What Makes the “Healthy Indian Diet” Healthy?

B Niraj Patel MkDk

There are three things we can do to prevent becoming sick with chronic disease or better live with it: eat a good diet, relieve stress, and get regular exercise. Millions today exercise at home or in gyms, many of them almost every day. Millions also practice the ancient Indian art of yoga, and modern science has confirmed that yogic postures, breathing exercises, and meditation contribute to good health. But yoga isn’t the only thing which comes from India that helps people stay healthy.

Did you know that many spices in Indian food like turmeric, cumin, and black pepper, among others and mixed together in combinations developed by Ayurvedic practitioners over centuries, have been discovered to have properties described as “anti-cancer” by experts like Dr. Bharat Aggarwal of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center? Spices are one or many elements that make traditional Indian food healthy. (Yes, I said Indian food can be healthy. Read on.)

To explain this further, I’d like to tell the story of Robert McCarrison, an Irish physician who set off a revolution in our thinking on nutrition over a hundred years ago based on what he discovered in India. In 1901, the 23-year old doctor was sent to the Himalayas to care for soldiers stationed there. Amid long hours on duty, he recorded observations on a people living in the foothills named the Hunza. They were in excellent health compared with soldiers from Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and other parts of India as well as Britain, he noted.

McCarrison also observed high rates of thyroid disease among other Himalayan tribes, and his intuition was that different diets played a key role in why some people suffered bad health while in the same region other people enjoyed good health. This ran counter to popular thought, but his intuition was vindicated by his research on what people were eating in different parts of India, some being based on ancient traditions and Ayurvedic wisdom, and their overall health. During three decades of nutrition research, some in the South Indian hill town Conoor (where he founded a lab that is India’s nutrition research center today) but much of it in the field all over India, McCarrison witnessed a trend that disturbed him: the industrialization of food.

In the spirit of promoting healthy whole grains, here’s an easy recipe for “Masala Brown Rice” by Anuja Balasubramanian and Hetal Jannu of the recipe site ShowMeTheCurry.com. This is one of more than 30 tasty recipes in our book “The Healthy Indian Diet.” Hope you enjoy!

Niraj “Raj” Patel, M.D. reads and writes on food and health. His new book “The Healthy Indian Diet” explains why modern diets are associated with obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers, and how the principles of nutrition illuminated by modern science apply to traditional diets. The book contains healthy recipes by Anuja Balasubramanian and Hetal Jannu of ShowMeTheCurry.com and is available in paperback at Amazon and in eBook formats across all major platforms. You can download a free sample at www.HealthyIndianDiet.com

To buy this book click on the link below