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It is best to be cooking at home during the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak
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Monday, 26 October, 2020, 14 : 00 PM [IST]
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Aayushi Lakhapati
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Modern age living and lifestyle has influenced our eating habits to a large extent. Ready-to-eat, packaged and processed food constitutes a major portion of our daily diet. With busy lifestyles where people find no time to cook and have to eat meals outside, the dependency on processed food has significantly increased. Not only that, the way the food industry markets products and tunes consumer’s mind into wanting the refined and processed food is beyond imagination. Though it makes our lives easy, the increased dependency on heavily processed food is greatly deteriorating our health.
Why Should You Avoid Processed Food?
Processed food is food that is highly refined and the refining process eliminates important nutrients like fibre, vitamins and minerals from it. The food manufacturers do this for a commercial purpose in order to increase the shelf life of the food. Because it’s so low on nutrients, low on fibre, it does not attract moulds and pests and that is why it lasts longer on a supermarket shelf.
Natural whole food does not stay as long as processed food and the reason is because it’s highly altered in a food lab and has additives. For example, fresh fruits spoil easily while canned fruit do not; homemade yogurt spoils much earlier than packaged yogurt bought from a supermarket.
Processed foods are engineered to be addictive and irresistible by adding extra salt, sugar, bad fat, preservatives and so on. They alter the taste buds in a way that it gets difficult to like whole foods. But consuming a lot of processed foods can chemically and structurally harm you. When you eat processed food, you are basically consuming “calorie dense” food while what you really should be eating is a “nutrient dense” food. This leads to nutritional deficiencies and obesity eventually giving rise to a lot of health concerns like diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases.
Why Is It Best To Be Cooking At Home?
When it comes to health and healthy food, you may think it’s the food that you eat. It is, yes. But what’s more important is the process of cooking it or making it. The way your food is made has a lot to do with your health. When you cook at home, you use the best available ingredients in terms of choice and quality both.
Keeping in mind that your family is going to eat it, you do not ever compromise on the quality and the nutritive value of the food. Besides, there is no intent to make the food last longer that pushes you to add extra salt, sugar, preservative, additives and so on. The act of cooking enforces you to consciously or unconsciously make a healthy wholesome diet. Another upside of cooking at home is that you only cook as much required and hence do not overeat because you have called and paid for it. Plus there is no wastage of food.
Cooking teaches you a lot about the ingredients, recipes, nutrition, calories, flavour and so on. And when you learn that, you automatically are inclined towards mindful eating. For example, when you eat a slice of cake in a patisserie, you relish the whole taste, texture, flavour of it. You do not really think of what has gone into it to make it what it is. But when you bake at home, once you know how much of sugar or butter goes in to make that one slice of cake, it almost gets impossible to not of think of it while eating it next time and make better choices.
Why Should You Be Home Cooking During Covid-19?
In the midst of a serious pandemic, eating healthy nutritious food and maintaining good health should be on the very top of your priority list. What you feed your body, makes or breaks your system. It is extremely crucial to maintain healthy eating habits, healthy lifestyle and give your body the necessary nutrition to keep up the immunity and ward off any virus or bacteria coming your way. Your body talks to you and you know best what works well with your system. What better way to give it what it needs than cooking yourself at home?
Besides, when you cook at home, it does not hit your pocket as much. You are not obliged to pay any tax or tip. Not only that, by staying indoors, cooking at home and not stepping out to buy processed food or calling for it, you are reducing your exposure to the virus. If you manage the grocery sourcing wisely, you can significantly reduce the exposure and chances of contracting the virus.
Do you not think all the above-mentioned reasons are enough to convince and conclude that you should be cooking more at home and not relying on processed foods?
(The author is co-founder, CHRO and chief health officer at 23BMI, a healthcare venture)
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