Since I started Cooking with the Ancestors, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking and thinking in between. Recently, the subject of healthy food and diet has become an important conversation in our household. And it has led me to think more about the food we eat and how we prepare them.
Breakouts and poor gut health
Last July, after my trip to Thailand, I started having breakouts on my face. At that time, I attributed it to heat, the stress of travelling (fearing that immigration officers wouldn’t let me out of my country to go on a simple little tour, for goodness’ sake), the adjustment of being with travel companions other than my family.
But it grew worse and worse. The last time I had a face like this was when I was an adolescent and had hormones raging all over my body. Was I going through puberty again?
Last week, I had a check-up at a clinic specialising in natural medicine and healing the body by cleansing the gut the good, old way Asians used to do it. One look at my face and they said I lack three things: zinc, minerals, and enzymes.
Apparently, I’m not producing enough enzymes to break down my food, thus preventing it from entering my bloodstream. The result? A face raging with breakouts, dry skin in various places, a hard time digesting, bloating over random things (I bloat over lettuce, can you imagine?), probably difficulty breathing. My liver is off, I have uric crystals, I lack water—the list is endless.
On food and a well-balanced diet
A few months ago, I discovered Kaki Okomura on Medium, which led me to subscribe to her newsletter. Kaki’s newsletter opened me up to a whole new world of nutritious eating that involves a well-balanced meal rather than diets here and there.
Of course, you want to be healthy and take good care of your body, and the general word on the streets says to do that, you need to diet. Keto diet; sugar-free, gluten-free diet; intermittent fasting—all those diets you read and hear about.
Now, I'm not going to pretend I know much about them, but between Kaki Okomura's posts and In the FLO, a book by Alisa Vitti, I'm starting to wonder if these widely-circulating diets are the best options for our bodies. People might argue that so-and-so studies have proven it effective and all that jazz.
BUT! I know some women who have been on keto diets and intermittent fasting for years and are now having difficulty conceiving. As Alisa Vitti points out men's and women's bodies are wired differently. While those diets and high-intensity workouts may be effective for some, they may not be the solution for all.
And, as they say, the best diet is still a well-balanced one. It’s not just as marketed as keto or intermittent fasting.
Where Cooking with the Ancestors is headed
Where am I going in all of this?
After my check-up, I started wondering what it would be like to go deep into the heart of our food and its preparation.
What if I looked into what goes into preparing main and side dishes and explored their health benefits? What I were to research and write about why a particular food is good for you? Or the effects of seasonal food on our bodies? What if I were to explore how our ancestors prepared food—and why it was so good and nutritious and led them to live long healthy lives?
Take vegetables, for example. If you overcook them, they tend to lose nutritional value. They become fillers that don't do much for your gut, and you'll end up excreting them because they have nowhere to go. Most of the time, we also don't know how to prepare vegetables because we've always had this misconception that they're good for the body but not entirely pleasant on the tastebuds.
I remember an episode of Queer Eye where Antoni (the food and wine expert) was going through a refrigerator and saw some vegetables tweaked to resemble meat. If you're going to eat vegetables, just eat them as vegetables, he argued. Don't try to turn it into meat.
More often than not, the magic happens in what you leave out rather than what you add to your vegetable dish. If you were to take vegetables and fruits and prepare them in specific ways before eating, you would get what you need to help you consume them in their most nutritious form and help you digest them entirely.
For example: sprinkling salt on your papaya or pineapple slices before eating them helps release the enzymes needed to digest your food. Or boiling beans for only three minutes before dousing them with cold water and seasoning them with crushed sesame, sugar, and soy sauce keeps them in their most nutritious state. (Plus, they taste super yummy and fresh.)
Cooking with the Ancestors, while a jest about how I never measure my food while I cook, is also a realisation about how our ancestors perhaps had it right in how they prepared their food. With their fermentation process, with the kinds of ingredients they used, with how they discovered seasonal food and prepared it.
These kinds of things. These things that we don't talk about readily. Or we've forgotten because it's easier to toss a readily-made meal into a microwave or lazily reheat whatever is in the fridge without thinking if you're giving yourself good meals or just putting more junk into your body. (Hey, I'm guilty as charged where all of these are concerned.)
While I won’t have it all down perfectly—and I suspect I’ll have a lot of messed-up moments and moments of trial and error—I want this to be all about discovering how nutritious good food can be and how good nutritious food can be. I won’t pretend to be an expert either, but I hope you join me in this journey to better eating and even better living.
I’ll be doing my best to share delicious, nutritious dishes I’m learning to cook, research I've made on gut health (something I'm so fascinated about these days) and other discoveries I make along the way. I’m also scheduled for a colonics/enema treatment this November (more on this in future posts), so I'll talk a bit about that and how it has affected my health journey overall.
Some of my favourite articles about healthy, well-balanced diets:
'One Soup, Three Sides': The Japanese Art of Eating Healthfully by Kaki Okomura
The Psychology Behind Why Japanese People Are So Healthy by Kaki Okomura
5 eating tips from Japan to achieve effortless health by Kaki Okomura
Gut-Health Benefits: A Journey into Traditional Fermented Foods by Priyanka Parhi
I’m a nutritionist from Japan, home to the world’s longest-living people—here are 5 longevity foods we eat every day by Asako Miyashita