Sprinkle seaweed on meals to shore up health

SEAWEED should be rebranded as “seavegetables” and eaten with every meal, according to a UN adviser.

Seaweed pancakes, seaweed tartare and even chocolate seaweed mousse should be on the menu in homes and restaurants, according to Vincent Doumeizel.

He recommended drying seaweed and sprinkling it on meals. “Start like this and get used to the taste. You don’t need a lot of seaweed to get all the healthy benefits,” he said.

Mr Doumeizel has written a book,

The Seaweed Revolution, based on his work as a senior adviser for the United Nations Global Compact on Oceans.

Decrying the “negative perception” of seaweed as a nuisance that spoils the beauty of beaches, Mr Doumeizel said: “Seaweed is clearly not a weed. It is not something unwanted in your garden. We should not call it a ‘weed’.

“It should be called ‘sea vegetables’, which is the exact translation of the word in Japanese and Korean, where they have huge experience and know how good it is for both the planet and the body. ‘Sea vegetable’ gives credit to how delicious they could be.”

The macro-algae is good for the immune system and packed with zinc, vitamins and protein, Mr Doumeizel said. When dried, it keeps for months and loses none of its nutrients in the way that vegetables do.

While it forms part of a healthy diet in Japan and Korea, Mr Doumeizel said Westerners are reluctant to eat it.

He told an audience at the Hay Festival: “You will always find people saying: ‘I’m not going to eat that, it’s awful.’ My first answer to that is: ‘Have you tried to eat raw potatoes?’ Don’t even try, it’s not good for your health. But you need to learn to cook them. And that’s the same for seaweed.”

Seaweed once formed a significant part of the diet in European countries with coastlines, but fell out of favour.

Mr Doumeizel said: “Over thousands of generations we had a lot of seaweed – that’s why our brains grew so big, because these fatty acids were present in seaweed and fish oil.

“Then we lost the intimate connection with the ocean 1,000 years ago when we learnt to be efficient at cultivation on land.”

He added: “If it were used in animal feed, it would also have a momentous impact on the environment. We have one billion people starving on the planet. We are running out of solutions. But the world is not doomed.”