Arab best practices for healthy eating

Share your meals with other people

Conviviality is very important in Arab culture. Every event anywhere in the world is celebrated with a meal, from a meeting between heads of state to someone’s birthday. In the Arab world, each meal is an event in itself. Sharing food is what unites people.

Losing conviviality means losing the bonds between human beings and is socially dangerous - people start cutting each other out and communities crumble – a phenomena that’s become widespread in Western countries and that is responsible for many chronic illnesses.

Enjoy eating

We eat for two main reasons: survival and pleasure. Arabs have always tried optimizing both. Pleasure is essential for metabolizing the food. Without it, eating the supposedly healthiest of meal is of no value to your body. So never ever give up pleasure for the sake of health, it would be detrimental to it. You can and must have both.

Don’t count calories

Every diet that involves counting calories is wrong, because it is unsustainable. We have good news for you: it is counter-productive to become a calorie accountant, because it causes stress, and stress makes you less healthy and potentially makes you gain weight.

If you want to eat less - do not count grams or calories - just use smaller plates. Studies show that even if you can refill your plate indefinitely, eating in smaller plates makes you eat less overall.

Don’t care too much about nutrition science

Keeping up with nutrition science is a particularly challenging task, especially since what is good for you or what is bad for you changes very often and sometimes quite dramatically. Many times, we have seen a food group glorified, then considered a villain, or vice-versa, making it very hard for any good-willed human being to just eat well. But, like in any domain, common sense will always win the day. A healthful diet is about balance: it should include protein (animal and/or vegetal), carbohydrates (preferably not refined or complex) and fats (oil, nuts and seeds). It has been summed up brilliantly by Michael Pollan:

Eat food – by that he means real food, not processed food

Not too much – he encourages you to practice moderation

Mostly plants – eating plant foods promotes health and longevity

Avoid foods with nutrition labels

Understanding nutriments and labelling is another daunting task. A simple way around it is to look at the list of ingredients when you buy packaged food: if there is a name you don’t recognize or can’t picture in your mind or more than five ingredients, put it down. A few red flags include: ingredients that start with an E followed by numbers, High Fructose Corn Syrup or any sugar replacement, added nutrients – this is most of the time a trap! Furthermore, a good rule of thumb is that healthy foods don’t come in packaging - have you ever seen a “low fat” tag on a broccoli? Finally, it’s better to eat food cooked by a human being rather than a large corporation.

Think of food as preventative medicine, not as medicine

We believe it’s better to eat a variety of food rather than taking tons of supplements. But of course, we don’t advise against taking a good multivitamin and a vitamin D supplement - as very few people nowadays spend enough time outdoors to be exposed to sunlight. We strongly recommend taking a good probiotic - as a healthy gut flora often means a stronger immune system, a better digestion and a healthier appetite.

When Hippocrates said, « Let thy food be thy medicine », he didn’t mean that one should use food as medicine, but that one should consume food intelligently to never have to take any medicine. Food DOES NOT replace medicine. It can be a prevention but not a cure (although it can help). Health claims on food products are to be taken with caution. There’s a reason apples are not being sold at the chemist.

Always be wary of fad diets

Let’s take the example of the paleo diet, which pretends that our prehistoric ancestors had a somehow « healthier » diet. This claim is not only pure imagination but is clearly inaccurate. Indeed, we have no means of knowing for sure what they ate. Besides, they rarely lived past 30 years old, which is quite far from our longevity goals. Finally, they probably ate very differently from one tribe to another, from a geographic area to another, from a time of year to another and so on. That’s why one should always be skeptical about supposedly revolutionary ways of eating.

Another far-fetched example would be the raw food diet. Many health gurus prone the consumption of raw food as they claim that cooked food has lost all its essential nutrients. That’s another myth that needs to be dispelled. Let’s remind ourselves that the domestication of fire and cooking the food have entailed a better absorption of the food’s nutrients. Thanks to this possibility of cooking the food, mankind has prospered, and civilizations have developed. That doesn’t mean food shouldn't also be eaten raw. But again, extremism of any kind is never a good idea.

Be generous and abundant with your food

Some people feel that being concerned about food and health is a privilege of the wealthy. This is very far from the truth. Arabs know that the cost of falling ill is often far greater than the cost of eating well. Relying less on animal proteins and more on vegetal proteins can entail important savings and buying local and seasonal food - directly from the producers at a farmer’s market or with very few intermediaries - is at the same time beneficial for your health and for your wallet.

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