Max out your nutrients — a guide to super-healthy eating

Botanist James Wong knows his onions,
and he says eat the red ones

If microwaved in a little water, for a short time, broccoli’s vitamin A and carotene levels increase by five

It’s been a while, I tell the botanist and broadcaster James Wong, the author of How to Eat Better, since I’ve looked inside a cookbook (I mean, an aspirational cookbook, its cover luscious with fruit, with an aesthetically pleasing author) and found a recipe for macaroni cheese, containing loads of cheddar and Parmesan and a litre of milk. Yes, the pasta is wholemeal, but it feels verboten. I mean, are we even allowed to refer to “creamy, cheesy goodness”?

“How scandalous! Dairy! And a litre of it!” exclaims Wong, feigning shock. However, having not included options for the “lactose intolerant”, the Kew Gardens-trained botanist — familiar as the face of programmes such as the award-winning BBC Two show Grow Your Own Drugs, and a regular on Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time — admits to being “a bit worried. It’s kind of anti a lot of trends. I don’t mention almond milk every third sentence.”

This, though, is why his book is so useful. It systematically sorts the wheat from the gluten-free chaff in terms of what is scientifically proven to be nutritionally beneficial amid the confusing fads and misinformation.

Wong, 35, tries not to be annoyed at the Star Wars positioning of certain foods as “good against evil”, but wonders at the kind of world we’re living in, where pasta is demonised in favour of quinoa. (He eats both.) “I’d be very surprised if any dietician in the world would tell you that eating pasta is a bad idea,” he says, “but an awful lot of Instagram bloggers will tell you that it is.” He adds: “If I was going to go for heart surgery I’d prefer to go to a surgeon than some guy with a spoon.”

As well as reassuring us about carbs gluten and sugar, the book has a wealth of simple, applicable science. Plonk mushrooms on a windowsill for a couple of hours and they’ll contain 100 times the vitamin D2 than if they were chopped into soup straight from the fridge. Microwave kale and its polyphenol levels jump by 40 per cent.

How to Eat Better aims to show that tweaking how we choose, cook and store ingredients might be better for us. So, for example, “when you stress out green vegetables they usually react by trying to defend themselves. These defence chemicals are often the very same chemicals that are doing you good. So chopping things up — garlic, onions, carrots, green leafy vegetables — helps to improve some of their phytonutrients.”

Wong is particularly pleased when his recommendations don’t involve having to spend more money. He likes, for example, the fact that value orange juice is more beneficial than freshly squeezed orange juice, because the whole fruit is pulped, so it contains the phytonutrients in the citrus peel. He resents the idea that “you’ve got to go to some fancy supermarket and get superfoods from the Amazon.’’

James Wong: “Sugar that’s wrapped up in plant cells with
fibre is not a health concern”

He says: “We almost have this inbuilt idea that fresher, local, organic — all those words are code for ‘expensive’ — and a higher price tag is better. People will use the words ‘cheap food’ like it’s a morally negative thing.” He is wary, therefore, of “flash words that instantly give a health halo”. Such as “paleo granola” which, he notes in the book, can contain more fat per 100g than a pork pie.

Amid the 80 or so recipes, he tried to avoid things like chia or goji berries. “I like both, but there is a fetishisation of those things, which aren’t necessarily healthier than boring things like milk and oats.” (These are not sexy, he says, on account of being cheap and widely available.) He is proud that every claim is “100 per cent backed up by science. I can show you the papers.”





His nutritional consultant is Dr Emma Derbyshire (degree in nutritional biochemistry, PhD in human nutrition). The book involved two years of poring over scientific studies. “I had two weeks of sleepless nights thinking, ‘Does microwaving broccoli spell doom?’ ” The answer is apparently yes, at first, until Wong realised that scientists had microwaved their broccoli in a litre of water for 20 minutes. If microwaved in a little water, for a short time, actually the broccoli’s vitamin A and carotene levels increase by five as its cells break open, releasing nutrients.

Wong was born in London to a Malaysian father and a British mother. The family moved to Singapore when he was two months old. He’s been fascinated by plants ever since he can remember: “My grandma in Wales used to mail me copies of Gardeners’ World.” He moved to the UK for college, accepting an academic scholarship, then trained at Kew and graduated from the University of Kent with a master of science degree in ethnobotany.

He’s reluctant to decree that any food is out of bounds. “A lot of popular dietary advice is about eliminating things from your diet,” he says. “There’s a moral labelling. I would never want to limit what I eat, and the more you limit the options in your diet, the lower the chance that you are going to be hitting the points of what we need to eat.” Thus, when taken to task by health-conscious mates for eating fruit salad — “so much sugar!” — he’ll growl: “Yes, and? Sugar that’s wrapped up in plant cells with fibre is not a health concern. It’s free sugars that are a concern.” These include “maple syrup, which is often recommended as an alternative by people who demonise sugar”.

