Mindful Eating: A Path to a Healthy Body: Class 6 Science · Chapter 3

Food: fuel, bricks and guards

What did you eat today? Perhaps hot poha with peanuts, or a roti rolled around last night's sabzi. Food is so ordinary that we hardly think about it. Yet everything you do runs on it: running, laughing, thinking and even growing taller.

In this chapter you will turn into a food detective. You will find out what food is made of and test foods for hidden nutrients. You will plan a plate that keeps you strong. Eating mindfully simply means knowing what you eat, and why.

3.1 What Do We Eat?

Scientists start with careful records. The easiest food data you can collect is about your own meals. So let us begin there.

Now imagine all the diaries of your class spread out on a table. Some families eat lots of rice, others mostly roti. Some eat fish or eggs, while others are vegetarian. Where do such differences come from? A big part of the answer is where a family's food traditions began.

3.1.1 Food in different regions

India is huge. It stretches more than 3,000 km from north to south. It has hot deserts, rainy coasts, cold mountains and wide river plains. Each kind of land and weather suits different crops.

Why does this happen? For most of history, families cooked what their own land gave them. Bajra thrives in dry, sandy soil, so it became the bread of the desert. Coconut palms love the warm, wet coast, so coconut flavours much of Kerala's cooking. The rivers and ponds of Assam are full of fish, so fish curries are a favourite there.

Crops are only part of the story. Taste, culture, festivals and family traditions also decide what people cook. Two neighbours can grow the same crops and still make them into very different dishes.

3.1.2 How have cooking practices changed over time?

Ask your grandparents how food was cooked when they were small. You may hear about smoky fires, heavy grinding stones and pots made of clay. The ways in which we prepare and cook food are called culinary practices. They have changed a great deal in just two or three generations.

What caused these changes? New machines made cooking quicker and less smoky. Faster transport by road and rail brought food from far away into local shops. Communication through radio, TV, phones and the internet spread new recipes everywhere. Many families also have less time to cook, because more adults work outside the home.

3.2 What are the Components of Food?

Every food is a mixture of different substances, called food components. Your body uses each one for a different job. Think of your body as a house that is being built and lived in at the same time. It needs fuel to keep running and bricks to build and repair. It needs guards to keep it safe, a broom to sweep out waste, and plenty of water.

The components that give energy, build the body and guard it are called nutrients. Let us meet them one at a time.

Carbohydrates and fats: energy-giving foods

Picture your school sports day. By the afternoon races, a runner who skipped lunch feels slow, sleepy and a little grumpy. Her friend who ate dal-chawal still has a spring in her step. Food is the body's fuel, and an empty stomach means a low tank.

Your body's quickest fuel is a family of nutrients called carbohydrates. They come in two main kinds. Sugars taste sweet: think of gur, honey, a ripe chikoo or the sugar stirred into chai. Starch does not taste sweet at all. Plants store it in their seeds, roots and tubers. A bowl of rice, a stack of rotis, a roasted bhutta and a plate of boiled shakarkandi are all packed with starch.

One sugar, glucose, reaches the blood very fast. A patient in hospital who cannot eat is often given a drip of glucose solution for this reason. Your body breaks starch down into glucose too, only a little more slowly.

Why do your fingers feel greasy after eating a samosa or a handful of peanuts? You are touching the second fuel, fat. It hides in the oil of a tadka, the butter on a paratha and the layer of malai on boiled milk. Seeds such as til and flaxseed and nuts such as cashew and walnut are full of it. Eggs and fish carry some fat as well.

Fat is the body's stored fuel. Gram for gram, it holds more than twice as much energy as carbohydrate. Your body keeps some fat under the skin as a reserve, where it also works like a warm blanket. Rice, roti, ghee and nuts, rich in these two fuels, are known as energy-giving foods.

Proteins: body-building foods

Look at a photo of yourself at the age of five. Since then your arms, legs, hair and nails have all grown. Where did all that new body come from? It was built from food, mainly from nutrients called proteins.

