The panel titled ‘The path ahead: Better nutrition and preparedness are the best ways’ focused on how good nutrition would fuel India’s quest to become a healthier and more resilient nation. The session, moderated by Pooja Biraia, THE WEEK’s Principal Correspondent, brought together Dr Jyoti Wadhwa of Apollo Athenaa, Dr Sushant Mittal from Action Cancer Hospital, and Dr Krishna Murty of Subharti Hospital to discuss how nutrition shapes long-term wellbeing. Excerpts:
Pooja Biraia/ Let me begin by asking you, ma’am, what a balanced diet means. Is there a diet that can prevent cancer?
Dr Jyoti Wadhwa/ As I am an oncologist, I restrict today’s discussion to cancer risk reduction and also the important role diet plays while a cancer patient is undergoing treatment. A balanced diet is one which not only provides enough calories and nutrients, but one that should also enable cells to renew and repair themselves. It should contain enough macronutrients, namely carbohydrates, proteins and good quality fats, but also micronutrients, vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals, which we often get from fruits and vegetables.
Biraia/ Do antioxidants play a role in cancer care?’
Dr Sushant Mittal/ So, antioxidants act like radical scavengers. We have a lot of ions going around in the body and they need to be taken care of. That is where antioxidant foods, superfoods, the millet diet, and fruits and vegetables come in. They detoxify our body.
Biraia/ When a patient comes to you, how do you judge their level of nutrition?
Dr Krishna Murty/ I would assess any patient on two bases. On the visible parameters, which we call clinical parameters, and on the biochemical or the investigation parameters. So, clinically speaking, you can see how wide the waist is, what the body weight is, what the BMI is, etc. General condition of the skin, nails and eyes would tell you a lot.
Biochemically, a lot of parameters like albumin, the level of haemoglobin, etc. will tell more.
Biraia/ There is this term ‘precision oncology’ (personalised treatment); do you think it’s time we also have precision nutrition?
Mittal/ Definitely. Just like precision oncology, where one size doesn’t fit everyone, precision nutrition is important because many of our patients have other comorbidities like diabetes, chronic kidney disease, hypertension, food allergies, etc. They have different tastes from across India, across the world. We treat international patients; they have different cultural beliefs. So all this needs to be taken care of and we have to counsel them in a holistic way. So, along with the physician, the dietitian, the F&B team, everyone needs to take care of the patient. They have to sit down with the patient and decide what diet chart needs to be given and what they can follow even at home.
Biraia/ Could you bust some nutrition myths you have come across?
Wadhwa: I would say most people are ill-informed about what is right and wrong in terms of a healthy diet. The biggest myth is that if we take a superfood, we can reduce our risk of a certain type of disease. There is no single superfood. Diet should be used as preventive medicine. If we eat intelligently and not restrict ourselves to just these so-called strict diets or fad diets or superfoods, then we will be able to do justice to our [body].
We should start eating sensibly, using common sense, and that is what we want to educate people on. There is no need to follow fad diets because you would not be able to stick to them and you would lose out on benefits from other sources.
Mittal/ We come across many patients who are taking alternative therapies. And those alternative physicians tell them a particular diet, and that the medicine needs to be taken only with fruits or liquids. So, when they come to us after three-four months, they have lost a lot of weight because they are malnourished. They didn’t have carbohydrates, they didn’t have fat, they didn’t have proteins. Anyone surviving only on fruits will be malnourished. This is one of the myths I feel that one should not follow blindly. One should go to a proper health care [professional] who knows the science and gives them proper treatment.
Murty/ One of the most common things I come across is that the patient is barely 35kg, is highly undernourished, has just been operated on, but the family members have said no to all white things—milk, curd, rice, etc. There are such myths. Another is that people say that if you remove the yellow part of the egg, you will not get cholesterol, because cholesterol is bad for you. This is a big myth. All the cells in the body are made up of cholesterol. Without cholesterol, your cells would die.
Then there is the myth that everyone needs to take nutritional supplements nowadays. Not required. A normal vegetarian diet would be healthy for you.
Biraia/ Please tell us one good nutrition habit that everyone can use.
Wadhwa/ I try to follow simple rules. Simple diet. Which means that I eat locally produced seasonal vegetables and fruits. Nothing fancy.
Mittal/ Whatever our grandmothers used to tell us. That is a healthy, balanced diet. It has carbohydrates, fats, protein, micronutrients, macronutrients, everything.
Murty/ Doctors are generally not following a healthy diet, so I will not say what I am doing. But one of the most common nutritional diseases in the world is dyslipidemia (unhealthy level of lipids in the blood). A common thing we can do that will help is intermittent fasting. So, 16 hours of fasting. There is only water intake and you eat the rest of the time.
