THE WAY WE
Indians are eating too much. They are also eating wrong.
How many times do you eat in a day? Three square meals, you would say. But statistically, you eat all the time: In 24 hours, minus eight hours of sleep time, you gorge on food every two hours. You eat seven times a day, if not more. And you eat so unhealthily that the reward section of your brain’s prefrontal cortex remains perpetually lit up in anticipation of high- calorie junk food.
Delhi starts the day healthy but progressively the platter gets heavy with greasy, deep- fried food. Kolkata likes to skip breakfast and gorge on pre- dinner bites. Chennai munches on mid- morning snacks. Bangalore is barely interested in fruits. Mumbai likes to eat unhealthy snacks at all hours, according to a health survey by Apollo Hospitals Group.
“Mindless eating” is now the name of the game. Coined to explain why so many people eat so much, by Cornell University’s Dr Brian Wansink in his Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, the term has become the leitmotif in America’s fight against obesity. But much of the same seems to be happening in over- fed urban India, as well. The wellness unit of the Apollo Hospitals Group, under Professor Adrian Kennedy, has been monitoring the health data of urban Indians over the last decade. The results of this year’s study of the eating culture of almost 40,000 urban Indians across eight cities who came to Apollo for their medical check- ups are now out. And they provide a wide- ranging snapshot of how India eats now.
“Something is seriously going wrong somewhere,” says obesity expert Dr Pradeep Chowbey of Max Healthcare. Food habits are changing. Energy- dense diets, high in complex carbohydrates, sugars and saturated fats, are taking over balanced homemade food. “And it all started with the entry of fast food chains in the 1990s,” he adds. As Wansink wrote, we seem to be “trapped” by our surroundings into eating more calories than we need to. We don’t overeat because we are hungry or because the food tastes good, he explains. “We overeat because of boredom, of family and friends, packages and plates, distractions and distances.”
While affluent Indians get carried away by the availability of new kinds of foods around them, the medical fraternity is concerned. Indians are particularly vulnerable to the illeffects of mindless eating, they say. No wonder obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes are reaching epic proportions in the country. As heart surgeon Dr Devi Shetty, chairman of Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bangalore, laments, “In my practice, it is often not the young son bringing his old father for a heart operation. It is the old father bringing his young son for a bypass grafting.”
INDIA TODAY took this opportunity to ask seven top doctors, four leading dieticians, four supermodels and an ace ayurvedic vaid to capture India’s new- millennium food culture. Read on to sample their views.