What Exactly Is A Balanced Meal?

What Exactly Is A Balanced Meal?

An important part of eating a healthy diet is ensuring that you eat balanced meals regularly.

You already know this.

Right from the healthy plate or balanced plate that you learnt about in school to the various articles about a healthy diet that you've probably read, eating a balanced meal is at the core of it.

Watch this video by Dr. Achyuthan Eswar, Lifestyle Physician and Co-founder, SampoornaAhara.com and NutritionScience.in where he not only talks about what exactly a balanced diet is, but also shows you what it looks like!

Most articles that you read will talk about the three core macronutrients - carbohydrates proteins, and fat - and eating enough of these three in your meal, while avoiding junk food ensures that you are eating a balanced diet.

While this is true, there is much more when it comes to eating a balanced diet then just focusing on the three macronutrients.

✅ The quality of carbohydrates proteins and fat matter as much as the quantity.
✅ The source of carbohydrates proteins and fat matter as much as eating them regularly.
✅ Micro nutrients matter as much as macronutrients if not more, to ensure that you eating a balanced diet.

Balanced Diet: What Is It and How to Achieve It

A balance diet is not a balance between healthy and unhealthy food.

Jokes apart, a balanced diet is one where you are meeting all your nutritional requirements on a regular basis, from foods that are health promoting.

✅ This includes eating foods that are rich in both macro as well as micro nutrients.
✅ Eating the right quantity of each of these foods to get optimal health benefits.
✅ Eating health promoting foods and not ones that have been linked to negative health outcomes

When it comes to best health outcomes while also meeting your nutritional requirements, a whole food plant based diet, comes out on top.

A diet that is rich in foods that come from plants and not animals and that is whole and not processed.

Eat A Balanced Whole Food Plant Based Diet

A whole food plant based diet has been shown to help prevent, manage, better treat, and even potential reverse chronic lifestyle diseases like diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, PCOS, obesity, asthma and other chronic lifestyle diseases.

A plant-based foods is also much higher in antioxidants and micro nutrients which are essential for a balanced diet. Unprocessed plant foods are also calorie dilute and nutrient-dense. This helps you eat a wide variety of food while also maintaining healthy weight.

👉🏼 When it comes to healthy eating, it's every bit what you eat as it is what you avoid.
👉🏼 You daily diet should not only be rich in whole plant foods but also a wide variety of foods from every category - fresh fruits, a variety of vegetables, lentils, leafy greens - to name a few.
👉🏼 Healthy foods are not necessarily interchangeable. For example, eating plenty of fruits and vegetables is not enough. It doesn't make up for leaving out greens or berries in your daily diet.
👉🏼 Each category of plant foods and in fact every single ingredient comes with specific benefits. This is why variety is recommended.
👉🏼 Eating healthy also means that you eat enough of each type of food so you are benefitted and don't suffer from deficiencies

Eat Enough Variety

🙅🏻‍♀️ One of the most common misconceptions of a plant-based diet is that it is lacking in variety. This could not be further from the truth

💁🏻‍♀️ In fact one of the requirements of a well-balanced, nutritionally complete plant-based diet is that it need to be full of variety

📑 More than 25,000 phytonutrients are found in plant foods
🥕 Carotenoids act as antioxidants helping prevent free radical damage
🍅 Lycopene has been linked to a lower risk of prostate cancer
🥬 Lutein and zeaxanthin may help protect you from cataracts and age-related macular degeneration, which are two types of eye problems

Eat Antioxidant-Rich Foods

When we think of a balanced diet, we only think of protein, carbs and fat. Here is another important often ignored/forgotten aspects of our diet that makes it truly balanced, nutritionally speaking. 💪🏽

🧘🏻‍♀️ Want to 'slow down aging? Antioxidants are your friend. They slow down oxidative stress which is associated with wrinkles, memory loss & organ system breakdown due to aging.

