Mallika Writes: Just Speaking
What Ails Us?
Early in the last century an intrepid group of doctors from the ‘developed’ world decided to go and understand the food, living and illnesses of the less developed countries. They set off in different directions; some to far flung villages in Africa, some to rural India and Asia, others to exotic Papua New Guinea. After spending many months there studying and living with the local population, they reported back the total absence of what by then were being called Western diseases – diabetes, strokes, cancer, heart attacks. The populations varied greatly in their food habits, from complete meat eaters, to vegetarians, to high carbohydrate diets to most everything. But none of the societies had yet seen processed or refined food. On a follow up visit twenty years later the doctors found the societeies much more developed, with cars, and pucca buildings and roads giving access to the main cities – and all the Western diseases. The main change? In their quest for acceptance up the social ladder, in their aping of the West, always seen as the better, the one to aspire to, they had started importing or producing Western refined andprocessed food.
Twenty five years ago, riding into an Indian village, it was hard to find stands selling crisps, Kurkure, Haldirams or any of the vast array of much advertised packaged snack foods. I have seen little children, not only in the rural areas but also in the cities, snack on chana, peanuts and puffed rice, or in Gujarat, on dhebra or khakaharas. Today, more often than not, even in the villages, children are seen with white bread or buns, or flour made biscuits promising goodness. In the cities youngsters, and not such youngsters flock to pizza and hamburger joints, dig into ice creams, eat polished white rice, refined flour, white bread and the yummy delights straight from the dripping oil of a kadhai. Mothers tell me that their children want to eat out, they don’t want home cooked snacks. And because they want to show their children love, families indulge them
The result is clear to see. India has become the diabetes capital of the world, with Gujarat the diabetes capital of India. People of 28 and 30 are having heart attacks and blood pressure is common amongst youngsters. As for diabetes and obesity, the numbers have shot though the roof. Children suffer depression and attention deficit disorder. And for some reason we turn a blind eye to why this is happening.
Processed foods are killing us, slowly. There are a hundred studies of the effect of processed food on health – cancer, heart disease and diabetes especially but a host of other things. And there is undisputable evidence to the connection of the spread of processed foods and diseases. Today’s chronic diseases can be directly traced to the industrialization of food – to refined, whiter and shinier grains, to the adding of chemicals into our soil to ‘nourish’ it and into our plants to curb pests, to the narrowing of what we eat – primarily products made from wheat and corn rather than the wide range of millet, jowar, ragi, rajgira and what not, and to the trillion rupee advertising industry that drives our taste and our sense of how ‘forward’ we are.
Human beings are omnivores and can survive on most foods, as indicated by our 20th century doctors’ reports. What they can not survive is what is called the Western diet – made up chiefly of starch, sugar and the derivatives of corn and soya in forms so diverse that they become unrecognizable in the gooobledygook that is put on food labels.
And we are swallowing this (pun not intended) hook, line and sinker.
If we had been eating certain things in a certain way and our race has survived that merely points to the appropriateness of the food to our bodies and to nature. I am not denying that we want change or variety. But are we aware of what we are eating and what it is doing to us? Are we aware that when we eat ice cream we are eating many of a staggering 1400 chemicals that go into making it look fluffier, brighter, smell better? Would you like to eat a paint emulsifier, Diethyl Glucol, often used as an emulsifier instead of eggs ? Or the vanilla flavoured Peperonal, otherwise used to kill lice? Or the pineapple flavoured Ethyle Acetate used for cleaning leather and textiles? Well, if you eat ice cream that is what you are ingesting.
Eating used to be about pleasure, company, about family and spirituality, about connecting with bhoomi, about thanksgiving and about identity. Having reduced it to the seduction of the ad where the crunch of the crisp gives you goose pimples of desire, or where your favourite star, more than well paid for the approval, talks of the strength giving properties of a new chocolate bar or drink has many repercussions. The faster we wake up and take active note, the more we delay the visit to the doctor.
March 7,2010, DNA
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