D r Michelle Davenport says her grandmother is 95 and doesn’t have any wrinkles. Skin smooth as a dewdrop. She came to America from Vietnam, and att

Food fad or science – or both? Why cooking with water may help slow ageing

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2024-10-25 20:00:09

D r Michelle Davenport says her grandmother is 95 and doesn’t have any wrinkles. Skin smooth as a dewdrop. She came to America from Vietnam, and attributes her youthful complexion to rarely, if ever, eating out at restaurants: not on birthdays, anniversaries or other special occasions.

“She was always telling me: ‘Don’t ever eat out, eating out is super bad for you,’” says Davenport on the other end of a Zoom call. “So we always had to cook at home. And when she did cook, it was always water-based: steamed meat, stews and lots of vegetables.”

Davenport, 39, is a scientist and registered dietician based in San Francisco whose work focuses on slowing the deleterious effects of ageing. She argues that this can be accomplished by cooking mostly with broth and water. On her Instagram page, which has nearly 200,000 followers, you’ll find recipes for dishes like collagen-rich oxtail phở, green curry salmon, steamed eggs and gà hải nam (the Vietnamese version of Hainan chicken, a recipe passed down directly from Grandma).

Cooking this way, she says, mitigates the creation of advanced glycation end products, or AGEs, formed when food is cooked at high dry temperatures, like over the grill or in an air fryer.