The 3 bad boys of the Diabetes epidemic
Diabetes…. a very well-known health situation among people worldwide, our country INDIA is leading in this…but have we ever thought why that is happening & what has changed since last 30+ years or so. I am sure we all have some idea what has changed & caused Diabetes to become leading health situation in India. I am penning top #3 most important factors, which are causing this.
No Movement (Sedentary life style): We are not moving at all, even not a simple walk. I remember my grandfather used to ride cycle every day, and we used to walk a lot for - to visit our relatives house, to visit temple, to buy groceries, to buy vegetables...etc. But that had started changing slowly, from Walk to Bicycle to Scooter to …. now Car. Today most of the Tier1/Tier2 cities in India, people stopped commuting by walk, which is good from prosperity perspective, but we are losing underlying benefits of walking. Though today people pay money to go to Gym, etc, but then this requires a discipline, and commitment, & in which most of the people fail. When walking was part of life, then we did not require to be disciplined as there were no option anyways except walking 😊.
Our Food:
Eating too much: if you look today’s perspective, we are eating way beyond what we need to eat. Our body does not require that much amount of food, what we eat today. I am here talking about quantity and number of times we eat, I personally think #1 reason why we are eating as we have lot of things are available to eat. Few years back like in 70s/80s, Indians did not have that many things to eat, but today you know, just look at your kitchen.
Not Eating Right: In continuation to above point, we have too many things to eat, and 90% are of that not right things to eat. Most of the people in today’s scenarios what do they eat – Chips, Pizza, Burger, Pasta, Noodles, Cakes, White Bread etc., these are just extra calories [bad carbs] which is getting converted into FAT. Even snacks like Biscuits, Namkeens, Samosas, Bhajji, Pakaudi etc. do fall in the same category. If you see people’s eating habit, they are eating at-least one of these things on daily basis.
Food Quality: in last 20s/30s years, quality of vegetables, fruits, grains have gone done tremendously. Our soil is now much more contaminated then any time before due to multiple reasons like pollution, use of pesticides etc. when inputs are not strong enough, how can we expect output to be good, and that’s reason we don’t see vegetables/fruits keeping the same goodness as these were 20 yrs before. Another imp reason is – keeping the vegetables/fruits in cold storage so that this can be supplied for longer duration – is causing nutrient in vegetables / fruits to go down to almost ZERO. We don’t get what we are thinking that we are getting from vegetables/fruits.
Stress: In today’s fast life, our life has become much more stressful than ever before. We are always in stress thinking about traffic, work pressure in office, handling office colleagues /our boss, /challenges in businesses, meeting targets. etc. Also, over period of time, we have seen that work hours have increased from 8 hrs to 10-12 hrs in day, woman has started working, that means in a family, there is no time, where people can sit, relax & have fun. Even having fun, enjoyment is also wrapped with Junk in today’s life.
If we understood above 3 points, we might think that we know what we need to do, but not really (in terms of food it becomes real challenge), as we don’t know what we don’t know, so we need someone who knows what we need to have, that’s where we required professionals who knows what to eat ( right nutrition) , exercises what we need to do, how to handle stress, etc.
