HOLISTIC EATING

When it comes to Food, *what* you eat is more important than the parts. 

When you eat organically grown whole foods, freshly cooked, without adding chemicals and preservatives, without a long shelf life, the effect on the body is on many dimensions, and the interrelationships between the parts is beyond "scientific" measurement. 

When it comes to food, in general : 

Avoid Grains,  or,  minimise them in your diet which is more practical; avoiding grains entirely in today's context of tough. Grains are a comparatively recent addition to the human diet. 

Use natural salt, not manufactured table salt. Manufactured table salt is a chemical called NaCl and it is not food. 

Use cold pressed oils, not refined oils. Til oil, coconut oil, groundnut oil, mustard oil, are all traditionally used in India and good for health, of course , when used in moderation. Palm oil is not good, period. Rice Bran oil is not even oil. I am not sure about Sunflower Oil and am still to form a view on it. 

Sweets should  be sparingly eaten, during festivals, etc, and make them using gud , not manufactured white sugar. There are many varieties of gud traditionally used in India.

Milk is not strictly necessary for the human body and can be easily avoided. BUT Ghee is extremely healthy. So is butter. Even vegans would be well advised to not skip ghee. So is buttermilk. 

So that takes care of salt, sugar and fat, which are the primary building blocks. 

What about protein? Dals and light protein are good if you also have grains in your diet. Grains are carbohydrates and the laws of food combination state that carbs and heavy protein don't go together. If you have meat, can you make sure they are freshly killed, not heavily processed, and come from free range animals fed on a natural diet? If you can, go ahead and eat meat, but in moderation. As affordability increases, the quantity of meat in the diet goes up, which is a mistake. If you can't ensure this kind of meat, and buy meat from animals raised and fed on industrial farms, then it is better to avoid meat entirely. 

Within foods itself, you have "super foods" , like spices; spices are a store house of micro nutrients. 

The food industry does not like this simple, common sense approach. None of their products are even edible, or in other words, food, if we follow the above approach. 

So what do they do? They divide food into various nutrients, and minerals, and vitamins, and give labels on all their processed foods listing all that. Their manufacturing process does the following: 

It strips the food of all that is good,

It adds chemicals and preservatives, 

It uses all the wrong ingredients that are bad for health in the first place,

It makes things that don't spoil with a long shelf life. Anything that does not spoil, is by definition, not food. 

It diverts us into the useless exercise of "label reading", and debates on the "nutrient profile" of foods, which is among the most useless exercises you can ever indulge in.

Then it adds the template called "hygiene". And "good manufacturing practice". And converts us into a bundle of nerves afraid of the very food we eat. 

And introduces abominations like milk powder into the culture itself. The office coffee machine of course has only milk powder, and so does the tray that is kept in your five star hotel for the morning chai. A dip dip tea bag with dairy whitener is the most pathetic way to start the day.

Slowly, we are converted into a bunch of people who believe in "science" , read nutritional labels on packaged foods; a walking talking abomination of inedible chemicals we shove into ourselves in the name of Food, all the time wondering where is that vitality, where is that positive health, where is that well being that we lost somewhere along the way. 

The medical industry then steps in to address our woes. The medical industry calls itself the health industry, but they have nothing to do with health, the apt description would be "disease industry". But more about the medical industry in another post.

And thus the system traps us. A bunch of people with more and more knowledge but less and less wisdom who are insistent on harming themselves...