Move over Medi – there’s a new heritage diet in town. It’s from Tanzania, and I’m very lucky to have just visited that glorious country. So I was fascinated to read new research naming the diet of northern Tanzania as one of the healthiest in the world.
Researchers from the Netherlands and Tanzania evaluated the diet traditionally eaten by arable farmers in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro. They consume many fibrous, polyphenol-rich plants and a fermented banana beer called mbege. Fibre intake can be up to 90g a day, three times more than that recommended here in the UK. And Brits only average around half that amount. The fibrous Tanzanian diet has a hugely beneficial impact on gut health, and is linked to better immunity and reduced inflammation.
POP-UP KITCHENS
To assess the benefits of the diet, the researchers conducted a neat experiment where they established pop-up kitchens in the foothills of Kilimanjaro and in the capital, Dar-es-Salaam. For two weeks the urban kitchen served meals of cassava, plantains, beans, green vegetables and mbege to study participants used to a Western-style, ultra-processed diet. Meanwhile, the rural kitchen dished out pizza, chips, fried chicken and beef stew with pasta. Participants in the study used to the traditional diet saw inflammatory markers in their blood increase, and their responses to infection decrease, when they swapped to the western diet. They also gained weight. In contrast, those who switched from a modern diet to a traditional one saw inflammation, and blood markers linked to metabolic syndrome, decrease.
If you’d like to know more about the study’s findings, there’s a great Zoe podcast about it, with Tim Spector and the Dutch lead author Dr Quirijn de Mast, which you can find here.
On our trip to northern Tanzania, were weren’t offered mbege – sadly – I’d like to try it! But we did eat huge amounts of locally-grown spinach, which was rich, fibrous stuff, more like kale than the pappy baby spinach we buy in the supermarket at home. We also had lots of bean and lentil dishes. Most meals started with soup and salad – nourishing, hydrating and blood-sugar balancing.
HERITAGE DIETS
So why do we know so much about the Mediterranean diet and so little about the Tanzanian one? The Mediterranean diet has been so well studied and documented over the last 60 years or so, that it’s easy to think that it’s the ONLY diet associated with longevity. I’ve had coaching clients in India worry that they’re not following the Medi diet closely enough, only to realise that in fact their own traditional diet is exceptionally healthy. So perhaps it’s time to look past the Medi diet – good though it is – and seek inspiration from heritage diets worldwide.
One traditional diet I suspect few of us would want to follow is that of the Maasai, nomadic tribespeople who live in the north-west of Tanzania and southern Kenya. We were lucky enough to visit a village in the Serengeti – pictured above, with their permission. Of course, I had lots of questions for our guide about diet and longevity. Their diet couldn’t be more different to that studied by Dr Quirijn de Mast and his team.
MILK, MEAT AND BLOOD
The Maasai are pastoralists, tending herds of goats and cattle as they move between villages across region. They don’t grow crops and, as a result, their diet is based on milk, meat and blood. Our guide told me that his first two meals each day are usually a mix of cows’ blood and goats’ milk. I can’t imagine what that tastes like. The evening meal consists of a maize porridge called ugali, and beef stew. Roots and tree bark are eaten as medicine rather than food. Heavy in saturated fat and cholesterol, it doesn’t fit our idea of a ‘healthy’ diet, but the Maasai have low rates of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. Why? They have genetic adaptations that enable efficient cholesterol metabolism and regulation, as well as a lifestyle that involves walking for up to 10 hours a day.
The chief of the village we visited is 97 years old, so something must be working!
RELATIONSHIPS, AND RECIPES
We’re taking our usual summer break for the rest of August. If you’d like something to listen to in the meantime, I talked to Lucy Cavendish on her podcast, How to Have Extraordinary Relationships, about our relationship with our brains. It’s the most important one we’ll ever have.
If we don’t take care of our brains – and make brain health a priority – we’re doing ourselves a fundamental disservice, as well as increasing our risk of cognitive decline.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or right here How to Have Extraordinary Relationships
And here are some of our favourite seasonal recipes from the archive to help you age well this summer:
Roast vegetable frittata with walnut sauce
Susan
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