Our needs are time and situation based. Today the pressing problems that we face are epidemics in the name of diseases like hypertension, cardiovascular accidents, cancer, diabetes and many more. Therefore to tackle these we should design a way out antagonistic to the causative factors of these diseases

The primary solution to these giganticular problems lies in our kitchen. We need to identify and correct the not so healthy eating habits, buying habits. These small changes pave way TO A BIGGER, HEALTHIER CHANGE

AN INSIGHT INTO THE REAL FOOD

1. Should be freshly cooked, without excess oil, salt and sugar

2. The food that you consume daily should not be made of refined foodstuffs (maida) or processed foods (mayonnaise, pizza or sandwich spreads, Nutella). Use wheat flour in various forms like porridge (dalia), vermicelli (seviyan), semolina (suji), chapatis etc, use rice, rice flakes (poha), sabudana instead. If you use butter, preferably use white butter instead of the ones available in the market. If you have time concerns, prepare it over the weekend

3. Use natural flavouring agents like curry leaves, chillies, ginger, garlic, coriander, cloves( laung), cardamom (elaichi) instead of artificial flavoring and coloring agents. Nature offers us a bounty of flavors!

4. Do not use frozen foods in your daily routine. Enzymatic structure in frozen foods becomes disrupted and it becomes unfit for digestion. It ultimately act as a toxin which gets accumulated in the body and serves as a base for diseases. Here is a light on the same:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2006/04/11/stay-away-from-frozen-foods.aspx

5. Eat colorful food. Choose the red apples, pomegranates, watermelons, the deep red beets, yellow mangoes, green grapes. These foods are rich in beta-carotene which are good for the eyes, also these foods improve immunity and prevent ageing!

6. Your food should neither be too thick nor too chilled. Such foods are heavy to digest and have a tendency to accumulate in the body

Here is an example for a better understanding:

Take a bowl full of  thick curd or thick/ viscous dal. Observe the bowl after you finish eating it. It will be stained and the stains get tough with passing time

On the other hand if you take a thin curd/ dal, you will see that it hardly leaves any stain behind.

Therefore we conclude that we should avoid eating such heavy/viscous/chilled foods in our daily routine as these foods tend to deposit in the body. After assimilation of such foods, the digested material gets accumulated in the blood vessels causing problems like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart ailments and so on.

7. A drastic mistake is combining fried and chilled food together. Both of these favour deposition/accumulation in the body doubling up the speed of disease onset

8. The container in which we eat food should preferably not be made of plastic, we should adopt glass or steel instead. Here is a link for better understanding:

http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/cookware-plastics-shoppers-guide-to-food-safety#1

9. Food should be of a natural size. In the market, oversized foods are branded a lot. Such foods are treated with growth hormones (auxins) to make them grow quickly. After consuming them they interact with and can disrupt the body's hormonal balance

10. Healthy diet recipe: SEMOLINA/SUJI UPMA

Time taken: 15 minutes

Method:

  • Take a pan, add 1 bowl of semolina into it on a sim flame. Roast it for 2 to 3 minutes. 
  • In the meantime coarsely dice 1 onion
  • After semolina turns golden brown, transfer it to a plate
  • In the pan now add 2 tsp ghee, add sarson, 1 red chilly, little chana dal, few curry leaves, onion and 2 to 3 finely diced cashew nuts
  • Add salt to taste
  • Saute these for a minute
  • Next, add 3 bowls of water to the pan on a full flame
  • After the water begins to boil, bring the flame to sim and slowly add suji to it while continuously stirring with a spatula
  • Mix it well
  • Garnish with coriander and serve hot!