AS we continue in our food series on Eating the seasons, we explore why nature has provided us with fruits and vegetables that are the colours of the rainbow each season. What does each colour mean and how they can help us to live healthier and longer. Over the coming weeks, we’ll explain why mother nature has left us clues on how to eat for longevity — she colour coded the food.
I remember hearing it all the time around the family dinner table — “Eat your greens.”
The modern western diet doesn’t promote eating green foods nearly as much as the traditional Fijian diet of moca, bele, ota bush fern, nama sea grapes, rourou leaves and green-skinned fruits.
Trying to get an Australian kid to eat green spinach and brussel sprouts that look like miniature cabbages is nearly impossible!
Why in the world would we want to eat something green — a colour we often associate with mould and unripened?
It seems mother nature wanted to provide us with special vitamins and minerals from plants and their leaves.
The lifeblood of green food is chlorophyll and other powerful phytonutrients and antioxidants that help heal our body from the inside.
If you aren’t eating many green coloured vegetables and raw salads in your diet, you are missing one of nature’s most obvious colour-coded signals to eat for long life. Green means go!
Surrounded by green foods
Our ancestors knew to eat a diet high in green foods, but do you know why?
If you think carefully about it, green coloured foods dominate our food supply and Fiji has no shortage of this special medicine food.
Walk down any market aisle and you are greeted by rows of cucumber, capsicum, beans, chilli, herbs, zucchini and okra. Look down the other side and you’ll find an array of green Chinese vegetables, gourds, avocado, limes, cabbage and lettuces. And don’t forget the imported broccoli, apples, kale, grapes, asparagus and kiwi fruit.
We are surrounded by green foods. The chlorophyll in green foods turns the sun into energy for the plants. They are nature’s healing foods of life. Unlike some seasonal foods, green foods are available all year around and for good reason.
Green blood transfusion from plants
Greens are a rich source of the phytonutrient called chlorophyll, which acts as a detoxifier in the body.
Chlorophyll also helps the blood to deliver oxygen to all the cells of the body as well as helping to neutralising the bad cells that cause damage and trigger disease.
If you suffer from bad breath or body odours, maybe you’re not eating enough green food as chlorophyll is a natural deodorizer!
The darker the greens, the higher the chlorophyll content, and to get the full benefit of the chlorophyll in greens, it’s best to eat them raw or very lightly cooked.
The modern Fijian diet tends to lean more toward acid-forming foods like meat and carbohydrates found in flour and root crops, but in order to maintain health and balance, it’s important to keep your PH at a healthy level. Vegetables, particularly greens, help to do this.
Greens are mineral-rich and supply the body with many vital nutrients such as calcium, magnesium, potassium and vitamins, including vitamins C, K, E and B.
Greens also contain a variety of phytonutrients, which research has shown helps protect the body against cell damage, supports the immune system and acts as antiviral and antibacterial agents. Greens are also powerful antioxidants, which are known to protect the body from damage from toxins in the environment and the bad foods we eat.
Antioxidants neutralise these toxins and clear them from the body.
Eat your greens
The Fijian cooking style of iTaukei and Indian cuisine tends to overcook vegetables until they are soft and mushy. While it might make the food easier to eat and digest, you are missing out on how nature intended for us to eat green foods; raw or partially cooked but still green.
When I was younger, an adult friend of mine swore that broccoli was yellow in colour, not green.
When I cooked him a healthy Chinese stir-fry of chicken, broccoli and cashew nuts, he asked what the green vegetables were.
It seemed his mother had been overcooking the broccoli his entire life!
Vegetables that belong to the cruciferous family like cabbage, broccoli, bok choy and watercress are supposed to be eaten crunchy.
Salads are another obvious way to get your daily intake of raw green vegetables with lettuce, herbs, beans and cucumber providing a cleansing accompaniment to oily curries, chop suey and heavy root crops.
The Chinese use high pressure gas stoves to quickly cook a stir-fry so that green vegetables stay crisp and retain all their vitamins, minerals and fibre.
Raw coriander (dhaniya) and bitter gourd (kerala) are some of the best foods anti-inflammatory foods that aid in digestion, disinfecting and clearing the body of toxins.
Avocado is also currently in season and is a green fruit for the brain. Containing healthy whole fats from a plant, avocado like walnuts, tuna and chocolate provide the brain and joints with much needed fats as we age.
Drink your greens
Another way to get your daily dose of nutrients is by juicing. In the first episode of Taste of Paradise last year, Mrs Singh in Suva showed me a delicious way to maintain a healthy chemical balance and get my daily dose of phytonutrients and antioxidants in glass. It was a blended kerala and gourd drink, seeds and skins included.
My ageing mother drinks a similiar concoction of kerala, cucumber and mint leaves to balance blood sugar levels and to keep diabetes away.
The Japanese have been drinking green tea for centuries to flush the body and live a very long life.
If you want the benefit of more fibre to broom your gastrointestinal tract, you can blend up a delicious and nutritious green smoothie made from a mixture of chopped leafy greens, a little avocado, some ground unsalted nuts, and honey with some yoghurt and milk.
You can also add fruits such as apple or banana to give more flavour and creaminess. It may not look enticing, but believe me, your body and doctor will say vinaka vakalevu!
If green vegetables seem too expensive or exotic, grow your own. Pop down to Hop Tiy in Suva to pick up a packet of seeds to fill your garden and diet with more healthy green fruits and vegetables.
And if you don’t eat many raw or crunchy greens, what are you waiting for?
NEXT WEEK we look at a coloured food that every living creature is in search of — red. Find out why red foods contain special nutrients that keep our blood healthy and help to fight some cancers.
* Lance Seeto is the award winning chef, television host and accredited food writer based on Castaway Island Fiji. He is also a member of the Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine (IFWTWA). Follow his culinary journeys at www.lanceseeto.com and Facebook.
