How To Eat Right

As awareness about the dangers of unhealthy food habits grows in India, here's the ultimate guide to what's good for you and what's not

- SONALI ACHARJEE, Aditi Pai, Chumki Bharadwaj and Shelly Anand

You are what you eat, they say. And Indians are spoilt for choice when it comes to variety in cuisine. The consequences of that gastronomic wealth are beginning to tell on their bodies. Lifestyle diseases have reached alarming levels in the country. A recent study by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) confirmed a truth we have known for some time: India is now the diabetes capital of the world. There are more than 101 million people with diabetes and another 136 million who are pre-diabetic. Indians now account for 17 per cent of the diabetics in the world. The culprit is no stranger: it is the sugar in most of the food we eat.

There is more bad news. In an irony that is anything but delicious, a third of Indian infants suffer from malnutrition, yet obesity is assuming epidemic proportions in India. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 discovered that a whopping 60 per cent of women and 50 per cent of men in urban areas suffer from a substantially high-risk waist-to-hip ratio, an indicator of abdominal obesity. Its natural corollary: hypertension and coronary ailments. Trouble is, they are afflicting young and middle-aged Indians, as The Lancet reveals, warning that over a fourth of the deaths in India are now on account of cardiovascular diseases, a rate that has shot up in the past two decades. "The rise in non-communicable diseases like diabetes and heart issues, especially among the young, is a clear sign that Indians are not eating right," says Dr Alka Mohan, former head of dietetics and chief dietitian at AIIMS, New Delhi.