Cambodia Versus the Standard American Diet (SAD)

Angkor Wat temple at sunset. Siem Reap, Cambodia. By PerfectLazybones @ Adobe Stock

In The Spectator, Sean Thomas discusses Cambodia, including its amazing food and how its people are thin and healthy, while Americans and many countries that have adopted the Standard American Diet (SAD) are succumbing to an obesity epidemic. He writes:

Yeah, I know, ridiculous. Cambodia? How can that be the best country in the entire world? For a start, most people can’t place it on a map. This includes close relatives of mine who are studying geography at A Level. They know all about the Marxist topography of urbanism, but Cambodia, err, um, is that near Africa?

Also, Cambodia?? Isn’t that the country that suffered a fearsome Maoist genocide within living memory, with a quarter of its population dying by execution, torture, famine and disease, and the rest left so hungry they resorted to eating giant spiders roasted in tomato powder?

Well yes, it is. But I have spent the last year — and indeed several decades — traveling the world, and the last three months traveling all over Indochina, especially Cambodia, and I can report that, quite remarkably, it has a claim to be the best country on earth, right now.

First let’s start with those tarantulas. Or, rather, all the many alternatives to roast tarantulas (which you can still buy on street stalls at fairs, like hot dogs in New York City). Cambodian food is phenomenal. Right up there. Why this is, I am not sure, the geography certainly helps: it benefits from yummy Thai influences to the west, scrumptious Vietnamese influences to the east, and a lot of delicious Chinese culinary ideas; plus some succulent Indian, Malay and colonial French tinges. An impressive lineage.

The result is mmm, sensational. And it’s not just the Khmer food (like the river prawn pancakes dipped in peanut sauce, or the succulent fish amok curries, or the beef in kampot pepper) the Khmers seem to have a mastery of any food. If you order a pizza, it will be properly cooked and probably fabulous. Ditto a tarka dhal, prawn tempura, fish and chips, confit de canard, or tortilla, tacos, and toasted cheese sarnies. Even the crisp, cold, cucumber-laced gin-and-tonics come with brilliant bar snacks — freshly deep-fried banana slices dipped in nut and chilli powder.

One reason for the great food might be Cambodia’s relative poverty and its lack of “sophistication” in food prep. There is not much processed food here — let alone ultra-processed. If you eat greens they probably came from a field a day ago, likewise fish from the sea, meat from the butcher. The result, despite the deliciousness (and now plentifulness) of the local food is that Cambodia has an obesity rate of about 4 percent, one of the lowest on the planet. And you can see it: everyone is slender and fit.

The Cambodians look, in fact, like westerners in photos from the early 1960s, before the Americans adopted the Standard American Diet (poignantly know as SAD), with all its UPFs, its fried wings, and its fructose corn syrups, making them obese. In my years of traveling I have watched this Standard American Diet inexorably waddle its way around the world, with an early landing in Britain and Oz, followed by Latin America, the Middle East, mainland Europe, north Africa. I have likewise seen the whole world get fat and arguably less healthy, notwithstanding increasing wealth. Yet not in Cambodia, so far.

The lack of rubbish western food ingredients is one reason Cambodian health — despite relatively meagre medical care — has vastly improved in recent decades. Forty years ago life expectancy here was around fifty. Now it is seventy-one. During the depths of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, Cambodian life expectancy actually went down to twelve. This is a majorly positive change in a comparatively short time: on present trajectories Cambodian life expectancy will overtake the USA in a few years, as American life-span falls, thanks to all those guns, drugs and deep pan pizzas.

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