But that's not all, antioxidants go beyond this

📈 Antioxidant-rich diets appear to protect against stroke and may also help decrease artery stiffness, prevent blood clots from forming, and lower blood pressure and inflammation

Surprised? 😲

👉🏼 Here's how you can give your antioxidant content a boost!

🥗 Increase your intake of whole plant foods one step at a time. Start with fruits, veggies and spices, at the same time reduce the consumption of animal foods including dairy
🍅 On average, plant foods contain 64 times more antioxidants than animal foods - that's a huge margin. Choose wisely
🥝 Make Amla a part of your daily diet
🥬 Amp up your intake of green leafy vegetables till you have them every single day
🍱 Use a wide variety of spices in your cooking - turmeric, pepper, dhaniya, jeera - the Indian Masala Box is a must in every kitchen

Three core food groups

Carbohydrates

"Oh! its the carbs! Just cut it out and you'll lose weight"
"Diabetic? Stop having carbs. That's the main culprit!"
"Don't eat carbs at night!"

You have probably heard one or all of these. Low-carb diets are becoming popular and further pushing these myths.

Did you know?

Carbohydrates are your body's preferred source of energy. They help fuel your brain, kidneys, heart muscles, and central nervous system. They are an essential part of a balanced meal.🤯

The problem is not carbs, its the SOURCE of carbs.

If the main sources of carbs is your daily diet are from refined foods and refined grains like:
🍚 White Rice
🍚 Maida (including bread, pasta, biscuits, noodles)
🍚 Rava
🍚 Semiya
🍚 White Sugar
🍚 Jaggery
🍚 Honey

then, yes, you must work on reducing and replacing them with healthy unrefined high carb foods like:
🍠 Brown/Red/Black Rice
🍠 Unpolished Millets
🍠 Legumes
🍠 Whole Wheat
🍠 Starchy Vegetables
🍠 Whole Fruits
🍠 Dates and other dry fruits

The solution is not to cut out carbs or replace it with more fat or protein, but to replace refined sources of carbs with whole plant sources! 🌾

✅ These whole plant foods rich in carbs give your body the energy it requires to fuel your vital organs.
✅ They are also high fiber foods that ensure that you have steady blood sugar levels.
✅ They are packed with vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that boost overall health.

Protein

Protein is one of the three macro nutrients that is essential for us. Specifically, protein is necessary for building muscle mass. It is a naturally occurring complex substance made up of Amino acid residue joined by peptide bonds.

Proteins are present in all living beings but is manufactured only by plants. You must have learnt in school that proteins make up the building blocks of your body. This is true.

📈 Protein acts as the building blocks of organs, muscle, skin, and hormones. Protein is also necessary to maintain and repair tissues. All enzymes that you have in your body are proteins. They catalyse metabolic reactions and enable you to build a chemical substances necessary for life.

Protein from whole plant sources is the best both in terms of meeting your protein requirements and long-term health.

Some examples of these are:

✅ Soya Chunks
✅ Tempeh
✅ Tofu
✅ Soya Milk
✅ Chickpea
✅ Lentils
✅ Pearl Millet
✅ Finger Millet
✅ Proso Millet
✅ Unpolished Rice
✅ Peanut

Fats

Fats are one of the three macronutrients that are essential for a balanced diet. Again, the source of Fat is what is important.

🧇 One of the most common questions we get is "Where can I get healthy fats from if we don't consume some oil or at least ghee?"

✨ The answer is from the healthiest source of course, Nuts, Seeds, Olives and Avocados!

Why settle for anything less than the best?

📈 The GBD study calculated that not eating enough nuts and seeds was the third-leading dietary risk factor for death and disability in the world.
🥓 Fats from Meat, Dairy, and Oil are not only high in saturated fats but also don't have any fiber. They are associated with a whole host of Chronic Lifestyle Diseases

Surprised? 😲

👉🏼 Here's how you can up your intake of nuts, seeds and other whole plant high fat foods!

