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.