Why The Chinese Don't Count Calories by Lorraine Clissold, who claims that a balanced Chinese diet is the key to a healthy body and a long life.

The main thrust of the book is that Chinese people eat three rice-based meals a day and they eat until they are full - no fad dieting or meal skipping - and that nourishing their bodies keeps them healthy and slim. It didn't have you all rushing out for dim sum though.

Some of Clissold's claims were disputed, including that there is no Chinese word for calories and that it is Western food which making younger Chinese fat - one of you said that over-indulgence in the richest meat-based Chinese dishes is the problem. There were also a few raised eyebrows about whether Chinese food is healthy at all, given the quantity of oil it is often cooked in, which can lead to heart disease.

Nutritionist Patrick Holford is sure that Western food, whether eaten in London, Paris or Beijing, is a recipe for disaster. "If the Western diet really was healthy we wouldn't have one in ten over forty diabetic, one in three over fifty obese, and one in six dying prematurely from heart attacks or strokes," he points out. He also believes the modern Chinese diet will soon generate similar statistics.

For the record, it is a "sugary, overprocessed Western diet" which we're calling to account here, not macrobiotic yoga fiends. Of course eating like that is better than round the clock takeways.

Affluent Chinese parents and grandparents are spoiling their children with all the foods they could not afford to eat themselves. Clissold is a critic of fast food whether it comes from a multi-national or a local takeaway. This is no Chinese phenomenon, it occurs anywhere the birth rate is low and economy fairly strong. Spain, for example, boasts its fair share of chubby little princes spoilt not just with the best jamon, but pizza and cake too. Clissold recommends Feeding China's Little Emperors, edited by Jun Jing, for more on this topic.

Both the Food Doctor Ian Marber and Patrick Holford disagreed with Clissold's promotion of eating a staple food, in this case rice, in large quantities with every meal. They said it makes Chinese people pudgy, which she simply doesn't accept. "Chinese people have based their diet around a staple for thousands of years," she says. "I have personally witnessed tiny young women consuming massive bowls of it and find it very hard to believe that 'that pudgy Chinese person' (which is a totally modern phenomenon) has got that way on rice. But it is a staple foiled by a series of flavoursome dishes that nourish the five organs."

Clissold also suggests that much of her book centres around Chinese Dietary Therapy, which is beyond the grasp of much modern nutrition: "The body is seen not as tissue and skeleton, muscles, bones and anatomical organs, but as an integral part of the natural world. By eating a mixture of Yin and Yang foods and more importantly featuring the five flavours in the cuisine the Chinese keep these organs in balance and the body from becoming overweight."

Lastly, Clissold points out that while a word - "ka" from Mandarin may have been designated to mean "calorie" in English, it is a literal translation, free of the complex baggage a calorie brings to bear on many Western dieters. Much of the Western world's obsession with dieting and losing weight is bound up in the word "calorie", but its implications are no more understood by a Chinese person unfamiliar with its ramifications than the full reach of qi can be understood by a Westerner who has not studied the concept.



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