Nutrition: Dietary Recommendations:
Asian Food Guide Pyramid
The diet and health statistics of some Asian countries and peoples are indeed well and carefully recorded.
Fortunately, though, general patterns do emerge from available and reliable evidence. Eating in Asia is often closely identified with religious practices or long-standing customs, and the recordation of these strictures is a source of excellent information.
The public health agencies of governments of Asian nations, long-concerned with the diseases of malnutrition that accompany scarcity and poverty, are now having to deal with fast-rising rates of the chronic diseases of affluence that accompany a turn to western-type diets richer in saturated fats than the traditional Asian diets.
These data make clear that peoples who ate traditional Asian diets and were not malnourished had, in general, low rates of the chronic diseases that now plague western populations and are beginning to alarm public health officials in Asian countries.
This Asian Diet Pyramid is based on a generalized summary of the traditional healthy diets of Asian populations, in the light of current nutrition research.
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