Areca nut

• 1. Introduction

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  The areca nut is chewed by around 600 million people, mainly of South and Southeast Asian origin. It leaves red stains on pavements from South Asia to the northern Philippines. This seed of a tropical palm, also called betel nut, acts as a mild stimulant. People reach for it to feel more alert, to greet a guest, to mark a wedding, and sometimes to push back hunger. Where did the habit begin, and how did it cross so much ocean? What actually goes into the mouth, and what does it do to the body? And why do governments keep banning a nut that so many people depend on for a living?

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• 2. The Palawan Burial

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  Several skeletons lay together in a burial pit at the Duyong Cave site on Palawan island in the Philippines, and their teeth were stained in the way typical of betel chewers. The grave dates to around 2680 BCE, give or take 250 years. It is the oldest unequivocal evidence of betel chewing. Beside the dead lay Anadara shells that served as containers for lime, and one of them still held some. Burial sites on Bohol from the first millennium CE show the same reddish stains.

  Language points in the same direction. The reconstructed Proto-Austronesian word *buaq originally meant simply fruit. By the time of Proto-Malayo-Polynesian it meant areca nut. From this shift, researchers believe chewing first developed somewhere in the Philippines, shortly after the Austronesian expansion began around 3000 BCE. From there it travelled back to Taiwan and onward through the rest of Austronesia. It also passed into neighbouring cultures through trade and migration.

  The palm itself, Areca catechu, was carried across the tropics from at least 1500 BCE because people valued it for chewing. It is now considered naturalized in much of Melanesia and Micronesia, in South Asia and Southeast Asia, and in parts of east Africa. Nobody knows when or why the nut and the betel leaf were first combined into one drug. Archaeological finds from Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines suggest the pairing is at least 4,000 years old.

  Europe met the nut far later. The word areca comes from Dravidian languages, and it dates to the 16th century, when Dutch and Portuguese sailors took the nut from India to Europe.

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• 3. Anatomy of a Quid

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  The areca nut is not a true nut at all. It is the seed of a fruit classed as a berry, and it is sold dried, cured or fresh. While the husk is green, the seed inside is soft enough for an ordinary knife. A ripe fruit turns yellow or orange, and as it dries the seed hardens to a wood-like consistency. At that stage only a special scissors-like cutter will slice it. In Indonesia, where the nut is called pinang, the Pinang scissor was developed for exactly this job.

  A typical chew begins with a few slices wrapped in a leaf of Piper betle, a separate plant that is often confused with the palm. The leaf tastes fresh and peppery, though some varieties turn bitter. Slaked lime, which is calcium hydroxide, goes inside the wrap. Cooks may add clove, cardamom, catechu resin known as kattha, or other spices. In the 1830s the diplomat Edmund Roberts noted that Chinese people mixed areca nut with Uncaria gambir. Tobacco is a recent addition, because it was not introduced from the Americas until the colonial era.

  The effect is a warming sensation and slightly heightened alertness, though it varies from person to person. The main active compound is arecoline, an alkaloid that partly activates both muscarinic and nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Arecoline is also what makes the habit addictive. The nut holds other alkaloids as well, including arecaidine, guvacine, isoguvacine and guvacoline. It also contains tannins such as proanthocyanidins, catechins and arecatannin. Two more alkaloids were recently discovered and named acatechu A and acatechu B.

  The husk makes up between 50 and 75 percent of the fruit's weight and volume. It is usually treated as waste, yet its fibres can be used to strengthen construction materials.

  In parts of India, Sri Lanka and southern China, the nut also goes into Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicines, and powdered nut appears in some dentifrices. Swallowing a few teaspoons of powder, or drinking it as a decoction, was a remedy for tapeworms and other intestinal parasites. Traditional Ayurvedic medicine holds that chewing nut and leaf together cures bad breath.