🍲 Switch from oil-based cooking to water based cooking
🌰 Garnish your dry curries and salads with whole nuts and seeds
🥜 Slice, grate, shave or powder - nuts are good as long as you don't remove fiber
🧈 Make nut butters (or get a fresh batch from here) and use them to make creamy gravies, smoothies, salad dressings, and more
🥑 Enjoy a variety of Avocado dishes when it's in season. Smoothies, salads, dips, guacamole
🥥 Remember, nuts that don't need to be cooked are best not cooked. If you are roasting, keep them from browning
🥡 Snack on seed mix. You can make your own or buy some (here is a yummy masala seed mix to meet all you snack needs)
🥛Replace dairy butter and mylk with whole nut butter and nut mylks (without straining the fiber)
📟 Learn to bake! You can make a variety of oil-free nut-butter rich goodies by baking instead of frying
🍛 Remember to include these healthy fats along with your meal for optimal nutrition absorption of fat soluble vitamins
📱 You can check our some delicious whole food plant based recipes, with healthy fats on NutritionScience.in

What to eat for a balanced diet

A balanced meal should consist of the three core macro-nutrients in the right quantity and should be rich in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. It should be food that is made with ingredients that are health promoting, nutrient-dense, with enough calories.

Does this sound like a lot of food?

We so used to being told to eat in moderation or control our portions, that we forget that food is fuel. We need the right kinds of food in the right quantities for optimal health.

This is the basis on which our meals are designed at Sampoorna Ahara. Every Balanced Meal from Sampoorna Ahara has the following

🍎 Fruits
🍓 Berries
🥬 Greens
🥦 Cruciferous veggies
🥕 Vegetables
🥜 Pulses/lentils/legumes
🌾 Whole Grains
🌰 Nuts & Seeds
☘ Herbs & Spices

This is what a balanced meal should include. You can download Dr. Greger's Daily Dozen App and use it as a guide to ensure that you're getting all the different categories of food in the optimal quantity to ensure that your eating a balanced diet.
You can also subscribe to Sampoorna Ahara's balanced meals and leave the thinking, planning, cooking and delivering to us.

How to eat a balanced diet — 10 quick tips

Eating a balance diet requires some learning, planning, and getting used to.

✅ The first step is to learn more about a whole food plant based diet. Learning about its benefits, can go a long way in helping you implement in your life.

✅ The second step is to plan your every meal. This can be time consuming and tiring at the beginning but overtime once you get the hang of it you will find that it is quick and easy.

✅ The third step is getting used to eating a wide variety of whole plant foods. This can be just adjusting to the sheer quantity of food. Getting used to eating unfamiliar fruits, vegetables, greens etc. Take your time and do it slowly.

Here are some tips to help you include the various categories of foods that you need to eat to ensure a balanced diet

🍉 Buy local and seasonal fruits and vegetables in addition to basic ones available all year round
🧈 Replace dairy products with nut and pulse based mylks & butters. Sampoorna Ahara has a range of whole food plant based condiments that will ease the process
🧄 Traditional Indian cooking has a whole lot of healing herbs & spices, just make them plant based for best health outcomes
🥬 Greens in every meal is recommended, this can be in your dal, curries, rice, smoothies, cutlets, koftas, etc
🌾 Use a variety of whole grains & millets that are unpolished. Red rice, brown rice, ragi, foxtail, jowar, are just the tip of the iceberg
🥥 Instead of using oil for fat, use whole nuts. Almonds, cashews, peanuts, walnuts, coconut (in small quantities)
🥡 Snack on seed mix. You can make your own or buy some (here is a yummy masala seed mix to meet all you snack needs)
🍱 Learn one-pot meal recipes where you can include multiple food groups quickly
🧉 Make smoothies with fruits, veggies, greens, nuts and seeds. A quick and easy way of getting so much nutrition in a yummy way
🥨 Switch you sweets and snacks to ones that are made with great ingredients. At Sampoorna Ahara, all our sweets,snacks, cake and cookies are all made with whole grains, nuts and seeds, no sugar/jaggery, vegan, oil-free. This is a yummy way of getting macro and micro nutrients.

