 22kg a yearFruit and vegetables: 46kg a year