The Complete Patient

Some further thoughts related to health from my just-completed ten-day trip to Thailand.

I discovered after ten days of eating Thai food, and lots of it, that my weight hadn’t changed at all. How can that be? The only explanation I can come up with is this: Thai food includes almost none of the three most common components of the American diet: sugar, dairy, wheat. Thai meals commonly conclude with a few slices of pineapple and watermelon. No cookies, cakes, or pudding.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to even find sugar. We went to a Japanese restaurant in a Bangkok shopping mall, and it served green iced tea to everyone. Of course, we were looking for a sweetener. There was none to be found, and while the wait staff was very apologetic, I found it refreshing, as it were, to not have sugar even around to tempt us.

The main accompaniment to meals is rice, rather than bread or pasta. And the closest one comes to dairy in food preparation is coconut milk.

I spent some time walking through very poor neighborhoods in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, a northern city, and one of the things that is striking is that even the most poverty-stricken include lots of greens in their meals. Vegetables are inexpensive, and it’s just part of the lifestyle and diet.

Food for thought.