Inside OutGetting food on the table without ruining the planet
As I slumbered gently on the sofa yesterday, slow-burning the oh-so-many calories that somehow found their way to my overstretched tummy, I realised there could be no better time to think about food.
As a westerner, this weekend was the biggest blowout of the year – though for most Hong Kong Chinese, the greatest calorie challenge comes at Chinese New Year. The average Brit consumes almost 3,300 calories over Christmas lunch – and perhaps 7000 calories in the day, with the steady ingestion of mulled wine and mince pies.
That is just behind the world’s Christmas lunch calorie leader – the United States – but is still an alarmingly huge mountain of calories. Note, the average man burns 2,500 calories a day, and a woman 2000, so to burn off the excess from just that one blow-out will take an hour’s walking every day in January – or an extra half hour’s jog every day, if you are into that kind of exertion.
At this stage in the recovery process, laying horizontal seemed yesterday to be the best option. Resting the Kindle on my stomach, two books seemed perfectly suited to the mellow but guilty mood of the moment – Tim Spector’s “The Diet Myth”, and Rob Knight’s “Follow Your Gut” – all about why diets don’t work, and about those busy little microbes that were toiling away at that very moment helping my body deal with the extraordinary excess of the past two days.
Did you know that our “microbiome” – the mainly-beneficial microbes that populate our bodies in particular in our gut – weighs more than 3 lbs – that is around 1.4 kg, the same weight as our brain. Did you know that compared with the 10 trillion human cells that make up each of our bodies, each of us provide home for 100 trillion microbes, which on average reproduce every 30 minutes.
By my count, that is a heck of a lot of bacteria. But without them, it seems we would be in a big mess – and that imbalances (often linked with using antibiotics every time we catch a cold) can give us problems ranging from irritable bowel syndrome to depression, and of course to diabetes and to obesity.
As concentration lapsed, I inevitably drifted into thoughts about obesity – and how this has soared as poverty continues to plague the unhappy part of the planet. According to the World Health Organisation, in 2014 more than 1.9 billion adults worldwide were overweight, and 600 million were obese – compared with 1 billion struggling below the poverty line and going to bed every day hungry. Alarmingly, a further 43 million kids under 5 years old are obese. And Hong Kong is up there among the fattest. Our Centre for Health Protection says 860,000 Hong Kong adults are obese – about 21 per cent of all adults. That is not as bad as the UK, where over 30 per cent are obese, but not good, and an important source of illnesses like high blood pressure and diabetes.