New Delhi: It calls for guts to say that foods could cure even cancer. But celebrated clinical dietician Manjari Chandra makes the claim with panache, holding the view that right nutrition is the potent weapon to annihilate all manners of diseases.
This is what makes the kernel of her recent book ‘Heal with Foods’. She terms her food repertoire for different diseases as magical ingredients right on the cover of the book underpinned by ‘must read’ prescription of Bollywood actress Sonali Bendre Behl, a cancer survivor. Call Mrs Chandra’s book Gutway to health, if you will.
Enter Manjari’s kitchen clinic with ‘magical ingredients’ for the treatment of all manners of life style diseases- diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, liver disease, cancer, obesity; you name it.She is a great votary of gut health and underlines it as the be all and end all of wellness. According to her book, gut is the battlefield where we either triumph over the diseases or be defeated by them. Gut is not a feeling but a fact of wellness. Her book Heal with Foods is a veritable pharmacopoeia of food medicines.
Clinical nutritionist, author and wellness coach Mrs Chandra says that blend of traditional food wisdom and modern nutrition science constitutes the quintessence of holistic health and freedom from all diseases. Saving our gut from foods that produce inflammation there and in turn all kinds of life style diseases is her mantra of best health. Her book is a red flag against fancy foods that swamp the market clothed in fake immunity and nutrition claims. According to her, designer packet foods wreak havoc on gut health.
Manjari Chandra succinctly sums up, ‘Our food choices are driven by what we subconsciously feed to our brain by advertisements, peers, social norms and many environmental factors. Immaculately designed packets and their strategic placement on store shelves compel us into buying food that, in reality, we do not need. These are the foods that deteriorate our over all health, particularly the gut, when in fact, the gut defines and influences every aspect of our health- from digestion and weight to mood, hormonal balance and immunity. And gut health can only be enhanced by eating nutritionally rich, wholesome foods.’
In the book she has elaborated on the science of Gut and its cruciality in treatment of diseases and maintaining prime of health in detail. She holds that gut is both creator of diseases and destroyer of diseases, depending on the kind of food we eat. It is here that we win or we lose our battle for health. The book staggers in three parts, Our Food Choices, Gut Health and Magical Ingredients. In its last part, she highlights life changing ingredients that can serve as a magical remedy for preventing and reversing chronic diseases while enhancing general well being.
Finally, foods have achieved the status of medicine and very effective at that. Sadly, it took a long time to be recognised as medicine. It has been a gut feeling for ages that foods might be important in the treatment of diseases evidenced by the fact that the patients invariably asked their doctors about food they should eat but doctors would not give a damn to it. They would say patients could eat anything so long as they take medicines. In a way, modern doctors thwarted for long foods being seen as medicines.
