Nutritious plants solution to NCDs - scientist

Transcript

An Australian scientist says the nutritional benefits of locally grown plants can have huge health benefits in the fight against non communicable diseases in the Pacific.

The University of Adelaide's Research Fellow in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, says research into leafy vegetables that grow well in Pacific nations show they have high nutritional value but some have been overlooked as potential food sources.

Dr Graham Lyons told Jenny Meyer the various islands have very different histories in the way they view some plants and the response to new information in fact sheets about how they can be prepared and eaten has been positive.

GRAHAM LYONS: So in the Solomons we've found that plenty of people are already eating a number of these plants but their reasons for eating them were that either they had a medicinal sort of capacity, or they liked the flavour, or they just were easy to grow. They knew rather little about the actual nutritional benefits, like as a food as opposed to a medicinal plant. Whereas Samoa there were only a couple of plants really grown that you could say were leafy plants, one was taro leaf, they're growing the taro anyway for the roots, and bele or pele or aibika, slippery cabbage, a very popular plant in the Solomons in particular, it's also quite popular in Samoa. And we found when we went back to the villages that supplied the samples that we analysed, people were really interested to see these fact sheets and find out more about the plants. And agriculturalists were very keen, we've seen them republish them in some of the publications in the Solomons, no the reception to them has been very good.

In fact just last week I got an email from the Director of Agriculture in Tuvalu to say that he and his family were eating the ofenga leaves now that's the pseuderanthemum whartonianum, it's also often grown in hedges, it's quite popular in Funafuti but no one had been eating them before. And he's saying "I'm losing weight, I'm feeling a lot better", he's attributing that to starting to eat this plant. So if he could get that message out, that could help a lot of people.

JENNY MEYER: What do you think are the real benefits of this work to the region as a whole, looking into the future?

GL: Well I think if you just get more people being aware of the value of this sort of food, their own local, highly nutritious, easy to grow, leafy crops, it's got to help against or help to reduce the rates of these NCDs up there. It's just a logical thing, it's just a matter of getting more of these foods into the diet and also making people more aware of the bad foods that they're eating which are killing them 20 years younger than they should and people are getting their legs cut off and what have you it's horrific. And getting policy makers to actually look at this sort of thing and perhaps put more taxes on some of these harmful foods and take them off some of the imported good foods, like some of the fruits and vegetables being imported to some of these countries in the off season.  That's a good thing, they shouldn't be taxed. And more encouragement for people to produce and consume their local nutritious plants.