Proteins are the body's bricks. Muscles, skin, hair and blood all need them. When you scrape your knee, proteins help new skin grow over the wound. That is why dal, paneer and eggs earn the nickname body-building foods. Growing children need plenty of protein. So does a young wrestler training for a kushti bout, whose muscles are growing too.

Vegetarian? No problem. A bowl of dal with rice, a plate of sprouts or a handful of peanuts gives you plenty of protein.

Vitamins and minerals: protective foods

Some nutrients are needed only in tiny amounts, yet they matter a great deal. Two true stories show how.

Vitamin C is one of the vitamins, and iodine is one of the minerals. The vitamin C you need in a whole day would hardly cover the tip of a teaspoon. Still, go without it for weeks and your gums start to bleed. Missing out on any vitamin or mineral for a long time can cause a deficiency disease.

Let us line up the whole team from our house of a body. The fuel is carbohydrates and fats. The bricks are proteins. The guards are vitamins and minerals, often called protective nutrients. These five are the main nutrients. The broom, which is roughage, and water are listed separately, but you cannot stay healthy without them either. You will meet them soon.

Here are two surprises. Your skin is a small vitamin D factory that switches on when sunlight falls on it. So playing outdoors in the sunshine is good for your bones. And the salt in your food never came from a plant or an animal. It comes from the sea, or from rocks of salt dug out of the ground.

Keep the vitamins in your food

Imagine chopped bhindi left in a bowl of water "to keep it fresh". Sadly, some vitamins dissolve in water, and they drain away with it. Heat does damage too. Boil palak for too long and it turns dull and limp, and much of its vitamin C is gone. A few simple habits save these vitamins.

• Always wash fruits and vegetables to remove dirt and germs, but do it before you cut or peel them.
• Do not leave cut vegetables soaking in water.
• Cook with a lid on, in just enough water, and for no longer than needed.
• Use leftover cooking water in dal, soup or dough instead of throwing it away.
• Eat some raw fruit or salad every day.

Roughage and water

Stir a spoonful of sabja seeds into a glass of water and wait five minutes. Each tiny seed gets wrapped in a coat of jelly. That jelly is fibre holding on to water! Dietary fibre, or roughage, is the part of plant food that your body cannot digest.

So why eat it? Roughage acts like the house's broom. It soaks up water and gives bulk to what is left after digestion, so the waste stays soft and slides out easily. With too little roughage, waste turns hard and dry. Going to the toilet becomes difficult, a problem called constipation.

Look for roughage in the chewy, crunchy parts of plants. Good sources are the bran in whole-wheat atta, the skins of dals, leafy greens, salad and nuts. Fruits eaten with their peel, such as guava, count too.

And the water? On a hot May afternoon you sweat, and the sweat drying on your skin cools you down. The water you lose must be replaced. Inside, water is the body's delivery service, carrying digested food to every part. It also flushes waste out as urine. Sip water through the day; do not wait until your throat feels dry.

3.3 How to Test Different Components of Food?

Can you tell whether a food has starch just by looking at it? Not really. A slice of potato and a slice of cucumber both look pale and wet. But a few quick tests with common chemicals can reveal some nutrients. Vitamins and minerals are harder to catch. Checking for them needs costly instruments that a school lab does not have.

You will test foods for three nutrients: starch, fat and protein. Test the same set of foods in all three activities, so that you can compare the results. Our set is boiled sweet potato, cornflour paste, boiled rajma, cucumber, paneer, ghee, crushed almonds and boiled egg white. You may add foods of your own.

3.3.1 Test for starch

Iodine solution is brown. When it touches starch, it turns a deep blue-black. Most other substances leave it brown. So if you see blue-black, you have found starch.

3.3.2 Test for fats

Fat leaves a greasy mark on paper that does not dry away. Light can shine through that mark, a little like a window.

3.3.3 Test for proteins

To find protein, we use two chemicals together: copper sulfate solution, which is pale blue, and caustic soda solution. If the food has protein, the mixture slowly turns violet. These chemicals can harm skin and eyes, so your teacher will show you this test.

