Nutrition

If you’ve seen me in the past two years, you probably know that I’ve become a lot more health-conscious as of late. I lost a lot of weight, and have been working hard to keep it off. I haven’t joined a gym here yet, although I will soon, but I have had some encounters with the other side of healthy living: nutrition. Something Indians seem to know nothing about.

Sanju and her roommate, Tulsi, are both on the petite side of things, so they don’t eat much to begin with. They also seem to care less about what they eat than I did when I ate nothing but cheese pizza and got a kidney stone. Tulsi, for example, was pretty surprised when I started looking at a nutrition label and said she’d never really looked at one. Sanju, however, recently tried to convince me that Ghee, or clarified butter, is healthy. Ghee is butter that’s been distilled down to just the fat, removing the milk proteins and some of the unsaturated fat, the point where you’re eating something that’s 1/3 unsaturated fat, 2/3 saturated fat. Sanju claimed that this is the “good” fat. Some web sites agree with her, but they also recommend things like Ear Candling. Ghee winds up in a lot of food, and in large doses. You know how Chinese food is supposed to leave you hungry two hours later? Indian food leaves you full all day, because it’s loaded with saturated fat.

A lot of this is cultural. Sanju touts the skin benefits of ghee, as well as its ability to prevent ulcers. In a society where not a lot of fat is consumed, these are both very real benefits. Add to that the love of chilis here, and the ulcer prevention is quite real. But when you have plenty of access to fat, ghee is a terrible choice. Avocados, nuts, fish oil, and other Polyunsaturated fats will line your stomach without lining your arteries. When your goal is getting bang-for-your-buck, and when meat fat is scarce and lactose intolerant prevalent, ghee works well.

Anyone who saw Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution knows how backwards America’s nutritional standards can be. Not only is the potato classified as a vegetable, but it’s basically THE vegetable in school lunches, despite being almost purely empty calories (yes, my Irish friends, I know the skin has value, but nobody eats the skin). School standards mandate that children be allowed to drink chocolate milk that has as much sugar as pop, to make sure they get enough calcium. India is largely still at the stage where those goals are important-–how do we provide as many calories as cheaply as possible to these hungry kids? While the US has moved on to dealing with health in an affluent society, India is still in an era when ghee and white rice make a lot of sense. So I don’t fault India or Sanju or Tulsi for their love of ghee. Now, when they make fun of me for drinking skim milk, that’s another matter.

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