This yearning to return to whole foods is also visible in kitchen cupboards. In Delhi, health foodie fiends Anu and Kapil's snack bar is stuffed with roasted bajra pops, pomegranate juice, whole-wheat crackers, apple crisps and soya candy. "I eat figs, I glow," says Anu. While in the Priya-Shanavas household in Bangalore, Priya says: "In our kitchen, the first thing you see is a large fruit bowl filled with green apples, pomegranates, oranges. Bananas are for our kids." And Mira Nath, as she stops in at Mumbai's Bake Haven Store for party provisions—baked masala puris, whole-wheat puffs, soya chaklis and low-fat cheese—asks: "Who'll eat an oily snack after seeing a tissue soaked with its icky residue?"
"Nutrient density-based intake is the key," says Delhi-based health counsellor and nutritionist Ishi Khosla, whose clients range from a six times overweight 10-month baby to a 70-year-old seeking nourishing foods."Our energy requirements have drastically reduced over the last decades," she explains. Earlier we needed 3,000 calories a day, today 1,500-2,000 suffice. Proteins, carbohydrates and fats are macronutrients. But Khosla recommends micronutrients: vitamins, minerals and anti-oxidants, found in traditional dals, dahi, vegetables, fruits and nuts. The new diet design is "squeezing in the maximum amount of nutrients using the minimum number of calories".
Health activist Vijaya Venkat asserts that "health food" is a huge misnomer if taken to encompass everything from fortified wheat, atta noodles, packaged water to pills and powders. "Today everybody is a referee without knowing the rules," she says. Kapoor agrees that health straddles the taste and nutrition spectrum, but says most people narrowly perceive as "medicinal food". It's neither. "It is food that creates faith in the body," says Venkat. Like fruits, raw vegetables, sprouts, nuts and dry fruits, which have energising and cleansing properties.
Alarming results from an ongoing All India Institute for Medical Sciences (AIIMS) study, led by principal investigator Anoop Misra and chief dietician Rekha Sharma, on Delhi schoolchildren who weren't eating healthy revealed "early appearance of metabolic disturbances which predict severe diabetes and heart disease". The AIIMS team has recommended three food groups urban Indians must banish. These are refined food (like maida), sugars and vanaspati. Says Rekha Sharma "Our study jolted the parents and the kids." (See box).
But food is indulgence. Junk lives. Parents allow burger companies to bribe kids into eating with toys. And the seductions of branded munchies and processed foods is ravaging our bodies. Besides, there's our urban work ethic—let's-discuss-this-over-breakfast/lunch/dinner. Family time too is centred around the dining table at home and increasingly in snack houses and bars, where beer and wafers go together well.
Today we're confused. Peanuts make us shudder and pass on nut bowls, but potato chip peddlers make it fine for us to say, like actor Saif Ali Khan, "Get your own bag". Ironically, peanuts, pistas, walnuts and almonds are packed with anti-oxidants, zinc, niacin and heart-friendly mono-unsaturated fat. Chips contain non-nutritive empty calories and trans-fats that deposit themselves as fat streaks in our arteries.
Some families are even abandoning classic combos. No, not burgers and fries, but sambhar and chutney. Says Priya: "I use only half a coconut a week. We eat dosa with only sambar, no chutney." Like the disappearing coconut, grandma's recipes too are vanishing. Auroville-based Dr Beena Naik, who's compiled Moments of Magic, a guide to wholesome cooking, says: "Few people eat the black idli made of palm sugar. It is a nutritious snack which the Tamils traditionally made but have now forgotten."
Last year Pankaj K, 55, a senior finance executive who survived on colas and junk during high-stress weeks, staggered into Naini Setalvad's Mumbai clinic, straight after a triple bypass. "His bandages were still on, I couldn't even measure his chest properly," says Setalvad. Today Pankaj, weighing 30 kg less, is an emboldened eater of muesli breakfasts, salad lunches, and soup and whole-wheat pasta dinners.
A faulty decision most of us make is buying refined oil. Asserts Sandhya Shrikant, who runs The Eco-Nut health food shop in Chennai: "Refined oils are perfect for engines which use oil for combustion, not human bodies. " She explains that grinding groundnuts or sesame seeds slowly in a stone mortar, at 40 rpm, makes quality cold-pressed oils. Due to low heat and without any refining process, the oil's nutritive value is conserved.Whereas most often industrial processors press oils at very high speeds in machines with higher heat, to produce double refined oil.
