Simple rules for healthy nutrition
Everytime I see a parent and child on a pavement with the latter walking on the outside, I want to stop to tell them to change positions for the child’s safety. Likewise when I’m in the proximity of people throwing garbage into the sea, I can’t help reprimanding them. Once when I said, "The sea is not for your garbage," I got a retort, "Then what is it for?" The gent honestly believed that the sea is his garbage bin! Despite such experiences, I continue to be a great believer in spreading environmental and civic awareness through personal intervention. That’s because we are not taught any meaningful civic behaviour in schools. Moreover environment education doesn’t emphasise how each person’s action counts. Nor do they teach nutrition — a basic and primary need of how to care for one’s health. Consequently children and youth are easy prey to any and every advertiser who wants to gyp them into purchasing whatever trash they sell, irrespective of its repercussions on health.
Thus when I see children guzzling deep-fried, salted snacks, potato chips and other junk food, I feel obliged to warn their parents that such stuff is unhealthy and anti-social. That even the little nutrition inherent in the over-refined product will be completely negated by the combination of preservatives, excess refined salt, colouring, refined fats, artificial flavouring, msg, stabilisers, etc.
It’s also pertinent to note that although packaged fruit juices are touted as ‘fresh’ and ‘natural’, they can’t be so if sugar isn’t added as a preservative. Moreover the truth is that fruit juice in tetra packs has to be pasteurised, thereby destroying a major percentage of nutrients. Therefore they are no substitute for fresh fruit or juice.
What bothers me even more is when I see parents feeding junk food to their loved ones as early as 10 a.m. I’m honestly scared to think of what such kids are fed as breakfast. Of course children are happy to munch on anything, but they tend to be perennially hungry. That’s because snack/ junk foods lack the nutrients necessary to energise the body to function in a healthy state and supply the energy for our daily work.
Since I only consume carefully selected nutrition-intensive food, I rarely experience the need to snack, particularly because I eat my dinner between 5-7 p.m, an American habit we need to inculcate.
However I must admit that when totally exhausted, I boil myself a packet of instant noodles. This is a salutary custom imported by my grandmother who lived in Japan. She introduced us to the now famous Ramen noodles which one consumes in the soup created while cooking them. The non-spicy taste provides a much needed break from Indian food. It’s advisable not to add the satchets of spices and oil included in noodle packages. Instead, add fresh veggies and a dash of soya sauce and cold-pressed oil.
But recently I received depressing information that even this simple snack of noodles has been ‘improved’ through product innovation and research. My information is that instant noodles are coated with wax so they don’t stick when cooked. Therefore people who happily snack on them, are susceptible to chronic health problems.
For best results in terms of nutrition and energy outcomes, old-fashioned noodles and pasta need to be cooked with a dash of oil to avoid sticking. Or after they are cooked and strained, they should be doused in cold water to prevent their natural tendency to stick. Please note they are distinctly different from instant noodles whose manufacturers innovated the wax solution to please consumers. Instead, it’s better not to grumble about the stickiness of old-fashioned noodles.
Likewise we shouldn’t grumble about lumpy salt. If that is its very nature, we should be happy with it. But crafty manufacturers sell us free-flowing salt infused with chemicals and convince us of its illusory benefits. The rationale of short-changers in the rapid growth food industry who indulge in these malpractices is cost-cutting and affordable retail prices. But it’s erroneous to believe this is what consumers expect of food manufacturers. I have always believed that if consumers are given full disclosure, they would be happy to pay higher prices.We need to wake up and take stock. Science and technology should be used to better our lives rather than allow greedy people in industry to use it for their profit, and our detriment.
Until this transformation happens, we need to decide for ourselves what’s best for our health. If we don’t begin living with full awareness, the chemicals we feed ourselves will make us so genetically fragile that the next generation will inherit health problems that could prove insoluble. And this isn’t because of our karma but because of the way we choose to live.
Therefore my advice is: eat and live in accordance with natural laws as much as possible under given circumstances. Buy locally grown produce to the extent possible, preferably organic. Start a kitchen garden or live on a farm, eat seasonal foods. If you follow mother nature’s simple laws, you’ll give yourself the infinite gift of superior health. And a consciousness that vibrates with the universe.
(Kavita Mukhi is a Mumbai-based eco-nutritionist and director of Conscious Food)