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What does the Swedish food agency think we should be eating more or less of?

https://www.thelocal.se/20240930/what-does-the-swedish-food-agency-think-we-should-be-eating-more-or-less-of/

Sweden’s food agency is due to present new dietary guidelines at the beginning of next year, but it has already published a sneak peek. What does it want us to change about our diets?

What should we be eating more of?

Similarly to its current recommendations, the agency wants Swedes to eat at least 500 grams of vegetables, fruits and berries a day – more if possible – with a large proportion of this consisting of fibrous vegetables, like root vegetables, cabbage and alliums. 

It describes this as “five fist-sized portions”, which could, for example, include adding grated carrot or lentils into a bolognese sauce, or adding berries to your morning yoghurt. Frozen fruit and vegetables can also be included in this total.

Adults currently eat around 270 grams of vegetables, fruits and berries a day, dropping to 200 grams for children, so the recommendations are almost double current consumption.

This doesn’t include potatoes, although the agency describes potatoes as “good food”. Legumes, like lentils and beans aren’t included in this 500 gram total either: the advice there is to eat them “often, preferably every day”.

Swedes in general do not consume many legumes at all – the median consumption for adults is estimated to be 0 grams, rising to 5 grams for children, and only 25 percent of Swedes eat more than 15 grams of legumes a day.

The agency hopes that these recommendations will lead to Swedes eating 50 percent more legumes, vegetables, root vegetables, fruits, nuts and berries in 2035.

As far as grains, like wheat, oats and rye, are concerned, Swedes are most likely to consume these as bread, with adults eating around 80 grams of bread a day while children eat around 100 grams.

Bread is also the leading source of wholegrains for most Swedes, representing 50 percent of adults’ wholegrain intake, dropping to 30 percent for children.

Other common sources of wholegrains are porridge, cereal, rice and other grains.

Currently, adults only eat around 40 grams of wholegrain foods per day, while children eat around 27 grams. The agency wants to see consumption double between 2021 and 2035.

The food agency wants Swedes to eat fish and other seafood two to three times a week. This doesn’t just include fresh fish, but also food like prawns, crayfish and mussels, as well as preserved fish products such as herring or tinned fish. 

Currently, only 40 percent of adults and 10 percent of children eat enough fish and seafood to meet the Nordic Nutritional Guidelines’ 300 gram-per-week target.

The average consumption for adults is around 220 grams a week, while children eat around 130 grams.

The agency hopes to see this figure increase by 20 percent by 2035.

What does it want us to cut down on?

The agency wants Swedes to eat less high-energy, unhealthy foods, like sweets, chocolate, cakes and, most of all, sugary drinks. It wants to see current consumption halved by 2035.

“If you eat well otherwise, then it’s not dangerous to eat food like this occasionally,” it says, while recommending that you think more carefully about when and where you eat this type of food.

This includes, for example, choosing healthier alternatives if you order take out, which contain more vegetables, wholegrains, fish, beans or lentils, and drinking water instead of sugary drinks.

Adults currently eat around 100 grams of sweets, like ice cream, cakes, desserts and drinks, a day, while children eat roughly double this, 220 grams a day.

“This number is however likely to be higher in reality, as respondents are likely to underreport their consumption of foods considered to be unhealthy,” the agency says.

Swedes’ meat consumption is also under fire, with the agency recommending just 350 grams of red meat and processed meats a week, down from its previous 500 gram recommendation.

The agency estimates that adults currently eat around 511 grams of red meat a week, and it wants to see this cut by 30 percent by 2035.

Women are currently the group most likely to eat less than the new guidelines per week, with 37 percent estimated to eat 350 grams of red meat or less.

The agency estimates that only 15 percent of men, 17 percent of girls and 4 percent of boys eat enough to meet the new guidelines.

“Boys in upper secondary school eat the most meat and processed meats, while women eat the least,” the agency says.

Finally, the agency also wants Swedes to cut down on salt – 20 percent less by 2035. Currently, adults eat anywhere between 8 and 11 grams of salt a day, while children eat around 8.

Most of that comes from meat and sausages (both fresh sausages as well as products like salami, which are preserved), as well as bread. For children and young people, pasta and pizza are common sources of salt.

Under new recommendations, salt should be limited to 6 grams a day at most, preferably iodised. The agency estimates that over three quarters of the population currently eats more than this.

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When did Swedes get so crazy about cinnamon?

https://www.thelocal.se/20240930/when-did-swedes-get-so-crazy-about-cinnamon

It's not just kanelbullar, Swedes put great spoonfuls of cinnamon in their porridge, in apple crumbles, in glögg wine, and even use it to jazz up their matjessill herring. What's the history of Swedes' love affair with the spice?

It certainly doesn't go back as far as the Vikings.

While they ate a lot of porridge and would have had a soupy stew constantly on the go on the fire, all the evidence suggests these lacked salt, sugar and certainly cinnamon or other spices.

"We have no evidence of spices being imported to anywhere in Scandinavia at that time. There's no written evidence and there's no physical evidence [from archeological digs]," Daniel Serra, a culinary historian, told The Local.

"They find herbs. They find juniper berries, mustard seeds, definitely. But there's no evidence of exotic spices." 

Serra is sceptical of suggestions that the Swedes who travelled to Constantinople to serve as mercenaries in the Varangian Guard would have brought spices back with them on their return. 

