When your orthorexic guest has watched you prepare a spread of millet, chickpea salad and three kinds of vegetables, only to say, “Maybe I’ll just have an orange for dinner,” you have to wonder whether healthy diets are more trouble than they’re worth. Orthorexia is an obsession with healthy eating that causes more stress than our traditional bad habits: for example, a juice diet that robs your body of protein and fibre till you collapse into goo.
Our doctor once told us never to read the health articles in the paper. I can imagine the headlines he had trouble with, and the responses of his patients. “One glass of red wine a day keeps heart healthy.” (Let’s guzzle brandy.) “Tall people at greater risk of cancer.” (Let’s keep smoking.) “Artificial sweeteners cause obesity.” (Let’s eat an all-natural chocolate cheesecake for our birthday.)
The material out there confuses us all. One expert tells us we must exercise or die, but surely we’ll die anyway. All we have to do is sit, apparently. Even after digging all morning in the garden, you don’t dare relax with tea and The Hindu because sitting has been declared as lethal as smoking.
Cholesterol used to be bad, then some of it was reformed and became good, and now cholesterol doesn’t matter. Coconut oil was fatal, and now it’s healthy. Soya was nutritious but it’s now just tasteless. Faced with daily dietary factoids, we long for easy fixes, so the same heart patients who distrust their cardiologist and his drugs are ready to credit a swamiji who swears that lauki juice will take you off medicines for life. To help us delude ourselves, concerned bloggers who used to suffer severe whateveritis tell us how they were cured with gluten-free aloe vera gel.
And yet all this mindful eating is too old to be called a fad. Long before the health nuts were at it, the orthodox had perfected the art. Unlike the Chinese, who are curious enough to eat anything at all, we Indians sniff and squint at each new offering and think, “Better not. You don’t know what will happen.” We avoid garlic, onion, root vegetables and “English” vegetables, and if there’s anything left on our plates we go all the way to Kashi to renounce it.
But there must be a middle ground, just the place for a nice chickpea salad picnic, and one day we’ll find it.