Video Transcript: What's In Our Dabba: What Exactly Is A Balanced Meal?

SampoormaAhara.com and NutritionScience.in. Today, I'm going to be sharing with you What's in our Dabba? What exactly is a balanced meal? Everyone talks about balanced food, a balanced diet, a balanced meal. What exactly is it? And how do you create it? So let's dive right into it.

I'm going to be showing you what's here in our tiffin boxes, in our dabba. So this is a steel different box from the Sampoorna Ahara kitchen that we've received for dinner today and this has five different compartments and that's important to remember so this is like the healthy plate from the Government of India, the healthy plate from ACLM, from PCRM, there are so many organizations, the WHO, that portrays how to eat a balanced meal through a healthy plate, that has four or five different categories around it and that's going to be a similar concept of what I'm going to be talking about today with a healthy tiffin box that has one, two, three, four, and five containers in it.

So I'm going to open this up. This one is a South Indian dinner from the Sampoorna Ahara kitchen and the first box will have a fruit starter. Now this is super duper important. So most of our meals in India today, we don't consider fruits to be that important. We have it as a snack in the evening, we have it on special occasions, we use it in some dishes like a mango payasam, some banana rasayana, jackfruit dosa, jackfruit kadabus, pineapple gojju, keseri bath. So we use fruits in preparations, in dishes but we rarely use it as part of our meals, but traditionally when you go back to a traditional Indian diet - the banana leaf meal, the first item to be served on that leaf is usually something sweet which was originally a fruit - a peeled banana. What they used to do is they put one spoon of jaggery and then peel a banana and place it on top of that jaggery. Now, jaggery is an unhealthy food, so why would they serve that as the first item? Just in case the banana is not ripe enough, you know in those days, it was difficult to get a big ton of ripe bananas for so many hundreds of people at a wedding or a function. So even if it's half ripe, just in case put that spoon of jaggery so that no one complains but that's not important for health, what's important is the fruit. So you start your meal with a fruit traditionally and why do we do that? because when you compare say to the the main item - that what we think of as the main item - in today's dinner is the upma kozhakattai, so this is like a modaka or an idli which is not flat like in idly, but shaped more like a fist, it's like an oblong ball - so this is called an upma kozhakattai and this is made from broken rice. So when you compare these two, which one is going to take longer to digest? Of course the upma kozhakattai because that's made from rice. This is going to take one and a half hours in the stomach and only then make its way into the intestine but the fruit that takes only about half an hour in the stomach and then the stomach pushes it into the intestine right away and that's important because when you start your meal with fruit, within half an hour it gets layered at the bottom of the stomach. The stomach doesn't mix everything up like a washing machine. It doesn't churn everything, although it may feel like that sometimes, it gets layered at the bottom of the stomach. Then half an hour later it's able to make its way into the intestine without hassles but when you mix it up with your meal or when you eat it at the end then it may take a little longer and get a little over digested. It's still not unhealthy, it's still fantastic, it's still healthy to eat but just start eating it first is much healthier because number one you're able to absorb all the nutrition from it, number two is because fruits have a very high nutrient to calorie ratio - they have a high nutrient density and very low calorie density. For example, if you take say one samosa or a cup of gulab jamun, either of them has about 300 calories in them. One samosa is not going to fill you up, you feel like eating the second one very soon, but if you want to get the same 300 calories from a fruit like today's watermelon then you would have to eat one kg of watermelon! That's like this whole tiffin box and a bit more of watermelon, just to get that 300 calories. So eating this one box of watermelon, that's about 180 grams of watermelon - that's not going to give you as many calories as a samosa - it'll be like one-fifth or one-sixth of that amount so about 50-60 calories, that's it! And this is going to fill up a quarter of your stomach and that will help you to feel fuller with less cooked food, with less dessert, with less grains, with less of the processed food that comes in usually at the end of the meal. So, the first step is to start the meal with a cup of fruit.

