“The only way you get that fat off is to eat less and exercise more,” said Jack LaLanne, the American fitness, exercise, and nutritional guru and motivational speaker, sometimes called “the godfather of fitness”.
Our so-called civilised society and our literate masses have an obsession with their body weight. Their role models in the film world show them the need for size zero to be acceptable. This, combined with a sudden spurt in youth income, thanks to the IT czars in India, and we have an epidemic on hand. This seems to be one of the few diseases that do not bother the illiterate poor village masses. If on top of all these, obesity in a girl gets further complicated by an English-educated, sophisticated doting mother results is chaos in the home. I call it the new-age malady. Other times obesity results from Mall nutrition, nutrition coming only from junk food and sugary drinks marketed by rich women in the shopping malls, again a disease of affluence. Philosophically it is money, too much or too little, that causes malnutrition-protein calorie sub-nutrition in the poor and Mall nutrition in the rich.
Be that as it may, let us look at our response to obesity. Obsessed with the thin body mania, we try to do everything to lose weight. A new disease was born thanks to this mania: bulimia. The weight loss industry is another growing money-spinner. Fitness centres, gyms of all hues and colours, and diet gurus of all shades, rule the roost in this arena. My good neighbour called me the other day to tell me about her newfound diet that looks too good to be true. Two eggs in the morning, and oats. Salads, lean fish with buttermilk for lunch and green tea for evening. And finally, close the day with salads again with an occasional serving of white meat. No cereals, no sweets, no milk.
I saw a friend who was diagnosed with diabetes recently. His doctor was very strict about diet. He is told not even to look at rice by mistake! He could have as much of proteins by way of millets such as ragi, eggs, chicken, fish and fats like butter and an occasional fruit. I have a good friend, Dr. Khader Ali, who treats diabetics on millets only. I have many sophisticated friends that want apples from Australia, olives from the Mediterranean, figs from Scotland, cooking apple from England, plums from California, dates from Arabia but do not like local mangoes and hates the best fruit available this season here, the jackfruit. Many of us have a misconception that rice is pure carbohydrate but wheat is all protein. Even some doctors ask their diabetic patients to switch from rice to wheat! The last advice is good for diabetic pill industry as wheat can maintain diabetes permanently by damaging the pancreatic beta cells with its gluten. While the protein content of wheat and rice is marginally different, rice, especially the brown, hand-pounded variety, contains too much dietetic fibre, and the bran contains a very powerful Vitamin D3 receptor stimulator called metadichol. The latter boosts the human immune system to prevent most illnesses very powerfully.
One other important point about diet is that man is meant to eat what grows in his vicinity and what grows at what season. Fruits plucked from the tree will lose the essence every day and fruits imported from afar will have nothing left in them. Local fruits are the best and that too as fresh as is possible.
A word about meat-eating next. If one goes into human physiology man is not a meat-eater. Our legs, our stomach, our small intestine length, our molar teeth, our jaw with its temparo-mandibuar joint not being in line with the lower jaw like meat-eating animals, and our mouth and jaw not favouring eating into animal meat, all tell us we are built to be vegetarian. Meat-eating animals eat raw meat while we eat cooked meat.
Animal milk is not a good food item as it is foreign protein. But if we can denature the protein by fermentation, as obtains in curds, we have an added benefit of millions of good gut germs in it giving us additionally Vitamin B12 also. This vitamin is not available in animal meat but is generated by germs which are plenty in our environment. Curds, butter milk and above all ghee (clarified butter) are super foods. Vegetarians do not lack special strength. If one does not believe in this statement she or he has only got to fight to win with a pure vegetarian — our elephant.
All crash diets are not only not good and do not lower your weight consistently, they could be even downright dangerous due to various reasons which I do not intend to go into here. Many such diets have come and gone and have killed millions in the bargain. Ideally one is safer to eat what his or her ancestors have survived on but the essential part of good health is not the kind of food that one eats but the quantity. Unless one never over-eats and does not eat when not hungry, any food is as good. If one does not have any endocrine or other causes for obesity, losing weight is simple in that one just has to eat half of what s/he has been eating when coupled with hard work and/or regular walking exercise. Running and jogging are also alien to human physiology as we have inherited the four-legged animals’ knee and ankle joints without any support for our centre of gravity when we run. We are not built to run.
I must admit that nature provides some super foods that are otherwise called functional foods in every part. I know about this part of tropical south India. Our brown rice has been already shown to be functional (food that has functions other than giving calories like metadichol in rice husk) food. Our mango has some special medicine to control diabetes. If eaten in small quantities it is good for the treatment of diabetes. Our jackfruit is a super food. It has everything in it. The raw jackfruit is a very powerful anti-diabetic medicine. Ripe jack fruit is such a good food that it can be eaten even by diabetics as it has plenty of fibre which will help take away extra calories in other foods to the toilet the next morning. It has all the necessary vitamins excluding the fat-soluble ones. The seed inside has almost a full meal in it. It is very rich in magnesium, a vital element for cell membrane health, including the heart muscle cells. This was the life-saver for the poor during the Second World War when rice, our staple diet, was very scarce. The poor lived on this king of fruits.
Let me reiterate that crash diets and crazy size-zero diets are dangerous, to say the least. Do not experiment on any new ideas about your health without knowing its history. It is not what you eat that kills you, it is what eats you (your negative thoughts) that usually kills you.
Moderation in food is the secret of good health. Periodic fasting is too good, like exercise. Marginally overweight people live longer than the absolutely normal weight people. The reasons are far too many to go into here. Even obese people could remain healthy all their lives if they are really active.
It was Tony Robbins, another motivational speaker, who wrote: “Want to learn to eat a lot? Here it is: Eat a little. That way, you will be around long enough to eat a lot.”
(Professor Hegde, a cardiologist and a former Vice-Chancellor of Manipal University, is a Padma Bhushan awardee. E-mail: hegdebm@gmail.com )
