Soup Is the Secret to a Long Healthy Life
An exciting new field of science suggests that cooking with water and broth can help mitigate the health woes caused by the western diet.
Last week, the Guardian published a story that I’ve been working on for a few months in which I talked to Dr. Michelle Davenport, a dietician who specializes in using food to help slow the deleterious effects of aging. (Huge shout to my editor and HEAVIES day one Estelle Tang for all her guidance.)
Davenport’s central argument is that that cooking with water and broth helps mitigate the creation of advanced glycation end products, or AGEs, which are a group of compounds that are prevalent in the Western diet thanks to foods that are blasted over high dry heat, either on the grill or in an air fryer: steaks, burgers, chicken tenders, Flaming Hot Cheetos, French fries, beef jerky, basically anything ultra-processed. All that stuff’s long been killing us and now we know why.
In fact, a mountain of scientific literature over the past decade supports the idea that AGEs are a nasty biomarker for everything from oxidative stress to inflammation to Alzheimer’s to elevated cardiovascular risk. “Basically, AGEs are responsible for total body aging,” Davenport told me, “but it’s crazy that it all comes down to these compounds that are so easily preventable.”
As you probably already inferred from the title of this post, the answer to dramatically cutting down the amount of AGEs in your diet to eat more soup.
A few years ago, Davenport, who grew up in the Bay Area in a Vietnamese household, started sharing recipes on Instagram. Mostly Asian-inspired soups, stews, and steamed meats and veggies.
Recipes like steamed ginger chicken:
and braised Korean short ribs:
In fact, marinating meat before grilling can also help minimize AGEs. For example, a regular steak seared in a cast iron contains about 10,000 AGE kU/Ls, or kilounits per liter; Davenport’s recipe for marinated skirt steak—which sits in a mixture of soy sauce, cider vinegar, Worcester sauce, and other aromatics—is closer to 5,000 AGE kU'/Ls.
But my favorite recipe of her’s? Collagen-rich oxtail pho, which has inspired me to go to the butcher to pick up a bag of bones.
It supports one of the central tenets of HEAVIES, which is that pho is a superfood. It’s nutrient dense, naturally low in AGEs, and more fun to eat than, like, a kale caesar salad from Sweetgreen or whatever. The bone broth is rich in collagen, which is great for joint health and skin elasticity. The protein is high quality, unlike many powders. You can pile on the herbs and aromatics. And the noodles are typically made from rice, the most powerful complex carbohydrate. (Opt for fresh banh pho if you can find it.)
That’s all to say Davenport is cool as hell—not included in the Guardian story is the fact that she may or may not have had a green mohawk in high school—but what I really love about her is that she’s introducing new arguments supported by science into the zeitgeist and actively re-centering ideas around healthy eating. She’s a refreshing new “wellness” presence, a budding exoplanet in a nebula already populated by Planet Goop and guys with podcasts. “I mean, I think I'm very different from the Hubermans and Attias and all that. I'm not a biohacker!” she said, laughing. “I'm more of a grandma who cooks soups and stuff.”
What better way to kick off soup season? If I were to ever make merch I would likely start with a HEAVIES-branded hot pot.
Read the rest of the Guardian piece here.
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Elsewhere:
For Mixed Feelings, I wrote an essay/advice column on what it means to “glow up” as a young man. Please give it a read, share it with the young men in your life, and tell me what I got wrong, if anything.
A friend at the Fort Greene Park dog costume contest said he saw someone with a sweatshirt that said HEAVIES in a similar font. For the record I am pro bootleg merch, but if you see such a sweatshirt in the wild please snap a photo and send it my way.
Apparently I upset some bird people with my Loves/Hates list for Dream Baby Press. My beef with birds is, as a young child, an aggressive seagull once snatched a cheeseburger out of my hands when while we eating lunch on the pier in San Pedro. I’ve clearly never recovered.
Thanks so much for featuring me, Chris! Was a pleasure talking to you about pho, grandmas and green hair, all my favorite things xo
Oxtail pho goes super hard (my favorite combo, in addition to bones, is some mix of shanks/oxtail/short rib depending on what's available) - toss some tendons in there for even more collagen.