Pitru Paksha at Banganga Tank, Mumbai, India (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Mahalaya Paksha or Pitru Paksha falls on 30 September 2016, Friday..
Those who read my blog posts on Mahalaya would know that I had indicated that there are some dietary restriction to be followed.
About a year earlier I posted that the Bhagavad Gita speaks about Food habits in detail and quoted texts with explanation.
I have tried these Dietary recommendation to the letter since last Mahalaya Paksha.
While I can not comment on the spiritual benefits that could have accrued, I can definitely assert that there was an astonishing improvement in my mental state and disposition.
In fact my wife, daughter and son were surprised that I was cool even under pressure, anger had ceased to exist and I was listening to others patiently without interrupting them, a quality which I am not accustomed to.
I could feel I remained undisturbed and was in fact was watching things happening around me,even if it involved me, as though I was a spectator.
There was no hurry in doing things, no anxiety.
There was no heaviness while waking up in the morning.
This I could attribute only to the Diet, for there was no significant change in my Lifestyle other than this.
The question of normal Diet is yet to be decided beyond dispute.
Dietary requirements vary depending on Countries,Culture,Sex,Work patterns,Individual needs and climate.
Blind imitation of Diets recommended by the West is no solution to India.
I hold the view that out ancestors have tried by trial and error the present system of Food habits.
In India we have various food patterns in various States and I feel that it the best.
For instance South India being hotter than North one needs immediate release of energy by Carbohydrates, that is Rice.
In North you need more of protein to withstand the extremes of Cold and heat.
You take more of Wheat.
I have personally experienced the effects of the food system recommended to us by our ancestors for each region and I can vouch that it is the best than anything else.
I also have tried the Diet prescribed by the Sastras for Mahalaya Paksha for the entire 15 Days.
I found my Mind to be calm, Unperturbed and body light.
I was feeling very fine Health-wise.
It is a simple Diet.
For Lunch around 1230 pm , you take food which excludes certain vegetables like Potato, Tomatoes,Garlic,Onion,
You take a light snack of 2-3 Idlis,or Dosas or Rice Upma or Fluffed Rice(Aval) and Fruits at night.
That’s all.
No Breakfast no munching in between.
Hindus do we have a fasting day once in Fifteen Days,Ekadasi, on the 11th Day of the axing and waning Moon.
On the next Day Dwadesi, one is expected to take diet in stages with a Gooseberry Chutney in Curds and Rice with fresh Greens (Agathi Keerai)
Now I came across a news item that Starvation Diet may actually be good.
Story:
Pinned to my mother Shirley’s fridge on yellowing, curled paper is a handwritten copy of a two-week crash diet. It has been there since 1979, the year she decided she wanted to shed a stone in a fortnight. Its survival is testament to the faith she holds in it.
Among other tortures while on the diet, she allows herself no more than half a grapefruit and a slice of dry toast with black coffee each morning. Lunch is a few cold cuts of meat and a side of vegetables, and dinner is similar. On a typical day this will amount to about 650 calories.
Now 78, you would have thought she’d have deserted this gruelling regime and allowed herself to go into diet retirement.
But like so many women of her generation, she believes the occasional fortnight of eating little is key to a svelte figure and good health.
Such extreme slimming plans have drifted out of fashion in the past few decades. Crash diets are supposed to slow your metabolism down, leading to more weight gain when you stop.
These days, the mantra recited by the medical profession is steady weight loss rather than starvation. And being curvy – a la Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks – is in vogue.
Science reporter Michael Mosley speaks to scientists who have discovered that periods of eating very little or nothing may be the key to controlling chemicals produced by the body linked to the development of disease and the ageing process. This backs up recent studies on animals fed very low-calorie diets which found the thinnest (without being medically underweight or malnourished) are the healthiest and live the longest.
The key, say researchers at the University of Southern California’s Longevity Institute, is the hormone Insulin-Like Growth Factor 1 (IGF-1). Mosley explains: ‘IGF-1 and other growth factors keep our cells constantly active. It’s like driving with your foot on the accelerator pedal, which is fine when your body is shiny and new, but keep doing this all the time and it will break down.’
According to Professor Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute, one way to take the foot off the accelerator, and reduce IGF-1 levels dramatically – as well as cholesterol, and blood pressure – is by fasting.
I chanced to read the The China Study by Dr,Campbell co-authored with his son.
Dr.Campbell is reputed to be one of the authorities on Dieting.