Number two, the second dish that we have today - open this second dish - is a delicious vegetable salad. Look at that! So, this is a yummy salad, it has some corn, there's some sweet corn, there's some onion, tomato, there's cucumber. Tonight I think it's the chaat salad, so you know these yummy chaats that you get on the roadside, so this salad is designed to give you that chaat flavor without any of the unhealthy stuff in it. It has tons of different vegetables, it's mixed up with some dates, some raisins, add some pudina, some coriander leaves, some chilies to give you that sweet and spicy flavor, and it's topped with delicious radish microgreens. So, the microgreens have a burst of nutrition and so do all the other ingredients, because they're all 100 whole food plant based. We recommend starting every meal with fruits and salad. When you do this, you are able to fill your stomach halfway with very low calorie density foods which help you to reach and maintain your ideal weight easily, at the same time giving you optimal nutrition, another thing that most of us don't think about is how much of the various food groups to eat every day and at every meal? Did you know that every food group has a sweet spot. So for example when it comes to fruits, if you eat anything less than about three fruits a day or three cups of fruits a day every 100 gram reduction increases your risk for chronic disease like heart attacks, strokes, diabetes hypertension and above 300 grams any amount that you eat, it is of almost no benefit for your long-term health like 360 to 400 grams sorry that's the number so about three medium sized fruits or three cups of cut fruits that's about 360 to 400 grams in total and anything more than that there's no added benefit. So that means this into two so this is about a cup and a half of fruits times two in now two meals a day that gives you your complete fruit requirement for the entire day and then vegetables similarly there's green leafy vegetables, there are berries, there are cruciferous vegetables, dals, pulses, legumes, whole grains, flax seed powder, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices, specific food groups that give you specific advantages and health benefits both in the short-term and in the long-term. This was all designed as part of Dr. Michael Greger's Daily Dozen, it which you can look up on his fantastic website nutritionfacts.org so if you haven't checked it out please check it out right away. It's called the Daily Dozen you can Google it, you can also check it out on his website nutritionfacts.org. Our website SampoornaAhara.com also has the details of the daily dozen in every meal plan so any meal that you see just scroll down and you'll see a list of check boxes telling you exactly which items of the daily dozen are filled by each and every meal in that meal plan.

So first we have the fruits and then we have the salads first two dishes of dinner today and then moving on to the third dish the third dish, is a delicious Kerala preparation so this is called an erissery so erissery is basically like a semi-solid semi gravy sabji, it's made with pumpkin so pumpkin is called matanga in Malayalam. So this is called matanga erissery and it's made from the sweet orange or red yellow pumpkins and it also has a legume in it. So this one for example has the cow peas or the black eyed peas, lobia. So this is made from those two ingredients and then it's garnished with once it gets cooked it's garnished with curry leaves instead of coconut we use a little bit of peanuts and some almonds in it, to reduce your intake of saturated fat even further for disease reversal and then there is jeera, and chilli, turmeric powder that's basically it. A little bit of miso paste to make it salty, some lemon juice but that's it! Super simple dish, and super duper delicious. What's important about this it's two things one it's made with zero-oil there's no oil used in it, number two it has both vegetables, and pulses and legumes in it. So legumes are the number one food group to improve your longevity - to help you to live a longer healthier life and the more we use the more we eat, the healthier we get, up to about three servings a day, each serving is about 30 grams of the dried dal so if you make a chutney it's about a quarter cup of it, if you make a regular sambar type it's about half cup, if you have it as sprouts or peas, then it's about one cup as one serving right. So, totally in a day you need three servings, every Sampoorna Ahara balanced meal has one and a half servings of pulses and legumes. So two meals a day and you get you meet all your requirements for pulses and legumes. So that is the third dish of dinner today and after that, the fourth dish is a delicious coriander chutney here we go. So this is a coriander chutney that's come with my dinner today and it has green leafy vegetables, that's the highlight of this chutney, so usually coriander chutneys have tons of coconut a little bit of coriander little bit of pudina. This has the other way around, this has plenty of coconut, I mean plenty of coriander and pudina, a little bit of nuts, little bit of dals, that are mildly roasted and ground up together and the spices that give it the delicious chutney flavor. So green leafy vegetables are the number one healthiest vegetable on planet Earth. So the leaves of the plant have more nutrient density than any other part of the plant because they need to be that much healthy to keep the rest of the plant healthy, to produce the energy needed for them. And they are the ones who are standing out in sunlight the whole day, exposed to sunlight rather the whole day, and they need a high nutrient density to protect them from the harmful effects of that sunlight. So green leafy vegetables number one healthiest vegetables they help you in losing weight, they help you in bringing your blood pressure down, they help you in controlling your blood sugars, and have a wide range of benefits. And some studies have even shown that it may be possible for us to improve the amount of energy we produce in our body by eating green leafy vegetables and then getting exposed to sunlight ourselves, it's crazy that study blew my mind. So this is dish number four of tonight's balanced South Indian meal from Sampoorna Ahara.

