a meeting place for families from all over the world who are visiting the United States as students and scholars at the University of California at Berkeley. They came together and generously shared their customs and foods.
My biggest debt is to my children, Elizabeth and Stephen, who spent a significant part of their formative years in Thailand and Japan, for their professional advice, gentle encouragement, and unflagging support. No words of thanks will ever be enough. As medical practitioners, talented cooks, and loving children, they both sustained me to a degree that only I can appreciate.
Introduction
You've heard the warnings loud and clear: cut back on meats, salt, eggs, butter, cream—all those rich, zesty, fatty, flavorful foods—or risk developing heart disease, high blood pressure, and cancer. You wonder what to do. Must you give up all the foods you love and face a lifetime of thin soup and boiled mush? Happily not! At least not if you take advantage of the variety of exciting flavors that Asian cooking has to offer. You can still eat delicious food, and lots of it, while automatically protecting your health and maintaining your ideal weight. Whether you have a family history of disease, or have no health problems at all and want to stay that way, the recipes in this book are for you.
Asian cookery is remarkable for its variety of delectable taste sensations and health-promoting benefits. The dishes I've selected and modified for this book retain the tantalizing flavors—the redolence of ginger and garlic, the zing of sweet and sour—while further increasing the nutritional advantages. The main health benefits of Asian cooking come from its emphasis on plant foods: vegetables, legumes, and starches. Meats play only a supporting role: in a meat recipe, just two or three ounces per portion, but it is appetizingly cooked with lots of vegetables that contain no cholesterol.
"Two or three ounces!" (I hear you protest), "What about protein?" If you're a Westerner, you were probably brought up with the idea that if your dinner plate wasn't dominated by a big slab of meat you'd suffer a dire protein deficiency. Science has proven that to be wrong. You were probably told that to be healthy and slim you'd have to cut out carbohydrates, including starches such as bread, rice, potatoes, and noodles, in favor of protein foods, such as meat, cheese, and eggs. Wrong again. In fact, red meat is loaded largely with fat, not protein, and that fat is packed with heart-threatening cholesterol. It may also lead to certain types of cancer, and ounce for ounce it contributes twice the number of calories that starches and other carbohydrates do. While droves of Western dieters following the protein myth have succeeded only in gaining weight and endangering their health, millions of people in the Far East have stayed fit and slim on little or no meat but large amounts of vegetables, legumes, and rice. So, by substituting chicken and fish for red meat and by emphasizing vegetables, legumes, and starches, the recipes in this book will help you to lower your risk of heart disease and cancer and to reduce automatically the number of calories you consume.
The high-fiber content of vegetables earns another plus for Asian cooking. Science now shows that a high-fiber diet reduces the risk of certain forms of cancer and helps to lower cholesterol levels. It also combats constipation and other intestinal disorders. And for weight watchers, fiber provides a very low-calorie way to satisfy the appetite.
Even some of the Asian cooking techniques deliver health benefits. Most notably, there's steaming and stir-frying, which not only seal in the flavor and original color of foods but also ensure a maximum retention of vitamins.
"Come on now," (the skeptics among you say), "aren't there any health shortcomings to Asian cookery?" Yes, there are three serious ones, but they are corrected in this book. In fact, that's what this book is all about. Asian cooking normally tends to rely on (1) salty condiments (bad news for people with high blood pressure), (2) monosodium glutamate (MSG, also sold as Aji-no-moto, a high-sodium taste enhancer to which many people are allergic), and (3) large quantities of fat for deep frying (inviting heart disease, cancer, and obesity).
The challenge I faced in developing the book was to choose the healthiest of Asian recipes and then to modify them to remain as delicious as the originals while containing no salt, no MSG, and very little fat. I believe I have succeeded. Very few of my recipes contain beef, pork, and lamb, because red meat is highest in cholesterol. Instead they contain chicken and fish. In place of salt, MSG, and large quantities of salty condiments, they achieve zest and pungency with ginger, chilies, garlic, and a range of other herbs and spices.
But before going on to the recipes, you may want to read a bit about the scientific findings concerning your health and what you eat. The sources from which I took these findings are listed in the back of the book.
Salt and High Blood Pressure
A high salt intake can lead to high blood pressure and its potentially fatal consequences, cardiovascular disease and stroke. The incidence of heart disease is practically nonexistent in pre-industrialized cultures where little or no salt is added to foods.
In the Solomon Islands of the South Pacific, scientists observed two tribes, one living in the hills and one on a lagoon. Each was similar to the other except for the high incidence of hypertension in one tribe and the low incidence in the other. The hill people ate almost no salt at all because they boiled their food in rain or well water. They had a low incidence of hypertension. The lagoon people cooked their food in salty sea water, thus taking in 15 to 20 grams of salt a day. They had a high incidence of hypertension.
In Japan, where hypertension is the leading cause of death, the disease is more frequent in the north than in the south. This is not surprising, since salt consumption is. highest in the north.
Your body needs salt, of course, or rather the sodium contained in it. But the amount of sodium required—about 230 milligrams per day—is miniscule compared with the 4,000 to 8,000 milligrams that Americans now consume. The 230 milligrams are easily supplied by the food you would eat daily in its natural state. So where do the other thousands of milligrams come from? Well, one teaspoon of salt contains about 2,000 milligrams. Hundreds and thousands of more milligrams come from processed foods bought at the supermarket, restaurant, and fast-food counter. One ounce of cornflakes, for example, contains about 350 milligrams; two slices of bread, about 260; one cup of canned chicken noodle soup prepared with water, 1,100 milligrams; a fast-food hamburger, about 990; and a fast-food chicken dinner, about 2,200. So cutting back on salt may be harder than it sounds if processed foods with hidden amounts of sodium are consumed regularly.
Heart Disease and Cholesterol, Fats, and Fish Oil
Cholesterol Is the way to a man's heart still through his stomach? It most certainly is. But the old saying has now taken on a second meaning. Give him a regular diet high in cholesterol and saturated fat and you will increase his risk of a heart attack.
Cholesterol—a soft waxlike substance found among the fats in the bloodstream—may build up on the inner lining of blood vessels and, over time, obstruct them. This narrowing of the blood vessels, called atherosclerosis, keeps oxygen-carrying blood from getting to the heart. The result can be severe chest pain and eventually heart attack.
Our bodies need some cholesterol to maintain health and we get it in two ways. Our livers manufacture it naturally no matter what we eat, and we ingest it by eating foods of animal origin such as egg yolks, meats, poultry, fish, and dairy products. No plant-derived foods, whether fruits, vegetables, grains, or nuts, contain cholesterol.
Studies have shown what can happen when people from a country with a low-fat diet move to a country with a high one. Japanese living in Japan, where fat consumption is low, have low blood cholesterol levels and a low rate of heart disease. Japanese who have migrated to Hawaii, where fat consumption is higher, suffer significantly more heart attacks
