How To Eat Healthy

 – Never cut your veggies and store them– same thing goes for fruits, and for mincing, shredding, dicing, cubing, mashing etc etc. If you have a cut vegetable, use it within 10-15 minutes. This is especially true for onions and garlic – the longer you leave them chopped or exposed, the more they gather microorganisms – which of course, will make their way into your body and not all of them will do nice things inside.

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– Fruit juices, I am sad to say, are useless if you are having them for health reasons – if you just want the taste, go ahead and pulp your fruit into juice but if you are looking for health, eat your fruit whole and immediately after you cut it. Also, the more you cut, mash, pulp, dice, freeze etc etc etc. your fruit – the more useless it turns. The exposed parts will oxidize and become useless, and the pulped parts will lose their organic molecular structure and act like coloured nonsense. Might as well eat Play-Doh. Or fabric paint if you are talking colour.

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– A lot of us are today concerned with how healthy fruits these days really are-Bananas, for instance are now chemically injected so they ripen faster and double in size. The same goes for mangoes. And several other fruits. The workaround we came up with in our family? We traced organic cultivators in the city of Mumbai (where we live) and have been buying mangoes from them – these mangoes are cultivated naturally, without any pesticides and insecticides and hormones, they are ripened on the tree and plucked when almost ripe – then they are stored in baskets of hay and reach our doorstep, ready to be eaten in a day. Most cities have a strong community of organic fruit cultivators. Another option is those little Kerala stores, from where you can buy bananas, right from the little Elaichi bananas to the long, reddish Nendaram-pazham (bananas). So, go local, trace out these stores and buy safe fruits.

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– No leftovers- Bet you saw that coming, didn’t you? Compost it or bury it but do not eat it. Which means, its high time you started figuring out a way to cook only as much as required. Ask people how many rotis they need and make only those many rotis. By now, if you are running a family kitchen, you will have a fair idea of how much each person eats. Stick to that – quantity is everything.

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– Try and use no or very limited chemicals in your cooking – colour, acids, vinegars, ajinomoto etc. Limit your use of sauces. Try and keep your food as natural as possible. Not saying that you should stop using sauces and all – just saying that it should NOT be part of your daily diet.

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 – No overcooking please – your food nutrients are delicate as it is – nuking the hell out of them is NOT going to help your case. You want mashed dal? Pressure cook your dal, allow it to cool and physically mash OR soak your dal for a while before pressure cooking it instead of taking the easier way out and pressure cooking for an extra number of whistles.

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 – Overcooking also takes me to the topic of pressure cooked rice versus boiled-drained rice – now understand the logic here please – when rice is cooked in anyway where it absorbs all the water employed to cook it – avoid. Pressure cooked rice absorbs most of the water you poured in, except for the bit that evaporated to create the steam that made the whistle blow – boiling and draining on the other hand, a lot of the water evaporates and the rest is drained away – along with the drained water goes out the starch and heaviness from the rice – you are never going to bloat on boiled and drained rice.

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– If you have read the above point, you will realise that it’s sensible to eat unpolished rice / brown rice and also boiled rice – both have a lot more fiber and help aid excretion, unlike polished white rice that is pretty much going to give you nothing, bloat you up and weigh you down. Eat your white rice, but substitute half of it with unpolished or brown – start moving into the unpolished rice model.

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– Microwaves are out, really- I know half this planet cooks their food in one and Indians are heading that way too, but it really doesn’t help. Microwave ovens and the technology they employ for fast cooking are still highly debated by health experts and you don’t want to use something until you are sure about its long term effects. Use your burner as much as possible – baking? Buy yourself a convection oven or conventional oven and do your body and family a favour. Use the microwave oven as a last-last-last resort.

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– Don’t overdo any vegetable – especially when it comes to potatoes, tomatoes and onions, we hit this dead end of sorts and cannot think beyond them – use them but never overdo any – so if you have had a day of potatoes, skip them the next day.

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– Have I forgotten to mention how amazing sprouts are for your skin and hair? Especially in helping overcome hairfall issues? I haven’t? Well, eat sprouts. Any which way you want but eat them. Will do you a world of good.

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– The last thing: salt- DO NOT say goodbye to common salt, rock salt, Saindha Namak, sea salt, kosher salt etc. If you are medically not iodine-deficient, and you live in a hot and tropical climate like India’s, consider lowering your intake of iodised salt. Start using common and the other salts I mentioned more regularly. If you ARE iodine-deficient or live in a climate that requires you to fortify your food with iodine (hilly, cold regions etc), or eat foods that demand extraneous iodine intake, ONLY then use regular amounts of iodised salt – and add this salt to food only after you are done cooking AND after you have taken your food off the fire – adding it during cooking is going to make the iodine evaporate. A deep dive into how salt affects your food is in itself, a post. For now, it’s important that you just incorporate this little detail into your life.

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