A balanced diet consists of all the foods that are healthy as well as important for our body. When we are hungry, we really don’t care if the food we are eating is healthy or not. Most of the time, we crave unhealthy foods that are not good for our bodies. Both adults and children should be served balanced food, and everybody should have food awareness to understand the nutrient level of each food item.
Children should be cared for more to check if they are getting healthy and balanced food. In the 1990’s, when Maggie was launched on the market, saying it was a two-minute noodle with all the healthy nutrients in it, Indian parents started serving the same to their kids. Though there were many who didn’t believe in packed foods and so refrained from such products and food items. I remember I never had Maggie during my childhood and even I didn’t know its taste. So, I did not crave for it at all. But I have seen my friends running behind those who used to bring Maggie as their lunch in their lunch boxes.
When I grew up, I also saw a few of my colleagues to crave for such noodles a lot. They were grown ups, but they still used to ignore their healthy lunch box to have some of these from the office cafeteria. At the same time, I also saw these people cry with stomach aches and go to the doctor for a check-up. One of my colleagues’ digestive systems became so bad that he was not able to digest anything when the doctor asked him to stop eating noodles totally and have only boiled veggies. This can happen to anybody. This is why we should keep ourselves aloof from such things.
Some packed foods can be very tasty as well as create an urge inside us to eat more. And the moment we eat them more, our bodies are in danger. Anything packed is always dangerous.
Go back to our ancient Indian food habits and you will come to know what a balanced diet is. According to our ancient food habit, we should have three meals a day, which would include breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At breakfast and lunch, our meals can be heavy. This is why our breakfast consists of food items like idli, dosa, poha, upma, paratha, etc. Our lunch plate includes all the types of food, starting from carbohydrates to vitamins and proteins. Our Indian lunch plate mostly includes roti, rice, any vegetable, one bowl of pulse soup, salad, papad, curd, and pickle. This is a full lunch plate according to any Indian household, and it can vary with the type of veggies and soups prepared. On the other hand, our dinner habits have changed a lot nowadays, but just go back to the ancient days and you will find that dinners were always light and eaten before 7pm. Our dinners consist of ragi balls, roasted gramme powder paste, or the liquid form of the same.
This is why our ancestors were fit and healthy compared to what we are now. But it is never too late! Still, we can start having food in the same balanced manner and also teach our children to have food in a healthy manner.
Nowadays, it is us adults who crave unhealthy food more than our kids, because all the unhealthy packaged foods were launched when we were small. And most of us tasted them all because we were not aware of their being unhealthy. But now we are aware and it’s time to say “NO” to all kinds of packed food, be it Maggie or Upma. Instant anything is harmful instead.
