The Rich Man's Food Dilemma

I've spent a lot of time studying, understanding and experimenting with food, and I don't mean gourmet but food that benefits health, vitality and life expectancy.  Here are some of the things I believed were what any individual can easily do to maintain healthy food habits:

1. 1. The thumb rule is to eat freshly prepared, home-cooked meals with balanced components that meet your daily recommended nutrition needs.  So, no packaged foods, no fast food, no synthetic or processed foods. Tough, but do-able; particularly if you can hire a cook or have a home-maker to take care of it for the family.
2. 2. Colourful meals.  Yup, but not with the help of food dyes and colorants! Adding the dark greens and reds to your meal (spinach, broccoli, radish, beet, berries, carrots) ensure you cover the various essential and much-needed vitamins and minerals into your meals without actually calculating. So, just checking if there's colour in the plate can be an easy way to good health! 
   
3. Cut out the saturated and trans-fats (artificial fats) from your diet completely. While a healthy balance of natural fats is essential to maintain a healthy body and prevent joint troubles, bowel disorders and colon-related complications, we can all do without any LDL (bad) Cholesterol. Fats from virgin oils of olive, coconut, fennel, flax and other seeds are good, while dairy fats should be reduced to skim and low-fat only.  Cow's ghee, however, is the only saturated fat that is not harmful and recommended in daily diets to about a tablespoon a day.  Fish oils too are very healthy and have anti-oxidation properties along with Omega-3.  
4. Fad-diets are more harmful than helpful.  So going on a no-carb, no-fat, no-grain or high-protein diet is only going to have short-term benefits as your intestines, kidneys and other organs work doubly hard to keep up to such diets and cry back in the long run.  So the answer is to balance carbs, proteins, fiber, and fat according to the body's metabolism and daily requirement.
   
5. 5. Water is a very important part of our daily diet.  While the general rule says 8-10 glasses of water in a day, it really depends on your hydration level as per the body mass, physical environment and activities of an individual.  Thirst is not an accurate indicator.  And along with drinking a good (not excess) amount of water, meals should also have a blend of liquid and semi-dry dishes and not all dry.
6. 6. The nutritional gatekeeper needs to be educated on the family's nutritional requirement.  According to Dr. Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating: Why we eat more than we think, 72% of the food decisions made in a household are by the nutritional gatekeeper. The nutritional gatekeeper is the one who purchases and prepares most of the food in the house. And this person, either knowingly or unknowingly, and either directly or indirectly ends up influencing the vast majority of what their family eats.  So, quite obviously this person is the key to your good (or bad) health.

Now, this said, I thought if I simply followed all these rules to the Tee, my family would be in perfect health and live strong, happy lives.  But then, the more you know, the more you worry, the more you research and the more you learn! It never ends.  My next level of quest began on New Year's day this year when I had decided to begin an Ayurvedic body cleansing and detoxification with a Panchkarma course.  I was put on a strict (OK stricter) diet which not only cut out meats and eggs, but also barred many vegetables and fruits too which were not recommended.  While I never thought I'd ever sustain such a diet, being a big non-vegetarian, it's now been four months and I'm happily following this restricted diet and actually have also (for other reasons) stopped working out and yet gained no weight or inches that I had imagined I would.  What's more, I saw a marked improvement in my skin and hair health, bowel movements and even moods!  

My next study was now to identify if this diet was the perfect diet.  What could be wrong with this one? That's when I realised that we progressive animals have come so far away from where we began as humans that we've actually come full circle today.  What we consume in the name of food today is not to meet our nutritional needs, it's to satisfy our emotional needs (be it depression, gluttony or simply hyperactivity)!  We've done so much to 'better' the appearance, taste, size and colour of our foods that we've changed them into something else entirely! And today the biggest challenge that we face is trying to 'undo' all this damage to our food.  No matter what diet you follow, unless you can cut out the chemicals and DNA-altered side-effects in them, unless you can get your hands on unrefined, natural food any attempt is only futile.  

This is where the Rich Man's Dilemma comes in.  With all the money, all the resources and all the knowledge required to source healthy food and maintain best eating habits the only solution is to go back to basics; leave mansions and fancy high-rise homes and live in villages with fields to grow one's own organic grains, fruits, and vegetables in, and eat from them alone.  While all major cities today do provide organic and unrefined food options, my biggest worry is proof that it really is organic.  It's a shame that a country like ours with farming as the occupation of its greater population, today needs to import most truly organic food from countries like Germany.  While Germany, on the other hand, sends us its exports like BASF, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim and Indian Government accepts with open arms.  

Percentage of Organic Farming Globally

No wonder organic and unrefined food is more expensive than chemical-infested and refined food (in spite of all the added costs to ruin it).  That's enough food for thought!