Your three tables hold a surprise. We call rajma a body-building food, yet it passed the starch test too. Paneer and almonds carried fat along with their protein. So a name such as body-building food tells you a food's biggest gift, not its only one. And the cucumber that failed every test? It is no empty food. It is mostly water, and it brings vitamins, minerals and roughage that these three tests cannot see.

3.4 Balanced Diet

Imagine four guests at a wedding feast: a two-year-old, a teenage footballer, a farm worker who ploughed all morning and a grandfather of seventy-five. Should their plates look the same? Not at all. The footballer and the farm worker burn far more energy than the others. The toddler has a tiny stomach but is growing fast. The grandfather moves less and needs strong bones. Someone who is ill, or getting better, has special needs too. Even a girl and a boy of the same age need slightly different amounts.

Still, one rule works for everyone. A healthy day of eating must supply every nutrient, and roughage and water too, in the amounts that person needs. We call this a balanced diet.

Nutrition scientists in India offer a simple picture of a day's food. About half of what you eat should be vegetables and fruits. A good share should be cereals and millets, best as whole grains. The rest can be dals, beans, eggs, fish or meat, with milk or curd and a small handful of nuts. Use oil, sugar and salt only in small amounts.

Food labels and junk food

Turn over a packet of biscuits or namkeen. Somewhere on the back you will find a small table headed Nutrition information. It tells you how many grams of fat, sugar, protein and more are hiding in every 100 g. Once you can read it, you have a superpower in the snack shop.

Read the corn puffs column once more: lots of fat and salt, very little protein and fibre. Foods with this pattern are called junk food. Think of a bag stuffed with packing foam: it looks full, but little inside is useful. Junk food fills you up with fat, sugar or salt. Yet it carries hardly any of the nutrients that build and guard the body. And junk does not always come in a shiny packet. A plate of syrupy jalebis from a stall fits the same pattern.

A treat now and then does no harm. The trouble starts when junk food becomes everyday food. Energy that the body does not use is stored as fat, so a person can slowly become very overweight. Doctors call this obesity, and it can lead to illnesses such as diabetes later in life. Sugary snacks also feed the germs that make holes in teeth. And a stomach full of chips leaves no room for dal, fruit and greens.

3.5 Millets: Nutrition-rich Cereals

Picture a dry year in a village. The rains come late and stop early. The paddy seedlings wilt, but in the next field a crop of bajra stands tall. Bajra is one of the millets, small-grained cereals that can grow on poor, dry soil with little water. India has grown them for thousands of years.

Millets come in many shapes. Jowar (sorghum) holds its grains in a round cluster at the top. Bajra (pearl millet) carries them on a long spike, like a candle. Ragi (finger millet) spreads its spikes like the fingers of a hand, and sanwa (barnyard millet) has drooping, branching heads. Weight for weight, these tiny grains hold more fibre, iron and calcium than polished rice. A bowl of ragi porridge has many times more calcium than a bowl of white rice. That is why millets are nicknamed nutri-cereals.

For many years people ate more polished rice and wheat, and fewer millets. Now millets are making a comeback. After India proposed it, the United Nations named 2023 the International Year of Millets. During fasts, many families cook sanwa, which is also called samak or vrat ke chawal.

3.6 Food Miles: From Farm to Our Plate

Pick up a single grain of rice from your plate. Before it reached you, it went on a long journey and passed through many hands. Let us follow it.

Many people work on this journey: farmers, farm workers, mill workers, drivers, shopkeepers and cooks. Each step takes time and effort. Rice alone spends about four months growing in the field.

Add up every kilometre of that trip, from the field where the rice grew to the plate where it is eaten. The total is the rice's food miles. The shorter the trip, the less fuel is burnt. Plant foods such as dal, sabzi and millets also need less land and water to produce than most meat. So a plate built mostly from local plant foods saves fuel, land and water. Now compare food from far away with food from nearby.