I came across the following critique by his detractors, who also advance their views.
My observation is that these detractors of Dr.Campbell have nothing to say about the evidence submitted by Dr.Campbell on the behavior of rats which were given low as well high protein Diet.
Te result was the rats that were fed low protein were more active, exercised more and were healthier than the ones that were given high protein Diet.
Again Dr.Campbell submits a study where he proves that meat-eating triggers the chemicals that set Cancer going.
There is no comment on this by the critics of Dr.Campbell.
My observation based on people, though I did not do a study, is that people who eat vegetarian food are less prone to Cancer and other debilitating diseases .
And recent Studies have proved that Cholesterol is in no way connected to Heart attack!(read my blog on this in Health)
I suggest reading Dr.Campbell’s Book The China Study, which is very informative.
“Eating foods that contain any cholesterol above 0 mg is unhealthy.” — T. Colin Campbell, The China Study
It was growing up on one of the many dairy farms of the rural American landscape, long before the China Study had taken place, and yet longer before the book was written, that the young T. Colin Campbell formed the views that would shape the early portion of his career.
Cow’s milk, “Nature’s most perfect food,” was central to the existence of his family and community. Most of the food that Campbell’s family ate they produced themselves. Campbell milked cows from the age of five through his college years. He studied animal nutrition at Cornell, and did his PhD research on ways to make cows and sheep grow faster so the American food supply could be pumped up with more and more protein.1
Fast forward to the present. Campbell is now on the advisory board of the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine,2 which describes itself as “a nonprofit organization that promotes preventive medicine, conducts clinical research, and encourages higher standards for ethics and effectiveness in research,”3 but whose opposition to the use of animal foods reflects its ties to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other animal rights groups.4
Campbell’s new book The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health hit shelves in January 2005 and details the turning points in his post-graduate research that led him to become a famed opponent of animal foods and an advocate of the vegan diet.
It takes the reader on a tour through Campbell’s early animal experiments, which he interpreted to implicate animal protein as a primary cause of cancer, through the massive epidemiological study after which the book was named.
Only 39 of 350 pages are actually devoted to the China Study. The bold statement on page 132 that “eating foods that contain any cholesterol above 0 mg is unhealthy,”5 is drawn from a broad — and highly selective — pool of research. Yet chapter after chapter reveals a heavy bias and selectivity with which Campbell conducted, interpreted, and presents his research.
Dietary protein and Cancer.
The first strike against the pro-protein mantra Campbell had inherited from his nutritional forbears came while he was studying the relationship between aflatoxin (AF), a mold-related contaminant often found in peanut butter, and cancer in the Philippines.
Campbell was informed by a colleague that, although the areas with the highest consumption of peanut butter had the highest incidence of liver cancer, it was the children of the “best-fed families,” who consumed the most protein, who were getting liver cancer.
Whether the best-fed Pilipino families ate the many staples of modern affluent diets like refined breads and sugars isn’t mentioned.6
This observation was corroborated by a study published in “an obscure medical journal,” that fed AF to two groups of rats, one consuming a 5% protein diet, one consuming a 20% protein diet, in which every rat in the latter group got liver cancer or its precursor lesions, and none in the former group got liver cancer or precursor lesions.7 Campbell went on to investigate the possible relationship between nutritional factors, including protein, and cancer, a study that proceeded for 19 years with NIH funding.8His conclusion was revolutionary and provocative: while chemical carcinogens may initiate the cancer process, dietary promoters and anti-promoters control the promotion of cancer foci,9 and it is nutritional factors, not chemical carcinogens, that are the ultimate deciding factors in the development of cancer.10″
The study confirms that canned food is a source of BPA exposure. But it does nothing to clear up the question of whether this sort of exposure to BPA has health consequences.
BPA is found in some plastic bottles and in the epoxy resins used to coat the inside of many food and beverage cans. Previous studies have shown that some BPA from can linings does get into the foods they hold.
Some scientists are concerned about BPA exposure because the chemical can act like the hormone estrogen, and studies show that high levels can affect sexual development in animals.
In the new study, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health compared people who were given canned vegetable soup for lunch each day with people who got vegetable soup made without any canned ingredients.
And they found that a couple hours after eating, the people who had canned soup had BPA levels in their urine that were about 12 times higher than the people who didn’t.
The levels were still within the range that government agencies consider safe.
