Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories (4 page)

After my conversation with Xiao Ding I took a closer look at the products on sale in the Chinese stores. In 1995 in China there was no such thing as a pre-prepared meal, breakfast cereals had not made their appearance and there were a limited number of biscuits and confectionary products on the shelves alongside the Chinese staples of grains, nuts and dried fruits. I scoured the packaging carefully: not a single calorie count did I find. A nightmare, I thought, for anyone on a WeightWatchers programme. But then, I realized, no one was. Chinese people will pontificate for ages on the health benefits of different foods, sharing knowledge that has been handed down through the generations, and will often make quite personal remarks about how a person needs to eat more of one type of food than another; but no one would ever consider the value of a food in terms of its calorie content. Food in China is enjoyed because it looks good, smells good, tastes good and does you good. And the people that I saw all around me were obviously benefiting. China has no special clothes shops for the ‘fuller figure’ or special facilities for large people. When I lived in China obesity simply wasn’t an issue. In 2002 in a multi-cultural study on attitudes to body shape, children from different countries were shown silhouettes of figures ranging from very thin to obese. While American children viewed the very obese figures as their least preferred shape, Chinese children had no negative feelings about obesity; it appears that they didn’t believe such fat people existed.
¹

We don’t know what to eat

The year I arrived in China and was marvelling at the wealth of foods in the Chinese diet, a Mass Observation survey in the UK found that ‘society now relies almost completely on convenience foods. Working people start the day with a bowl of cereal and milk and sugar, and drink tea; throughout the day they eat biscuits and sandwiches and drink more tea; once at home, few of them seem to cook a meal for themselves from raw ingredients. ’This picture is very bleak, and numerous campaigns have improved the situation in recent years, but it does explain why Western dieters often end up by starving themselves. Cut out the bread and biscuits that have been pinpointed as ‘baddies’ and what is there left to eat? Manufacturers have had a field day producing low-fat, low-calorie versions of the limited number of foods that Western consumers feel comfortable with: diet yoghurts, low-fat biscuits, sugar-free drinks, butter substitutes, oil-free salad dressings. The Meat Marketing Board has produced leaner pigs; the dairy industry has taken the fat out of milk. We have spent the last few years hung up about what not to eat, when there are thousands of foods out there packed with nutrients, but we don’t know what to do with them.

How easy is it to put aside all the baggage of Western nutrition speak, when the ‘count your calories’ message is screamed at us from the packaging of our ‘healthy’ breakfast cereal, throughout the day in shops, in magazines and on the television and, for many, last thing at night as we fill in our WeightWatchers chart? Until I saw the Chinese way of eating with my own eyes I did not really believe that it might be possible to enjoy food without guilt, and without getting fat.

In the West we have been indoctrinated with the idea that the only way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more. During my first year in Beijing I went to a talk organized by the International Newcomers Network (INN). The speaker was the fitness instructor from the leisure centre at a leading hotel: the message was ‘join our gym and you will never have to worry about your weight again’. Not yet immune to the Western mindset, and with new-found leisure time thanks to round the clock domestic help, I joined. I even found a driver to take me there. I tended to exercise in the late morning while my youngest was asleep and leave during the lunch-time rush as the place filled up with sweaty businessmen. On my way out I would glance into the canteen to see a bunch of drivers enjoying a slap-up lunch. And I couldn’t help but consider that, despite the fact that some of them had to cycle to and from their place of work morning and night, generally a driver’s lifestyle is pretty sedentary – and I didn’t see many fat ones.

I was slightly envious of the camaraderie that was so evident in the Chinese canteens. While I was puffing away in silence on the running, step or rowing machines, watching the counter record the energy I was burning, all the Chinese staff, from the manager to the receptionist and the waitresses to cleaners, were enjoying a feast with friends. My reward for burning off an extra 200 calories might be an extra slice of almost stale bread with my salad and a digestive biscuit for tea: but was I really any better for it?

I am not disputing that exercise does burn off calories or that restricting food intake can help lose weight. What I question is a food culture that has allowed these principles to take away the pleasure of eating, which traditionally was a positive experience associated with nourishment, good health and sustaining life.

At this stage you will undoubtedly be thinking that there
must
be a catch. The West
is
getting fatter and we all know that this is because we are taking in more calories than we burn off. So, if the Chinese do not need to count calories yet manage to stay slim and fit, is there a genetic or lifestyle factor involved? Or perhaps, despite the appearance of eating a lot, are they actually eating a low-calorie diet because of the types of food in their diet?

All these questions went through my mind, too. My quest to discover the secrets of the Chinese diet was originally totally unhampered by any scientific training or method; my only qualification was my enthusiasm for the subject and a burning desire to understand why the West’s relationship with food has gone so terribly wrong. Modern science, with all its strengths, tends to concentrate on single factors; I wanted to understand a whole culture and was as interested in unquantifiable factors such as attitudes to food as I was in comparative calorific intake and obesity levels.