Dish number five is the upma kozhakattai that I showed you before, so there are three kozhakattai in total in my box today. Each one is made from broken rice there are some grated vegetables mixed in it and there are also some peanuts that are mixed in and steamed with it. So the way we make it is we cook it halfway and then we roll it up into balls and then we steam it for the rest of the cooking to get over. Now my version has no salt we have two versions that we make one with no salt and one with a little bit of salt for people who just get started with our subscription. If you're signing up today you will get the version with a little bit of salt, moderate salt, it still won't be a salty as what you make at home, because salt increases blood pressure, it increases risk of stomach cancer, kidney failures, and strokes. So we try to reduce salt about 60% of what you may be used to and then once you get used to that it takes only about a week for your taste buds to adjust and get re-sensitized to low to medium salt and then we reduce it to low-salt once you're ready to do it. So this is a zero salt upma kozhakattai.

Then for the sixth dish of the day we have a delicious Kerala sambar, now I don't want to tip it further, because last time I tried it, I spilled it all over myself and on the floor. So I hope you're able to see this, this is a delicious Kerala sambar and it's made with dals, it's made with lentils, it has some Amaranthus greens and it has mixed vegetables and it has a very unique blend of spices in this particular sambar powder that gives it that Kerala sambar flavor. So the sambar or the dal is usually the dish that has the maximum amount of spices in any Indian meal. That's very important as well because spices and herbs pack the maximum antioxidant content concentration of pretty much any food group that you can eat. So it's not fruits, it's not vegetables, but it's herbs and spices, and one spice stands out from the crowd that's turmeric powder so turmeric powder is pretty much almost always there in the dal or sambar, sometimes is there a vegetable dishes as well. Today we have it in both we also have it in a third dish which is the seventh dish for dinner tonight and that is an amla pickle. So this is a delicious pickle, fresh pickle it's not cooked it's raw made with grated gooseberry grated amla amla is especially important we recommend adding it in every single meal because amla is the highest antioxidant concentration food on planet Earth. It has the highest antioxidant concentration and it's also been shown to be the only food that's capable of reducing a genetic marker of heart disease called as Lipoprotein(a) or Lp(a). This particular Lipoprotein(a), it doesn't seem to reduce with pretty much any medication so no matter how healthy your lifestyle if you genetically have a high level it just stays high except when you eat amla. So amla can help you to reduce this and reduce your risk of heart disease, so we add it in every single balanced meal. If you take a balance South Indian or North Indian meal from the Sampoorna Ahara website, you're going to get amla pickle in it. So cooking amla, if you cook amla, which is what most people do. If you cook it, it loses out its potential - tannins in the amla which make up its health benefits, those start getting destroyed when you cook it, so that's why our amla pickle is 100% raw and not cooked.

So here we go, next, I'm going to show you the North Indian meal. Now this is super exciting, super delicious, let's see what yumminess they have served for us today and how to make this also a delicious balanced meal.

