Previous Next

Ensuring a Balanced Diet

A balanced diet is a meal that provides at least a third of your daily nutritional requirements. To estimate the third, your daily nutritional requirement must be estimated first, which is not easy since the variables influencing the daily requirement (gender, work, ethnicity, climate, etc) differ from person to person.

For Indians, the Indian Council of Medical Research and National Institute of Nutrition published a report on their nutritional requirements¹ that is used throughout this handbook.

But given the fact that we:

• do not measure and cook using weight scales but eyeballing the volume,
• eat our fill as per what our stomach says,
• have no idea of our precise nutritional requirement but follow the average suggested requirement,
• have no idea of our exact metabolism, but follow the averages and approximates,

... we cannot follow an ideal balanced diet. It simply does not exists. What you can eat however, is a meal that is close to a balanced meal. To do that, understand the food group and follow some rules to cook the nearest possible meal to balanced diet.

Food group

Food group is categorisation of food based on their origin and common properties. Though studied in school syllabus, most of us forget the grouping or just don't use it in nutritional decisions. The following is the food group common to Indians .

• Grains and cereals largely contain carbohydrates and provide energy.
• Lentils and legumes largely contain carbohydrates, proteins.
• Nuts and seeds largely contain carbohydrates, proteins and unsaturated fats.
• Roots largely contain carbohydrates and fibres.
• Fruits largely contain simply carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals.
• Vegetables largely contain vitamins and minerals.
• Milk contain fats, vitamins and minerals. Other dietary products like ghee, butter and cheese contain saturated fats.
• Eggs largely contain protein, vitamins and minerals.
• Meat (including seafood) contains proteins, vitamins and minerals.

The rules

• Ensure that you consume the traditional 4 meals of a day — breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner.
• Ensure that it contains carbohydrates (both simple and complex), protein and fats sources as the staple food. Leave out carbohydrates and fatty food only if you are on a sensible fat loss diet.
• Ensure that you consume vegetables and fruits. Most people hate them and rely on supplements to compensate for the lost vitamins and minerals. Supplements cannot replace food.
• Ensure variety of food in your meals. It is the easiest way to ensure you get every nutrient in adequate quantities without boring your taste buds.
• Acquaint yourself with food groups and what they generally constitute and make sure that most (if not all) food groups are present in your meal.

These rules are well integrated within each food culture and cuisine because they evolved according to the taste and energy demands of the respective people. An example of food culture's evolution is rava replacing rice flour in dosa and idly batter and brown rice is replacing white rice to compensate for the decrease in energy requirements. As work is shifting today from hard labour to sedentary work, the local cuisine too is evolving to For instance,

So the easiest way to maintain a balanced meal is to follow your cuisine and enforce variety.

Previous Next