Pacific diet is more healthy than Western foods, chef says

Chef Lance Seeto may have been raised in Australia but he's advising the people of his adopted Pacific home to return to traditional foods to reduce obesity and other health problems.

The award-winning chef at Fiji's Castaway resort, famous for his Fiji-Asian fusion cuisine, says people in the Pacific should take advantage of their easy access to fresh foods.

"I've been in Fiji for four years and what was incredible to discover is that people here still live - or can live - how we used to live," Seeto told Pacific Beat.

People in Fiji, he says, eat "straight from the land, vegetables from trees, the ground and fish straight from the sea."

Seeto has Chinese ancestry but was born in Papua New Guinea and grew up in Australia.

He says that people in Fiji, PNG and the South Pacific can draw on their ancient civilisations to eat more healthily.

"The people who are removed from Western foods - those that are living in the Highlands or those on the outer islands or in the remote villages - seem to be still quite healthy," he says.

But those living in urban areas eat more processed foods.

"There's alarm bells ringing in my head about food and disease - our modern food."

Governments in the Pacific are encouraging people to eat mostly traditional foods and only occasionally processed foods.

Seeto uses coconut oil as an example of a healthy local food.

It's a drink that's high in saturated fats, which are sometimes feared as unhealthy but are actually nutritional, especially for the brain.

"I'm learning from people here, the native people, that they've always drunk coconut oil - and then incredibly, as well, the diseases that they don't have and that our Western culture does," Seeto says.

Fijians see coconut oil as medicinal and everyone should, he says.

"We actually need to go back to a time where we're looking at foods as medicine."

Source: ABC News, 30 August 2013