We Asians love spicy food, don’t we? We also love talking about the health benefits of spices like turmeric, cayenne pepper, garlic, rosemary, and cumin. Personally, I just love the taste of different spices, and that’s a good enough reason to eat them!
The problem is that the health argument for spices does not really hold, at least in the way that spices are consumed in Asia and especially India. If eating all these spices is so good for you, then why are upper and middle class Indians so unhealthy and overweight? Why is diabetes reaching epidemic proportions in India?
The answer lies not in the spices themselves, but in what the spices enable us to eat.
The reality is that the two main staples of the Indian diet, rice and wheat, are by themselves bland and tasteless. But when you mix them with a little spiced vegetable/lentil/meat curry, suddenly you enable the vast consumption of these health-damaging staples.
Let me say it clearly. Rice and wheat and potatoes and sweets are deadly, chronic poisons that are causing the obesity and diabetes epidemic in middle class India today.
Here is a picture of the traditional South Indian thali.
What do we see here? It sure looks attractive and tempting!
We see a bunch of spicy curries arranged meekly in a circle around the presiding deity, which is a pile of rice! And to top it off, you have yellow rice in one of the cups on the left, a wheat chapathi on the side, what looks like sweet vermicelli-filled milk in a cup next to the chapathi, and a cup of sugar syrup with floating flour dough balls in a cup on the right. You are supposed to finish all the rice using the curry-filled cups as condiments, and of course then you are given a second and third helping of rice.
There is nothing, I repeat nothing, healthy about the composition of this meal unless you are training to run a marathon!
If you wish to live a long and healthy life, after the age of thirty you must slowly reduce and finally eliminate rice and wheat from regular consumption. What should you replace it with?
The answer is staring back at you from the edge of the plate in the picture. Scale up the size of all those curries and yogurt in the little bowls (but not the rice and desserts!). Move them one by one to the centre of the plate or bowl and eat them. Lessen the spice content in each of the curries because if you eat them on their own without the huge pile of bland rice, you don’t need as much spice.
In the thali above, all you have to do is get rid of the dessert, and replace the rice and chapathi on the plate with a pile of stir-fried broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower or carrots.
Look what happens when you replace rice with broccoli.
| A Cup of cooked rice |
| Serving Size 1 cup (186.0 g) |
| Amount Per Serving |
| Calories 242
Calories from Fat 4 |
| Total Fat 0.4g |
| Total Carbohydrates 53.2g |
| Dietary Fiber 0.6g |
| Protein 4.4g |
| A Cup of Broccoli | |||||||||||||||
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| You are reading this right! Broccoli has one-eighth the calories of rice. In addition, the carbs in broccoli are slow-burning carbs which are much less easily absorbed. You can and should eat a lot more quantity of broccoli (3-4 cups) and you will still have consumed much less calories than rice.
In India, we are lucky to have a breath-taking variety of edible plants. With the amount of newly created wealth in upper middle class India, there is no excuse to be eating small amounts of healthy plants vegetables, while inhaling rice and chapathis in vast quantities like in the thali example above!
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