The Chinese eat more calories

As my understanding developed, I found many of my observations vindicated by modern research. Chinese people do actually eat more than Westerners and yet stay thinner.
The
China Study
by T. Colin Campbell claims to be ‘the most comprehensive study of the link between diet and disease ever published’. A survey carried out by Dr Campbell and a world-class scientific team in 1990 questioned 6,500 adults from sixty-five counties across China and compared the statistics with those gathered in different countries, particularly the United States. Not only did the survey result in 8,000 statistically significant associations between lifestyle, diet and disease but it had ‘startling implications for weight loss’. Any investigation into eating habits necessarily includes a record of calorific intakes and bodyweight.
The China Study
showed that when Chinese were compared to Americans: ‘The average calorie intake, per kilogram of bodyweight, was thirty per cent higher . . . Yet bodyweight was twenty per cent lower. ’
²

Chinese people eat more calories than Americans, but keep slimmer – extraordinary. ‘So the Chinese must be more active!’ you will cry with relief, and resolve to use that gym membership. Certainly when they saw the local people stuffing themselves with huge portions of food three times a day, my Western friends were generally quick to assume that the Chinese don’t worry about counting calories because they need to fuel their active lifestyles. And indeed most Chinese people still live and work on the land, and those living in towns will generally walk or cycle to work. But what about all the sedentary drivers enjoying their huge lunches? Or the Chinese scholastic tradition and the hundreds of thousands of office-bound civil servants?

1
.
Calorie consumption and body weight
²
(Courtesy of Campbell and Campbell,
The China Study.
)

The
China Study
team ranked the Chinese in five groups according to their activity levels: the figures above relate to the least active group of Chinese (the sedentary office worker) compared to average Americans (moderate exercise several times a week).

The Chinese are not thinner because they take in fewer calories or because they take more exercise. ‘Then it must be in the genes,’ you will conclude with resignation. (People claimed to have ‘heavy bones’ when I was a child; now ‘a slow metabolism’ is more fashionable. )

The gene theory is tempting,but too simplistic. With different ethnic backgrounds come different lifestyles and eating habits. It is easier to point to the one thing that cannot be emulated than find out more about those that can; but, over the years, I have been fortunate to be able to delve behind skin colour and into lunch-boxes.

Before moving to Beijing I took a Mandarin course in London. In the early stages of my third pregnancy, I entered my first class with a touch of trepidation, not to mention nausea. I couldn’t tell if the other students were in a gap year or recent graduates, but their fashionably grubby clothes exuded the enthusiasm and self-assurance of youth. It was with enormous relief, therefore, that I noticed Paula sitting alone and took up a seat beside her. Like about half the class, Paula was ethnic Chinese, but while the others were mainly the children of Cantonese restaurateurs, focused on the career opportunities that the language of the motherland could offer, Paula was a wife and mother, and more interested in rediscovering her roots. United by age and responsibility, we became firm friends within the week.

On the first day we soon left the smoke-filled common room and ventured into the concrete expanse of the town to eat our lunch. As I suffered the hunger pangs that I considered par for the course in pregnancy, I noticed that Paula, whose petite stature made me feel gargantuan, never tried to get by on a sandwich at midday. Her lunch-box revealed a mound of rice topped with meat and vegetables. I watched in disbelief as her fingers worked the chopsticks. This was no midday snack, yet she was talking excitedly of the meal she would cook that evening. While her family may have neglected to maintain her linguistic heritage, their culinary legacy was obviously still intact – and she looked great on it.

Ladies who lunch (and don’t get fat)

The first friend I made when I arrived in Beijing was May, the wife of one of Tim’s colleagues. May was from Hong Kong and loved to ‘lunch’. It was at her apartment, with its panoramic view of the Sanlitun Embassy district, that I had my first real taste of Chinese home-style cooking. Eating with May and her friends from Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia was confirmation that throughout the whole of Asia people eat well; they positively celebrate food and never talk about restricting what they eat in any way. We would take steaming bowls of rice or noodles and top them with a selection of tasty morsels. I discovered the delights of lotus root, fibrous and delicate in flavour, and stem lettuce, crunchy and tasting slightly of asparagus, and I began to recognize the fermented bean pastes that give so many Chinese dishes their distinct flavour and to distinguish one type of beancurd from another. They introduced me to foods I didn’t know existed, like the delicately filled tiny parcels of Cantonese
dim sum
, crisply wrapped Japanese sushi, Korean noodles that blew my head off and the fascinating flavours of the local stir-fries. I also learned that there is more to aubergine than ratatouille and far more to cabbage than bubble and squeak. When these women talked about food it was with excitement and pleasure. While the bias of their diet was towards freshly cooked savoury dishes they did not have any taboos or no-go areas. When the school bake sales came round, which they did with monotonous regularity, they could produce a cheesecake or a plate of muffins that would rival Betty Crocker.

May and her Asian friends were all slim, despite the fact that eating was their favourite occupation. Like Paula, they all appeared to have been brought up in households with a positive attitude to food. But during my time in Beijing I also had plenty of opportunity to observe other Asians, whose eating habits had been influenced by Western ideas or lifestyles. Those of ethnic Chinese heritage who are born in the West are loosely described in Asia as American-Born Chinese (ABCs). As China’s economy boomed in the 1990s thousands of ABCs were attracted back to the home of their ancestors. One of these was my friend Deborah, a British-Chinese doctor, whom I met during a routine consultation and who had an enviable command of self-taught Mandarin that I hoped might open some restaurant doors for me. Solidly built to the extent that her white coat was stretched across her stomach, she certainly looked as if she must enjoy food.

I met Deborah for lunch. She ordered nothing but a watermelon juice; I invited her for supper and she picked at her meal complaining of a stomach upset. She seemed to live on air, and despite our initial spark I never became close to her. When we met at social functions I continued to notice that, despite her size, she never seemed to show any interest or pleasure in food.