Know your 'health food'

THE FOOD CLUB

There's a brand new bandwagon on which a number of people are jumping, hoping to make a killing.

That they are "" if they are "" is more a measure of the dense clouds that envelope this particular bandwagon. I'm talking about the health food business, currently in the throes of an identity crisis.

Clinical nutritionist and director of Whole Foods (with branches in Delhi and Chandigarh currently) Ishi Khosla hits the nail on the head when she says that advertisers seek to equate low-calorie and/or low-sugar, low-fat products with guilt-free bingeing.

In my now-permanent quest for foods that are low on calories (but high on taste), I have found imported chocolates that claim to be safe for diabetics, but which contain enough fructose to be as sweet as regular chocolate. I have seen mithai which proudly advertises that it contains no sugar, only the paste of dates and slivered almonds.

Khosla confesses that the path of a clinical nutritionist is strewn with the time bombs of misconceptions about health and diet. That there is a difference between organic food and diet food is a fact that few are aware of. That "zero calorie" is a figment of some copywriter's imagination has escaped the majority of the thinking public.

"Nothing is zero calories, except water," chuckles Khosla. Anything made from fructose is no better than the regular kind, and she heaped scorn on me for not being able to figure out that date paste does not equal low-calorie mithai.

The other side of the coin is that awareness is trickling in, however slowly. There are people who head to Bread & More (branches in Vadodara, Delhi, Mumbai and Goa) and ask for wheat and oat or multi-grain bread.

"Few of our customers are naïve enough to ask for brown bread," young Dhruv Lamba tells me. "They ask for the grain they want by name "" not colour." Bread & More is one of the very few places I've seen that peels and segments a variety of fruit and vacuum seals it in single-serve portions for the executive on the run who believes in life beyond burgers and samosas.

And if Mughlai food giant Karim's has not started cooking with less clarified butter, it is because they strongly believe in what they do.

"Our cuisine has remained unchanged from the times of the Mughal empire. At that time, people used to do much more physical labour. The problem is not with the clarified butter we use, but with the rest of our lifestyle," rues Haji Alimuddin, now in his seventies.

He anticipates that a time will come when customers will walk in to the restaurant, pay to have a whiff of the food and leave.

Will that time actually come? The last five years have seen the mushrooming of ice-cream parlours selling sugar-free ice-cream, cake shops doing puddings and pies with Splenda, and restaurants advertising low-calorie options. Perhaps Haji Alimuddin is right after all.

marryamhreshii@yahoo.co.in