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• 4. Matters of Betel and Areca

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  In Vietnamese, the phrase chuyện trầu cau, meaning matters of betel and areca, is another way of saying marriage. Chewing the nut traditionally opens the talk between the groom's parents and the bride's parents. Leaves and juices are used ceremonially at weddings. A Vietnamese folk tale explaining the custom treats the two ingredients as practically inseparable, like an idealized married couple.

  Across South Asia the pairing carried a more romantic meaning. Lovers chewed nut and leaf together for its relaxing properties, and a sexual symbolism grew around the habit. The nut stood for the male principle and the leaf for the female. Hinduism and some schools of Buddhism regard the areca nut as an auspicious ingredient. It is still offered with betel leaf in religious ceremonies and when honouring individuals across much of southern Asia.

  In India and Sri Lanka, chewing was formerly a custom of royalty. Kings kept special attendants whose only duty was to carry the box holding everything needed for a good chewing session.

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• 5. Gifts and Greetings

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  The Spanish mariner Álvaro de Mendaña reported that the chief Malope, on Santa Isabel Island in the Solomons, offered him nut, leaf and caustic lime every time they met. Mendaña also noted how the habit stained the islanders' mouths red. He read the offering as a token of friendship from a friendly and genial man.

  In Assam, offering the nut and leaf together, a pair known as gua, is part of ordinary greeting. Guests receive pan-tamul, which is betel leaves with raw areca nut, as soon as they arrive. It is served again after tea or meals on a brass plate with stands called bota. In traditional Assamese society, a person carried a pouch of tamul-pan on journeys and during farming, and sharing it was an essential requirement. Assamese people prefer the nut fermented, which is supposed to make it harder and sweeter. The raw nut is eaten when fermented stock runs out, but it carries more ritual weight.

  In Assam the nut also stands for fertility at weddings, and no religious ritual is complete without tamul-pan offered to gods, spirits and the assembled guests. Upper Assam has a custom of inviting people to wedding receptions by handing them a few areca nuts with betel leaves. During Bihu, each household offers the nut and leaves to the husori players while seeking their blessings.

  Bhutan calls the nut doma, and the raw, soft, moist version is potent enough to cause palpitation and vasoconstriction. In the lower regions and in North Bengal, it is halved and placed in a paan leaf with plenty of lime. Elsewhere in Bhutan the whole husked nut is fermented until the husk rots and can be pulled off. The result smells putrid, and the odour carries from a distance. Doma is served after meals and at rituals, offered to friends, and chewed at work by every section of society.

  A Bhutanese myth credits the arrival of Guru Rinpoche in the eighth century. In that story the people of Monyul, a land where Buddhism had not reached, lived on raw flesh, drank blood and chewed bones. Guru Rinpoche stopped them and created a substitute from betel leaf, lime and areca nut.

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• 6. Markets and Roadsides

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  In 2023 the world produced 2.3 million tonnes of areca nut, and India supplied 60 percent of it. Bangladesh and Myanmar are major secondary producers. Within India, the state of Karnataka alone grew 79.97 percent of the national total in 2019-20. India is also the largest consumer. Across the subcontinent, a nut wrapped in leaf is called paan, and ready-to-chew pouches of crushed dried nut are sold as pan masala or supari.

  Pan masala with a small quantity of tobacco is called gutka. Poor people, who may eat only every other day, chew it to stave off hunger pangs. The small plastic pouches are discarded everywhere and have become a ubiquitous pollutant of the South Asian environment.

  In the Maldives, spitting is frowned upon as an unrefined and repulsive way of chewing. People prefer thin slices of dry nut, sometimes roasted. A mixture called killi, made of areca nut, betel, cloves, cardamom and sugar, is sold in small home-made paper pouches. Old people who have lost their teeth keep chewing by pounding the mixture with a small mortar and pestle.

  In Thailand, use has declined gradually over recent decades, and younger people in cities rarely chew. Most chewers are over 50. Even so, markets sell small trays of betel leaves and sliced tender nut, which people use as offerings at Buddhist shrines.

