The small-sized panacea for health
MILLETS ARE SUPERFOODS THAT CAN CURE A HOST OF DISEASES, SAYS INDIA’S MILLET MAN
The small, humble grains are finally getting their due. Long considered a poor man’s food, millets are now on the verge of becoming superstars of nutrition and one man who has steadfastly believed in their powers all along is Dr Khadar Valli, also known as the Millet Man of India. With unwavering effort, he is bringing back these unprepossessing foods on the plates of everyone, including the rich.
The Green Revolution in India in the 1960s changed the course of dietary preferences as people moved away from traditional food grains. Millets were seen as primitive foods which only the poor ate. But Dr Valli prefers to term them as super or rich grains.
Millets comprised about 40 per cent of all cultivated grains in India before the Green Revolution robbed them of their profile.
Dr Valli, who hails from Rayalaseema in Andhra Pradesh, lived in the US for 10 years as a Homeopathy doctor before he returned and settled in Mysore.
Since then he has done extensive research on millets and their curative properties in reversing diabetes, PCOD, thyroid, obesity, constipation, migraine and several other ailments. In an exclusive phone interview with Gulf News he spoke of the “scam and scheme” tricks of the food industry in pushing rice and wheat as wholesome grains, while the fact is that it is millets that do a world of good for all, he said.
“Health should be our birthright, and no leader has ever stressed this point,” he said.
“In Bengaluru alone, there are three million diabetes patients. I have conducted more than 40 awareness campaigns over the last 10 years in the city. [Many] have realised the benefits of millets and switched to this super food and have been cured of the disease,” he says.
Growing demand
As a result, the market for millets has grown tremendously and farmers are trying their best to meet demand. “We have seen farmers who grow rice or other food grains committing suicide when their crops fail. But now, any small farmer can grow millets, even on a barren patch of land, as these crops require very little water and no fertilisers or pesticides. All it takes is just four rains for growing millets, yielding four quintals [400 kilograms] of the grain per acre,” Dr Valli says.
The ecological warrior is pained by the growing number of children getting diabetes by eating processed foods including “two-minute noodles advertised by celebrities” and the fact that girls in India are attaining puberty at the age of 6 or 7.
According to Dr Valli, healthy food has three dimensions: it should give us good health; it should be sustainable; and life on this planet should continue for a long time, which means we have to preserve and conserve ■ our natural resources. “The food that we now consume doesn’t conform to any of these requirements,” he says. “People are eating the wrong foods and even medicines are unable to keep them healthy. By wrong foods I mean rice, wheat, milk, sugar, all kinds of meats and eggs.”
The way forward, he advises, is to figure out what food is required and then ensure it is available in large quantities.
The second point is sustainability and that’s possible only with crops that don’t require large quantity of natural resources.
“Just four rains are good Millets can be cooked just like rice and used in making fried rice, pulavs and biryani.
Chapatis or rotis (Indian flat bread) can also be made with millet flour.
Idli, dosa and appams can be tried with millet batter.
Porridge, desserts and traditional Indian sweets can also be made, but replace sugar with palm jaggery.
Since millets contain 8 to 12.5 per cent fibre, the grains need to be soaked for at least two hours.
For weight loss and therapeutic purposes, Dr Valli advises eating one millet variety a day for better results. enough to grow five varieties of millets (see box).
“Third, we should make the soil more fertile for the future generations,” said Dr Valli. “That’s where the jungle farming becomes relevant. From the field to your plate, the food should be sustainable, involving no machines.
“If you produce in India and feed people in Mexico, that doesn’t work.”
The response to his campaigning has been overwhelming, he says, because it cures diseases. “Educating the farming community is our next battle.”
According to Dr Valli, multinational companies are responsible for tampering with the crop patterns in order to push their seeds, fertilisers and pesticides.
“Millets grow well in diverse, small-scale, low-input farming systems. Our aim is to simplify the cleaning of grain without involving high-end machinery. The farmers themselves can do this with simple equipment costing no more than Rs2,000 (about Dh104) at home to make the grain palatable.”
Dr Valli is convinced that even large-scale farming farmers with hundreds of hectares can grow millets profitably. The way forward, he says, is Adavi Krishi (forest farming) to energise the farmland.
How can we energise farmland?
Soil from forests is placed in pots, to which barnyard millet flour and horse gram flour is added to help microbes grow. This slurry is sprayed on dry, semi-arid lands over three weeks to energise and make it fertile for the millet crop. No fertilisers are used. The tiny birds, which are not pests strictly speaking, which come to feed on grain make the land fertile with their droppings.