Animal foods and their counterparts

Animal foods such as Milk, Curd, Cheese, Egg, Chicken, Meat, Fish, and Shrimp contain plenty of calories and loads of protein and fats. But they don’t have fiber.

The protein found in animal foods is high in uric acid which stresses the kidneys. The fats in animal foods contain cholesterol which might be bad for your heart. 

There are some plant foods which provide loads of protein and fats. They are Nuts (Almond, Walnut), Seeds (Sesame seeds, Pumpkin seeds, and Sunflower seeds), Avocado, Coconut and Oils (Olive oil, Sesame oil, flaxseed oil). The good thing about these plant foods is they don’t have uric acid, cholesterol and they have fiber. Moreover, they don’t need extensive cooking so we can save some money on cooking gas. Nuts and seeds have high amount of phytic acid which causes poor assimilation of minerals in your body. To reduce the phytic acid, always soak the nuts and seeds overnight and discard the soaked water.

Does that mean we need to avoid eating animal foods? The answer is no. They have Vitamin B12, Vitamin D and some other nutrients which we won’t normally find in plant foods. So it would be a good idea to add animal foods occasionally.

Chimpanzee Diet vs. South Indian Diet

The other day I was reading a book – ‘Green for life’’, written by Victoria Boutenko. She compares the Standard American Diet with the diet of wild Chimpanzees. The reason is that Chimpanzees share an estimated 99.4% of genes with human. At the same time, these animals possess an extremely strong natural immunity to AIDS, Hepatitis C, cancer, and other fatal human illnesses. Hence, as per Victoria Boutenko, our diets are supposed to be 99.4% similar to the diet of chimpanzees in order to be healthy.

It came to my mind that what about comparing South India Diet with the diet of Chimpanzees.  Let us see how much we deviate from the Chimpanzee diet. Here is my analysis and comparison.

If you see the pie chart of the Chimpanzee diet, they predominantly eat, raw greens (green leaves) and fruits. Now let us see the pie chart of South Indian diet. To prepare the pie chart, I have considered a sample diet which we normally consume in any one day.

	Refined Grains (Cooked, White Rice)	Pulses (Cooked)	Vegetables (Cooked)	Dairy (Milk, Curd, Ghee)
Breakfast
Idli (or) Dosa	2	0.5
Tea				0.25
Lunch
Rice	3
Sambar		0.25	0.25
Kootu			0.5
Poriyal			0.5
Curd				0.25
Coffee				0.25
Dinner
Rice	3
Sambar		0.25	0.25
Kootu			0.5
Poriyal			0.5
Total	8.00	1.00	2.50	0.75
Total (%)	65%	8%	20%	6%

Measurements are in cups. 1 cup is equal to 236 ml.

If you compare the pie charts, we eat almost all the foods cooked whereas chimpanzees eat raw foods (Of course, Chimpanzees don’t know how to cook.). The other difference is that they eat lot of greens (green leaves) and fruits, whereas we eat less amount of green leaves (keerai) which is part of vegetables group in the pie chart and fruits are optional in our diet.

The comparison indicates that we need to include lot of keerai (either cooked or raw) and fruits in our diet to get the health benefits of these two important foods. If you want to add raw greens in your diet, the simplest method would be making green smoothies with keerai, fruits and nuts.