Waiter, Bring Me Some Health Please!
November 12, 2009 by Madhav Shivpuri
Filed under Featured, Food, Restaurant
Breaking news - “Deep fried food is bad for your health”!
Unless you lived in a village without access to decent medical information or advice from a doctor, I assume we all know that.
“So shouldn’t I eat my favourite samosa?” is what you say. But before you order a deep fried item as appetizer next time you are at a restaurant, read this.
Villains at the table
Calorie watching websites like this one http://www.medindia.net/patients/foodcalories/index.aspcan easily give you an idea of how many calories exist in each type of food or oil (like coconut, peanut, mustard, sun flower). A quick look up will tell you that a spoon of oil has about 120 calories. Now add to that all the ingredients – vegetables, nuts, meat, spices, salt etc., and before you know it each samosa or chilli chicken would be above 200 calories! When you consider that a normal adult needs only about 1200 calories in a day (give or take a hundred depending on gender and height) it’s not difficult to overshoot the daily calorie limit in just one meal!
Let me rattle off a few calorie figures just to set the mood!
- Samosa- 200
Chilli Chicken – 234
Sheekh Kebab – 311
Fried Fish – 363
Gathia – 260
Did you just tune out when reading about calories? If so, let me remind you that deep fried items are for bad another reason. And that is because we tend to eat deep fried stuff outside our homes, not because we can’t make them at home, but because they taste just so good.
At home the chances of using fresh cooking oil each time is higher compared to eating out because restaurants generally tend to reuse the oil to conserve costs (obvious isn’t it?). If oil is bad for one’s arteries, the reused and hence reheated oil is found to be even worse as it could lead to cardiovascular disease, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimers disease, Huntington’s disease, various liver disorders, and cancer (source: http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/id/QAA358078).
Waiter, bring me some health please!
Let me give you some good news and an (obvious) alternative for appetizer. May I present to you – salad! Yes, this part of the post is all about the benefits of salad, and if I sound like your mother asking you to finish your salad, so be it!
Apart from economically helping our humble farmers by consuming their produce, we can do ourselves a world of good by eating a bowl of salad every day. Salads and fruits minimize your risk of developing cancers, improves blood levels and blood circulation. It also helps fight heart diseases, improves your vision and strengthen’s your hair roots (oh yes!). I can go on, but I will stop 
So next time when you are eating out and call the waiter to order the artery clogging but yet appetizing samosa or chilli chicken, would you consider changing your order to the virtuous salad?
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Fatty and Deep Fried foods are obviously bad for one’s health. Having said that, few things provide the kind of satisfaction & comfort the way anything ‘deep fried’ does. While one must be conscious not to consume an excess, I think the occasional indulgence is just fine.
What needs to change in our modern lives is primarily the ’stress’ of urban life. I really believe that more than fried and other harmful foods, most of today’s illnesses are perpetuated by stress and hypertension. We need to try and relax.
A positive mind and body will digest that yummy ’samosa’ much better than a wound-up system!!
So be happy, and eat wisely
Hi Kartik, good points. That reminds of what our grand mothers used to tell – that in olden days people consumed lots of butter and ghee, and that kings had golden foil on their food. If they could digest it and live to a 100, can’t we?