So, we start off with the same fruits -the watermelon fruit starter, and the vegetable salad, and the amla pickle, that's pretty much standard so there's the chaat salad inside and the amla pickle with a beautiful looking banana leaf on top. So these three dishes are standard for every balanced meal, they're the same as the South Indian meal tonight.

Now getting to the cooked vegetables of the day, I have a very interesting sabzi today called the French Fry Jalfrezi. I know, it sounds super fancy right? So basically you take
potatoes, you chop it into these french fry shaped pieces but instead of frying it in oil, what we do is we steam it first.

We steam it until it's about half cooked, and then we bake it in an oven to complete that crisping on top.

So, it's nice and it has that slightly fried flavor outside without using any oil and it's soft inside, then we put it together with...

So jalfrezi is a dish that traditionally has a lot of capsicum in it. So we put it together with capsicum to make this delicious french fry jalfrezi.

That's one of the french fries in the jalfrezi!

We put all those together and then we make a sabzi out of it. We make a masala gravy, we put the capsicum in it, we mix it all up with zero oil, again, there are no dairy products in it.

Usually, North Indian preparations have lots of cream or yogurt or curds or ghee or butter, but this meal has cashew butter instead of dairy, cashew cream made from whole cashews.

That gives you a delicious rich flavor while at the same time preventing an increase in blood cholesterol.

And then, after the french fry jalfrezi, we have the grain dishes of the day.

Today, the one.. two... three... four... fifth dish in the North Indian meal today is a delicious pakoda.

This is not a fried pakoda!

It's baked in an oven but it's absolutely delicious. It's nice and crispy outside and it's super soft inside.

So, inside, you have this - it's stuffed with greens - the green vegetables which we put in the chutney, here we have put it inside the pakoda, right.

It's nice, it's lightly browned outside, and inside it's super soft and it's stuffed chock full of greens.

So if people at home don't like eating green leafy vegetables, chutneys and pakoras are two ideas to kind of sneak in their greens, so your meal is still balanced but people just don't think about it - people are just thinking "Pakodaaa!"

And then the sixth meal - oh did I say it right? One, two, three, four, five, yes the sixth dish of the day today is a jeera roti, which is your regular whole wheat roti but made with zero oil and also with cumin seeds inside.

So one of the disadvantages with roti, with any type of roti, is that when you grind up whole grains to make a flour, they tend to get absorbed very fast by the body.

That fast absorption results in a blood sugar spike after eating your meat.

So ideally, if you're eating a roti you would like to eat it with something that's going to help you prevent that blood sugar spike.

In this case, cumin seeds - jeera - has been added in this roti and those jeera seeds help. You know, fantastic knowledge, traditional wisdom, right - they help you in preventing that blood sugar spike because they're slightly bitter and bitter foods help you to slow down digestion, okay, at the same time when you're eating them with dal and all the vegetables, that also helps a lot as well

Then we have the rice of the day. So this is brown rice and you're never going to guess what variety of brown rice this is!

This is your regular Sona Masuri Rice! That's right!

This is rice you're probably eating at home tonight for dinner, but this is the whole version.

This is how it is before you polish it, before you strip away its nutrients and remove the bran, that's how it looks if you cook it.

It's very similar to white rice really. It's very mildly brown on top and it's a little chewy, but it's going to give you so much better health benefits than simply eating white rice, which is not just empty calories, but actually harmful calories, and that's the problem

If you look at it as empty calories then you're like "Oh it's just empty, let me just eat it", but it's actually harmful calories.

When you eat processed foods like white rice they're going to go in, they're going to give you energy, sure. But they may also increase your disease risk, which is not what we want.

Then finally, the eighth dish of the day is we have a delicious dal.

I think this is a lemon dal or a tomato dal tonight for dinner. I'm not going to tip this further as well - a dangerous act, right - so this is dal made with moong dal or maybe masoor dal, one of the two, and some chopped up tomatoes some lemon, some ginger I can smell that delicious garam masala, turmeric powder, it has some kalonji added in, which helps you to lose weight faster, some coriander leaves on top and that is the dal dish for the day right.