Even so, “We were surprised by the magnitude of the elevation,” says Karin Michels, senior author of the paper. Michels says previous studies have found much less dramatic increases after people drank from polycarbonate bottles.
It’s unlikely that soup caused BPA levels to remain high very long, Michels says, because the body tends to excrete most BPA within a few hours. But she says levels could stay high for people who regularly consume foods and beverages from cans.
Michels says she can’t comment on the health implications of the finding because that wasn’t part of the study. Even so, she says, food makers might want to consider eliminating BPA from can linings.
The famous writer late Sujatha(Mr.Rangarajan) once told me that ‘after 60, the greatest relief one can have is to pass motion in the morning with out effort’
True, constipation at any age is very irksome at the least and may be a cause and portend some serious ailment.
One result because of constipation is Piles, which does not have a cure despite claim to the contrary.
Surgery might alleviate the suffering for the time being.
The best way to ensure free bowel movement is to drink lots of water,eat vegetables, especially greens,leafy vegetables and of course lots of foods rich in Fiber content.
Some of the foods that are rich in Fiber …
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Artichokes. Few fiber-rich foods are more fun to eat than artichokes, and this veggie treat provides you with about 7 grams of fiber.
Pears. Sweet, juicy pears rank high up on the list of surprisingly fiber-rich foods, ranging between 4.4 and 5.5 grams depending on the type of pear.
Berries. Blackberries and raspberries weigh in at 4 grams of fiber per serving and can be very tasty as a topping to breakfast cereal, as a stand-alone dessert, or as a simple, refreshing snack.
Mixed veggies. One-half cup of cooked vegetables delivers about 4 grams of fiber.
Cocoa powder. If you like to make your own hot chocolate, 2 tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa powder in a one-cup serving equals about 4 grams of fiber.
Sweet potato. Cooked with its skin on, a sweet potato serves up 3.8 grams of fiber. You can also get this fiber by baking sweet potato fries, a great alternative to traditional French fries.
Dried figs. These sweet, slightly-chewy treats give you about 3.7 grams of fiber per serving.
Pumpkin. A half-cup of canned pumpkin has about 3.6 grams of fiber. It’s a great ingredient in pies and breads. It also helps thicken stews and soups.
Almonds. These nuts have a number of health benefits, including a relatively high fiber content — 3.5 grams of fiber per serving.
Peas. The common green pea served as a side dish or added to stews and casseroles provides 2.5 to 3.5 grams of fiber per serving. Split peas, commonly used in pea soup, have as much as 8 grams per serving.
Of course prunes, beans, legumes, bran, bulgur wheat — and yes, those fiber crackers — are all high-fiber foods and can be a part of a healthy high-fiber diet. But for diversity and taste, you can change it up with these additions. The more variety you have in your diet, the healthier it will be overall.
The American Dietetic Association recommends 25 grams of fiber per day for women and 38 grams per day for men. After age 50, the recommended amounts are 21 grams per day for women and 30 grams per day for men.
Fiber: Get more fiber or bulk in the diet. If this cannot be done adequately by diet changes, consider adding a fiber supplement to the diet. There are many of these available, including psyllium(Metamucil) and methylcellulose (Citrucel). In general, these fiber supplements are not drugs and are safe and effective if taken together with sufficient water. They are not laxatives and must be taken regularly (whether you are constipated or not) in order for them to help you avoid future constipation. They are generally taken suspended in a glass of water one to three times daily. Start with once daily, and increase to twice daily after a week, and then to three times daily after another week if necessary.
Exercise:Regular physical activity is an important component in bowel health. Try a daily exercise such as the knee-to-chest position. Such positions may activate bowel movements. Spend about 10-15 minutes in this position. Breathe in and out deeply.
Hydration: Drink plenty of fluids, especially water and fruit juices. Drink 6-8 glasses of water daily in addition to beverages with meals.
Alcohol and Caffeine: Decrease alcohol intake and caffeinated beverages, including coffee, tea, or cola drinks. In general, it is a good idea to have an extra glass of water (over and above the 6 to 8 daily mentioned previously) for every cup of coffee, tea, or alcoholic drink.
Bowel Hygiene: Go to the toilet at the same time every day, preferably after meals, and allow enough time as not to strain.
Laxatives: Avoid using over-the-counter laxatives. Try to avoid laxatives containing senna (Senokot) or buckthorn (Rhamnus purshiana) because long-term intake may damage the lining of the bowel and injure nerve endings to the colon.
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