  In the Ifugao province of the Philippine Cordilleras, betel nuts are high-demand products sourced from the province's cities and municipalities. In Hainan and Hunan Province in China, old and young people chew daily, and Xiangtan is a centre of use and processing. Most eat the dried nut alone, without the leaf. Old women sell it, and shops that stock tea, alcohol and cigarettes carry the dried version.

  Taiwan has the most distinctive roadside trade. Many customers buy fresh bags of 20 to 40 nuts every day, so two kinds of shop keep steady supply: poorly maintained family shops and free-standing booths. The booths are usually raised one meter above the street and measure less than 3 by 2 m. Large picture windows give passers-by a full view inside. Inside, a young woman known as a betel nut beauty prepares the nuts. Green LED lamps or neon lights often frame the windows. Customers pull over and wait for the nuts to be brought to their vehicles.

  In Taiwan the habit is tied to blue-collar work such as long-haul transport, construction and fishing. Studies show it is common among taxi, bus and truck drivers, who rely on the stimulation to cope with long hours. It also becomes a way of socialising with coworkers. Oral cancer has been identified as a leading cause of death in professions with high chewing rates.

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• 7. Bans and Their Limits

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  In Papua New Guinea, where the nut is called buai in Tok Pisin and grows abundantly around Wewak and Madang, a governor banned selling and chewing it in public places in Port Moresby in 2014. The ban was controversial, and it was lifted in 2017. Smuggling continued while it lasted, and prices rose dramatically. Police enforced the ban rigorously, and in 2015 two betel nut sellers died in Hanuabada after police reservists fired on a crowd.

  A new ban came in July 2023, this time limited to the business district of the city. Many people make a living selling betel nut, so they resist bans in their areas. On Manus Island, young men take small boats to the northern coast to buy nuts for trading. The trips expose them to piracy, and several have disappeared.

  Baguio City, in Benguet province in the northern Philippines, has set restrictions and fines. There the nut is called momma or moma. The rules hold that chewing and spitting are improper during public transport drivers' work hours, and that the spit stains roads and sidewalks. Despite the rules, betel nut thrives across the Cordilleran market.

  Other countries treat the nut very differently. Australia bans its importation, use and sale, though it has been sold illegally in several South Asian supermarkets. In the United States it is not a controlled or specially taxed substance and turns up in some Asian grocery stores. Customs officers can stop imports in any form other than whole or carved kernels, citing food, agricultural or medicinal drug violations. The United Kingdom treats it as legal. In the United Arab Emirates, possession of the nut or the betel leaf is a punishable offence.

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• 8. The Medical Toll

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  In 2017 the harm caused by areca nut use worldwide was classified as a neglected global public health emergency. Chewing raises the risk of head and neck cancers and of esophageal cancer, with or without tobacco. A betel quid affects almost every part of the body, including the brain, heart, lungs, gastrointestinal tract and reproductive organs. Documented consequences include myocardial infarction, cardiac arrhythmias and liver damage. They also include asthma, type II diabetes, hyperlipidemia, metabolic syndrome, hypothyroidism, prostate hyperplasia and infertility. Habitual chewing raises the risk of cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. It causes oral submucous fibrosis, a condition that may progress to mouth cancer, and it has been linked to throat cancer.

  Adding tobacco, as in gutka, raises the risk further. Cancers of the mouth and oropharynx become more likely, and so do fatal coronary artery disease, fatal stroke and non-fatal ischemic heart disease.

  Women who chew paan or other areca nut mixtures during pregnancy significantly increase the chance of adverse outcomes for the baby. These include stillbirth, premature birth, and low birth weight and height. The effects may stem from arecoline, and the fetus is also exposed to other toxic components linked to cancer.

  Not everyone accepts the international findings. India's government and agriculture ministry are probing the IARC report as a misconception, and significant opposition to it has been reported in India. CAMPCO, an Indian farmer co-operative, points out that arecoline is classified under Group II B, possibly carcinogenic to humans. It is asking IARC to re-classify areca nut from Group I to Group II-B.

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