Delicious delicious food which is a hundred percent balanced at the same time!

To top this all off, we're going to have the Flaxseed B12 Laddu, right, which I have in my kitchen - a big full bottle of it!

I have forgotten to bring it out today. I usually get to the kitchen after dinner and pop one in.

So what we do is we deliver, for any of our balanced meal plans, like the healthy food plan, the diabetes diet, high bp diet, weight loss diet, for all these plans, we deliver a bunch of stuff at the beginning of the month, one of which is the flaxseed b12 laddu body.

So this laddu is made with literally three ingredients:
Flax seeds
Dates and
fortified with vitamin b12.

That's it! Three ingredients.

They are just ground up together, shaped into a laddu, coated with flaxseed powder again and delivered to your home, fresh.

Now, each flaxseed ladoo has all the vitamin b12 that you're going to need everyday. That keeps you healthy.

That reduces your risk of heart disease and stroke, keeps you healthy for a longer healthier happier life with your family, and that, my friends, is how you make a balanced meal.

It may seem very difficult to start with, there are so many food groups, ten different food groups that I have to imagine - that I have to think of - I have to remember them and put them in every meal...

In the first few days it might look a little complicated, but once you get used to it, it's actually quite simple!

You take the fruits, you make a salad, you make a cooked vegetable dish, which you... so some of these things you may already be doing.

You may have some vegetables, you may have some dal and some grains like rice or roti or idli or a tiffin item every day in your meals.

So what do you add to it to make them balanced?

Normally - usually - people miss out the greens.

So you add greens. That's number one.

The second thing people miss out is flaxseed powder so you add in the Flaxseed B12 Laddus or flaxseed powder in your roti or idli or any other dishes.

Number three is fruits.

So you add in a fruit at the beginning of the meal.

Apart from these, another thing - number, number four, right - what people do is they eat lots of grains, especially in India, and very little of all the other stuff.

So if you look at a typical plate, you'll see a mountain of rice with small cups of side dishes on the side.

Now, the trick is to exchange this.

You would have seen in a big tiffin box that just half quantity of one box is rice, right?

There are fruits and salads, there's cooked vegetables, there's dal, there's these side dishes, there's pakoda, there's pickle, there's chutneys, by the time you get through that box, you finish the fruits and salad, finish the cooked vegetables and get to the rice, you're practically full!

That little quantity of rice is more than enough to fill you up.

Yesterday, I was on a call with one of our newest customers and she said, "Look, I loved your meal. I ate it all, but I didn't eat the rice. I gave it to my husband, he ate it. The rest of the meal seems to be enough for me!"

So the first few days, that's how it will feel, and that's the goal!

The goal is to wean you off this culture of eating just plenty of grains and little, very little of all the other nutritious food that you need, and to make your meals more balanced.

After a week or so your hunger levels actually increase.

Your appetite increases.

You're able to eat more food, and then the quantity becomes perfect for you.

So that, my friends, is a balanced meal with a hundred percent whole food blood-based dishes according to Dr Michael Greger's Daily Dozen Checklist, which gives you optimal health and longevity.

I hope this video was useful for you.

I hope you're taking back home some tips to start with, for your lunch and dinner tomorrow.

If you'd like to get started with a healthy diet, then feel free to order a meal from SampoornaAhara.com

We have like nine different meals that you can order and get delivered to your home tomorrow - five for lunch, four options for dinner, you can order any one of them and just try it out.

See how it is tastes, see how it feels, and then it will become much easier.

Once you have a practical experience of a balanced diet, it becomes very very easy for you to follow the same thing at home with your own cooking as well if you'd like to do that.

I hope this helped, and I hope you have a fantastic day ahead!

I look forward to meeting you tomorrow.

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Thank you so much! Have a great day. I'm Dr. Achyuthan Eswar and I'll see you soon.

Be blessed!

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