The Vegan Myth & the Organic Disaster
The idea of eating all organic is terrible in itself when the nutrient needs of the body are not taken care of. For the past two weeks, I had been sick with chronic indigestion. I realized I was eating the best but not consuming a holistic balanced diet. The reason being, one, my amateur home science knowledge and two, our stubborn decision of not buying food coming from the plains, as it is laced with chemicals and grown in untrustworthy places like landfill sites just to give you an idea.
Back when roads had not reached mountains, or the Chamoli district specifically, the villagers grew on their farms everything they required here. It was mostly self-sufficient countryside. Now that the locals have the availability of the market, they buy their food from the market. The locals themselves depend on food coming from other states for their daily food requirements. Being stubborn in our decision of eating healthy, we completely depended on locally grown vegetables, grains, millets, and even fruits and lost check on our nutrient list. Though this place offers some of the most exotic variety of agro-food but are occasionally available and cannot fulfill the daily nutrient needs of the society here.
Now, having suffered chronic indigestion, I am drifting from extreme idealism to practical sustainable living. I have been amending my sustainability playbook.
While introducing reforms in my diet, I found, absence of tomatoes in my diet to be a notable reason for my illness. It is the most valuable dietary need, apart from the tangy twist it adds to every dish, Vitamin A, B, C, antioxidants, lycopene present in it keeps the heart and skin healthy and flushes out free radicals from the system. It is very important to consume tomatoes regularly for a healthy body. It came as a surprise as to how a regular vegetable if removed from the diet can have such drastic effects on a body. My concern about the kind of tomato is however very genuine. I have read and even seen enough to know that tomatoes in India are grown anywhere and everywhere. Our tomatoes are pumped with heavy chemicals and many are grown in wastewater, some even on the landfills! However, I have to be deprived of my playbook and buy the ones available in the market, till beautiful red cherry tomatoes in my farm fruit.
Similar is the case with our fruits. This is a well-known fact, even amongst traders, that the bananas, papayas, even the mangoes available in the market are reaped before they are ready. They are then artificially ripened. like bananas are ripened by carbides. Whatsoever, a high-fiber diet is very much required for good digestion. And that’s the reason my breakfast plate every morning without any excuse is a rich fruit diet.
Green vegetables have found their way twice a day on my plate. They fulfill the body's requirements of minerals and vitamins.
One silly habit that can affect health disastrously is not eating your meals timely. It sounds like a discipline to follow but it has more to do with the intuitive understanding of the digestive system. The body memorizes our eating habits and schedules its functioning according to a rough timetable. Bombarding food into the system at any and every hour confuses the stomach and its allies which causes the digestive system to collapse.
I also found it important to understand which food has to be eaten when. This, I shall be covering in my upcoming blogs.
But there is one very interesting experiment that will be invaluable for many of the readers. How would it feel if you can excrete out all the piling stool in the body without any effort and you don’t have to run to the washroom in between meetings? Warm water is the answer to this jovial feeling. On empty stomach, just after you wake up, drink lukewarm water as much as your stomach can fill. I drink back-to-back 4- 6 glasses of it and walk a few steps before nature calls out loud. Using this method, I can assure the readers, they won’t have to pump out in installments throughout the day and one can experience the softest and most satisfying commode experience! No more about it!
I have also fixed the biggest ambiguity around milk consumption. Having had extreme views on whether to consume milk or not, discussing the vegan ideologies and also extracting the traditional beliefs from Dadima, I have now found the magical solution to milk consumption. My dear readers, the nighttime, right before going to bed, is the auspicious time to drink a glass of Haldi Doodh. I like it with a spoon of Chawanprash(Ayushkalp) and some dates. Cow Milk relaxes the mind and muscles just the way a mother’s breastfeeding calms a baby and couches its restless mind to sleep. And what a healthy sleep it has been dozing me off into!
My dietetic experiment has finally achieved a balance between organicity, nutrients, and time invested in the preparation. A lesson learned the hard way!
