All the world’s flavours are coming to please Indian vegetarian palates. We bring you some best kept health secrets from Suman Agarwal, Pujyashri Gurudev’s nutritional advisor

Suman Agarwal founded Selfcare – The Natural Way to promote the benefits of wise nutrition. She has been counselling as a Nutritionist & Fitness Consultant for the past 9 years, has a diploma in Food and Nutrition from Oxford University, UK (affiliated with ORT India Institute) and also a certificate in Fitness Training from the National Institute of Aerobics.

‘Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth.’ -Gautam Buddha

Give yourself this one gift and you will be wealthy enough to keep gifting all your life to other people.

The quest for good health has tickled everyone’s mind. The secret lies in our age-old menus and combinations.

Can you speak an Italian or Chinese language without learning how to? The answer is no. But when it comes to food, we do not think about the aspect that in order to make it vegetarian we may be compromising – not a bit but a lot – in the long run. We keep introducing different world cuisines in our dinner menus without knowing the balancing of nutrients for those menus. Why do we do this?

A typical household will have noodles with rice, frankie, pasta, pizza, burger, nachos with cheese or khowsuey for dinner. Am I not correct?All international menus made in a vegetarian way. Amongst Indian fast foods pav-bhaji, frankie and idli-chutney are the favourites. But what do you get? Incomplete nutrition.

Try speaking Italian without knowing it and you will garble. In the same way, our body gets garbage.

Avoid confusing your body and don’t make it a garbage dump. Give your body respect and provide it complete nutrition. Every meal that is, breakfast, lunch and dinner, should have the combination of proteins, carbohydrates and fats.

If proteins for vegetarians come only from pulses and milk products then where is the protein in pasta, frankie, khowsuey or burger? All these are non-vegetarian menus and they are balanced due to the non-vegetarian protein present. But as soon as you vegetarianise them they become high carbohydrates, high fat and low in protein and nutrition (often termed as junk food).

To get complete nutrition out of these menus, here are some suggestions:

Make chole frankies instead of a vegetable frankie.

Have khowsuey with moong salad to up the protein.

Add rajma to pasta, to balance the nutrients.

Make burger pattice with tofu or mashed kidney beans along with vegetables.

Have idli, dosa or uttapam with sambhar. This way you will ensure the protein and minimise the fat component in coconut chutney.

Have pav-bhaji along with a moong dal pudla and it is no more junk food.

Have noodles with sautéed vegetables and tofu.

Always have mixed beans salad with pizza.

You can further increase nutrition by having all these options with some milk or milk products like curd, buttermilk, yogurt, fruit or vegetable raita.

This way you will be able to tickle your taste buds with international cuisines and at the same time, your stomach will not be a dump yard for carbohydrate rich food. Give your body good food; it will give you vibrant health.

Go ahead… savour your dinners!