Asian food

From a visit to three Asian countries, one thing is clear: the Asian diet is now more Westernised. The traditional Asian food - eaten three times a day - is rice. But now there are also meals of wheat products, such as toast for breakfast and milk products.

Asian supermarkets now have a long list of Western foods such as breads, cakes and biscuits, snack foods, tinned goods and fizzy soft-drinks, pasta (wheat noodles), breakfast cereals, butter, cheese, lamb and beef.

But most striking is the large number of milk products. Milk products traditionally aren't part of an Asian diet - many Asians are actually allergic to milk. But there are now ads on television for milk. Milk, according to the ads, is ‘modern’, middle class and healthy. At a supermarket in Ampang Park, Kuala Lumpur, there is a shelf, four metres long, for milk in tins.

In one Bangkok supermarket there are more than a dozen different brands of milk drinks, from strawberry to pineapple flavour. In a typical supermarket in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand (population 1.2 million), there is fresh milk, and flavoured long-life milk in mini cartons. There are also fruit yoghurts with pineapple, orange and lychee flavours.

Unfortunately, there are now more Western diet-related diseases.