"You would need an audience that knows what it is," he says. "You would be spending all your savings on bringing home these spices that nobody would understand, whereas if you bring home silk fabric, gold or silver, people will know what it's about." 

Spices like cinnamon and cumin were, however, certainly available during the Viking period in the bigger cities of Germany and northern France, but they appear to have stopped there. 

"One of the earliest evidence for spices is the description of a market in Mainz by an Arab cumin merchant, who finds spices, but then he goes on to Hedeby, which is in the south of Denmark, and says only that the food is terrible. So I think there was a clear demarcation line." 

Cinnamon comes to Sweden  

The earliest written evidence of cinnamon being used in Sweden appears in a recipe for the mulled beer Saint Bridget of Sweden, known as heliga Birgitta, served to guests at the funeral of her father in 1328, when half a kilogram of the expensive spice was used. 

"There are two main reasons for serving cinnamon here," Serra says of the use of cinnamon in the funeral beer. "It's to show your status, because it was an expensive import, to show that you're part of the continental European food culture, and it also has medical properties."

Bridget of Sweden's father, Birger Persson, was governor of Uppland and one of the richest men in Sweden. "Next to the king, he was the most potent, powerful man in Sweden at the time. So when he dies, she has to do something extraordinary." 

But cinnamon had probably begun to become available to the elites in Sweden fifty or a hundred years before this. It is included as an ingredient in several recipes in Libellus de arte coquinaria, The Little Book of Culinary Arts, a cookbook attributed to the Danish cleric Henrik Harpestræng, the Canon of Roskilde Cathedral, who died in 1244. 

"What he includes in the cookbook is a cameline sauce, which is based on vinegar and cinnamon with some herbs to it. I think there's mint and parsley," Serra says. "You would have had small morsels of meat and dipped your food into the sauce. There's also one where you make a bread pudding with saffron and some cinnamon sprinkled on top of that, but as a sort of savory side dish." 

The Salsor Dominorum sauce in the book, used for wild game pickling, features a mix of cloves, black pepper, cinnammon, nutmeg, ginger and cardamom: a similar mix to that used nowadays in the pepparkakor biscuits Swedes serve at Christmas. 

A portrait of Bridget of Sweden by Hermann Rode, taken from Svenska folket genom tiderna. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

From rich merchants to ordinary people

It was not until well into the 13th century, when the Hanseatic League began to increase trade with Sweden, that the spice began to be used more widely, although it remained a luxury. 

"In the Renaissance, you have a rising middle class who want to show off that they are part of the elite, so you start getting these cookbooks and you also have luxury laws around Europe, which say 'if you are a peasant or you are a merchant, you can't have these spices'," Serra says. 

The use of spices like cinnamon then slowly spread from the very wealthy to become something ordinary people would use to mark big celebrations. "It trickles down to become festive food, for Christmas or for festive occasions." 

Spices only began to come to Sweden in large quantites with the advent of the East India trade in the 18th century. The Swedish East India Company, founded in Gothenburg in 1731, brought spices and also sugar to Sweden in large quantities for the first time. 

Cakes and kanelbullar 

Cinnamon was initially used in savoury dishes. It was only when sugar began to be produced at plantations in the US and Caribbean and imported to Europe in large quantities that cinnamon began to be used in cakes and desserts, and it wasn't until sugarbeet began to be planted in Sweden the late 19th century that sugar became a commodity available to almost everyone. 

"The first recipe we have for a sweet cinnamon dish in Sweden is from mid-16th century, and it is written by one of the last Catholic bishops of Sweden," Serra told us. "It's for a tart or cake including eggs, sugar, cream, cinnamon and ginger, which he said was made in Sweden for noble women when they were feeling unwell." 

The bishop was in exile, and the recipe, Serra says, was part of a book aimed at showing the Catholic world why Sweden was special and so encouraging them to intervene and return it to Catholic rule.

It wasn't until the middle of the 19th century that cafés serving Viennese-style patisserie started to become established in Sweden. The kanelbulle, or cinnamon roll, appears to have arrived or originated in Sweden on the west coast, in and around Gothenburg. 

According to the website Högtider och traditioner, the earliest recorded written mention of kanelbullar comes in 1857, when there's an advertisement for "saffron and cinnamon rolls" in the local newspaper in Åmål, on the west coast of Lake Vänern. In 1868, there's a similar announcement in the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper. 

The now ubiquitous bun does not appear to have arrived in Stockholm until decades later, with the first mentions in Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet not coming until 1925. 

The real explosion, however, came when rationing was lifted at the end of the Second World War. The first edition of Vår Kokbok, Sweden's classic collection of home recipes, contained a recipe for kanelbullar, helping to turn them into the Swedish staple they are today. 

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8 minutes ago, Vesper said:

the earliest recorded written mention of kanelbullar comes in 1857, when there's an advertisement for "saffron and cinnamon rolls" in the local newspaper in Åmål

The 1998 movie Fucking Åmål (known in the English-speaking world as Show Me Love), directed by Lukas Moodysson, is set in Åmål. The movie depicts the town as extremely boring and it was largely filmed in the nearby town of Trollhättan. The film created controversy in the town of Åmål. Local politicians campaigned to get the title of the film changed.^[4] The local complaints had no effect on the content or release of the film and since the release of the film the town of Åmål has even tried to embrace the publicity generated. In the early 2000s the town founded the pop music festival "Fucking Åmål Festival".

Edited 8 hours ago by Vesper