Off to Japan tomorrow to film a series about cherry blossom, he’s excited about picking up some exotic-flavoured Kit-Kats: “I very often break my own rules. People will see me eating green grapes and say, ‘But you said that black ones were better!’ I’m like, ‘That’s what Pret had!’ ”


How to Eat Better: How to Shop, Store and Cook to Make Any Food a “Superfood” by James Wong, April, 6, £20, Mitchell Beazley

The fruit and veg nutrient boosters

● Place your mushrooms on a sunny windowsill for an hour or two — the vitamin D will skyrocket.

● Store strawberries for four days on the counter instead of in the fridge to quadruple their healthy-heart compounds (these peak, alas, just before mould sets in).

● Keep tomatoes and mangos at room temperature for a week or two to almost double their carotene levels.

● Store grapes at room temperature to increase antioxidant levels by up to 20 per cent.

● Chop or shred salad leaves, garlic and carrots etc several hours before eating, and store in a sealed bag or covered bowl. This stresses the still-living tissue, sparking the production of protective polyphenols and increasing antioxidant levels by 50 per cent.

● Buy plastic-wrapped rather than loose broccoli. Once picked, it decreases in nutritional value, losing up to 80 per cent of its glucosinolates by the time it reaches your plate. This loss is halted when broccoli is kept refrigerated and sealed.

● Chill cooked carbs (potatoes, rice or pasta) for 12 hours because this causes some starch molecules to expand and crystallise, turning them into “resistant starch”, which lowers its GI and is harder to digest.

Power cooking

● Simmer blueberries for three minutes into a compote and get 100 per cent more antioxidants.

● Add mustard to cooked broccoli to increase cancer-fighting compounds by 300 per cent.

● Mixing and matching foods affects their “bioavailability” — how well you absorb their nutrients. For example, the lycopene in tomatoes is fat-soluble, so eat tomatoes with olive oil or avocado.

● Microwaving whole potatoes is the best way to retain all their nutrients.

When cheaper is healthier

● The value blueberries in supermarkets tend to be tiny, so there’s an overall larger surface area of skin, which contains phytonutrients.

● Comminuted orange juice, which includes many cheaper brands, involves blitzing the whole orange to pulp then filtering it, meaning it contains nutrients from the polyphenol-rich zest and skin.

● Parboiled rice (not to be confused with “easy-cook rice’) is pressure-steamed so retains higher levels of the B vitamins niacin, riboflavin and thiamine.

● Tinned tomatoes are better for us than raw because heat breaks open their cells, releasing the lycopene molecules. Concentrated tomato purée is the richest source of lycopene.

Need-to-know science

Phytonutrients 
Chemicals produced by plants (such as carotenes or polyphenols) that 
help to prevent many degenerative diseases. You’d need to eat nearly five green peppers to get as many phytonutrients as a single red one.

Carotenes 
Bright yellow and orange pigments, eg lycopene in tomatoes. After cooking, tomatoes contain twice the lycopene than uncooked. The functions of carotenes include shielding fruit from UV damage, which is believed to have benefits such as lowering cancer risk. Winter squash is one of the richest sources, hokkaido being the highest with 70mg per kg compared to 6mg per kg in butternut squash.

Polyphenols 
Chemicals produced by plants to protect themselves — such as the bright purple and red pigments found in blueberries, which are called anthocyanins and shield cells from ultra-violet rays. Blackcurrants have the highest anthocyanins (475mg per 100g) while strawberries have the lowest (42mg per 100g). Other polyphenols are antibacterial or anti-fungal and can help to fight disease. A braeburn apple has 475mg of polyphenols per 100g compared with 330mg in a fuji. Black rice has about 14 times the polyphenols found in white rice and black beans have 223mg in a 400g can compared with baby butter beans with only 56mg in a 400g can.

Glucosinolates 
Sulphur-containing compounds that are found in cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. They are thought to have potentially cancer-fighting benefits. Savoy cabbage has 109mg of glucosinolates per 100g, compared with 62mg in 100g of broccoli.

Antioxidants 

Substances with chemical properties that help to prevent oxygen reacting with other molecules in food stuffs (which is thought to cause DNA damage). Apple juice can have as much as 88 per cent less antioxidant activity than whole apples, while cloudy apple juice contains up to four times the antioxidants of clear juice. Red peaches have nine times the antioxidants of yellow ones, and purple sweet potatoes contain three times more than blueberries.


Anna Maxted - April 3 2017, 12:01am, The Times