And what frightens most counsellors is malnutrition and its class-obscuring haze. Everyone from liftmen and babus to politicians and celebrities are asking for health food plans. A niche change is also appearing. Client records at health clinics show that thin people are coming in for health consultations. This is besides the larger percentage of those who come in for health food diets to battle hypertension, diabetes and heart disease. The reason for the slim coming in, say experts, is increasing "wellness awareness". And the search for natural foods that make mind, body and skin glow. "Tampered food is dead food, why eat something that does nothing for your body?" asks Venkat, who uses food to treat everything from colds to cancers.
Corporates like ABN Amro Bank and Lintas advertising agency have launched unique initiatives. Early this year, as part of their Fit-in-Job programme, ABN Mumbai counselled their potential leaders on how to eat better. While last week, Lintas Mumbai hosted a "Just Chill" lunch session with Setalvad, to help employees give up their junk food crutches when beating crazy deadlines and long work hours. "We also have a consultative nutritionist and a LinCafe that serves lite lunches," says Sujoya Banerjee, senior VP-hrd, Lintas.
The market is brimming with innovative products. Like karlic pearls (garlic pearl lookalikes made out of karela, for those who won't chew but will swallow bitter gourd as pills). Flax seeds (the sexed up ingredient for vegetarians that contains Omega 3 oils, otherwise found in fish). And aloe vera (a rich source of anti-oxidants, vitamins and amino acids that boost your immunity). At Food Bazaar's outlet in Lower Parel, Mumbai, they're selling a hundred aloe vera plants per day.
"Hold the fat" is a demand being placed on restaurateurs. Witness the rise of Mediterranean-olive-oiled eateries. Says Moshe: "The first challenge I set before cooks is to build food full of flavour without using butter." (The trick is to reduce meat juices and turn it into sauce). He also teams up Moroccan tagines with whole-grain basmati and pushes seasonal juices over aerated drinks. Chefs at the Radisson MBD, NOIDA, don't ask guests about steak styles: rare, medium or well done. Instead they ask: is your Ayurvedic type vata, pitta, kapha?
At Aiwo, the menu card says it all: "Our food does a few rounds on the treadmill. So you don't have to." Says chef P. Chrishanth: "Even if you eat all 14 items on the menu—which you normally can't—you'd consume only 650 to 700 cals. Each bowl on the conveyor meal does not exceed 45-55 calories." A regular South Indian thali is about twice that. S. Karthik, 15, who eats both lunch and dinner at Aiwo as part of his weight-loss regime, says: "My friends are seeing the results."
But can we really stop sinning? New studies show eating ice cream makes you happy, temporarily. The depressing sugar-and-fat deposits in your arteries and flesh come later. Monsoon Bissell, 35-year-old filmmaker, confesses, "I used food to soothe myself, I'd wake up wondering what to eat." But seven months ago, Monsoon flung out her Snickers-bar stash from her bedroom, car and desk. Her body is pared down by 32 kilos. She's wearing tight tracksuits instead of swirling tents. Why the lifestyle overhaul? "Believe me," says Monsoon, "fat people are the new lepers....I wanted to be the person I'd date".
Whole foods also have a vital earth connect. Says Venkat: "A nation's security is not food security, it is health security." Embodying this belief, Sarvodaya Karnataka, a party uniting Dalits and farmers, has natural farming topping its agenda.Says leader Devanur Mahadeva: "We're encouraging natural farming so that multinationals selling pesticides and genetically engineered seeds will commit suicide instead of our people." The hunger for pure food has harvested a boutique organic movement that's encouraging farmers to grow pure-as-possible spices, coffee, herbs, veggies, cereals and even paan (see box). Pune's had its run of organic melas and outlets. Yet Sohrab Chinoy of abc Farms, where you can get your chives, cheese and Thai curry, complains that awareness is needed: "Our ambience is what exerts the major pull." The most enlightened is perhaps Auroville, Pondicherry. At places like the Kottakarai Organic Food Processing Unit, which offer old-fashioned foods like raagi dosai as well as new-age pasta with spirulina, a natural food that functions as a bio-shield against illness.
What's in the future? Nutraceuticals. Like enriched breakfast cereals that meet our nutritional and medical needs. Smart foods we can eat with a spoon, rather than swallow as tablets. Last month, Avesthagen, a pioneering Indian biotech firm, acquired Waheeda Rehman and Ashrafa Sattar's health food company. "Non-pharmaceuticals are the way ahead," says senior VP Manan Bhatt. And they're all set to provide branded smart foods from breakfast to dinner. Tara Singhji might say most of it sounds like nani's food sold in fancy packaging. The choices are ours. To buy nutraceutical packets from a store, or to eat foods grown on good earth, sunshine, pure air and water, and then cooked at home like nani did.
