The so-called betel nut isn't betel at all; betel is the leaf around it
Betel is a peppery vine leaf, not a nut. For roughly 5,000 years people across Asia have wrapped it around areca nut and lime to chew, a habit traced to a cave in the Philippines. The leaf alone seems harmless; the quid it wraps is classed as a cause of cancer.
Piper betle belongs to the pepper family and is native to Southeast Asia, an evergreen climbing vine with glossy heart-shaped leaves and separate male and female plants. The English name reached us through Portuguese from the Malayalam or Tamil vettila. It travelled with Austronesian seafarers and traders as far as Melanesia, the Maldives and Madagascar, and Indian indentured workers later carried it to the Caribbean.
The oldest evidence of chewing comes from the Duyong Cave site in the Philippines, where areca nut remains and lime made from crushed shells date back around 5,000 years. Nobody knows when or why the leaf was first paired with areca, since the nut can be chewed alone. Texts from the 9th century CE list areca, slaked lime and catechu as the classic filling; tobacco joined only in the 20th century. In India and Sri Lanka, a sheaf of leaves is presented as a gesture of respect at weddings, at New Year and when paying physicians or astrologers, and at Bengali weddings the bride's face is hidden behind betel leaves.
Growing it is fussy work. Bangladeshi farmers known as barui build fenced gardens of bamboo and coconut leaves, plant cuttings as the monsoon starts, and water lightly and often, never letting puddles stand more than half an hour. A vine can climb to between 150 and 180 cm and start branching in as little as three months. In India, a 2006 study found about 55,000 hectares under betel, supporting perhaps 400,000 to 500,000 farming families, but trade fell by 65 percent between 2000 and 2010 as buyers switched to gutka, a tobacco mix.
The health picture is stark. The International Agency for Research on Cancer and the WHO accept that chewing tobacco and areca nut causes cancer in humans. Regular betel quid use is linked to head, neck and throat cancers, and even tobacco-free quid to oesophageal cancer, along with stillbirth and low birth weight.
Source: Betel
