In our series on eating more like our ancestors, Chef Seeto goes back in history to discover an ancient civilisation that can be traced back more than 70,000 years ago — the ancestral Indians.
While rice, wheat, barley, and barbecued animals flavoured with spices and fruit formed the basis of the cuisine of the past, how different are Indian descendants eating today?
The dietary habits of India are quite well known.
There are more than 1.2 million Indians of different religious beliefs that hold life sacred, with many of them vegetarians.
While Hindus forego beef, Muslims find pork abhorrent.
Yet were these habits followed in ancient times?
What did the Indian people eat hundreds or thousands of years ago as an ancient civilisation?
The lessons of learning one’s ancestral diet are important for all of us, regardless of which tribe or civilisations we belong to, because our unique DNA helps determine our specific nutrition needs.
A quick look at the modern diet of Fijians with Indian ancestry reveals a huge gap and lack of the essential vitamins and minerals that their ancestors ate.
If you are of Indian descent, are your people from the Southern state of Kerala, where coconut oils and coconut milk provided flavour and a natural fuel source of good saturated fat?
Or do you belong to the Northern states where the food of royalty dates back to the Persian and Mughal empires that combined fruits and spice into deliciously spiced dishes for intense flavours and healing ingredients?
Or are your people from the colourful and spicy region of Uttar Pradesh with it’s richly red chilli tandoor and unleavened chapatti breads? Whatever your ancestry, the answers to a healthy diet for your body can be found in the past.
The diet of early Indians
Historians believe that today’s Indians are descendants of a very old civilisation that left Africa more than 70,000 years ago and spread throughout South Asia as hunter-gatherer tribes who lived off what they could catch and forage.
The earliest modern Indians, the Harappan or Indus Valley civilisation, date back more than 5000BCE, and ate mainly wheat, rice and lentils, and occasionally cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and chicken.
The arrival of the central Asian Aryan nomads in 1500BCE did not seem to have changed Indian eating habits, but by 300 BCE under the Maurya Empire, a lot of Hindus felt that animal sacrifices added to your karma and kept you from getting free of the wheel of reincarnation.
Animal sacrifices became less popular, and although people didn’t give up eating meat entirely, they ate much less of it, and a lot of people became vegetarians.
In the Gupta period, around 650 AD, Hindus began to worship a Mother Goddess. Cows were sacred to her, and so Hindus stopped eating beef.
And then around 1100 AD, with the Islamic conquests in northern India, most people in India stopped eating pork as well, because the Koran forbids it.
People could still eat sheep or goats or chicken, but most of the people became vegetarians, and only ate meat very rarely or not at all.
The vegetarian food that Indians ate had to be rich in proteins, calcium and iron to compensate for a diet without animal meats. Fresh milks, beans, peas, nuts and seeds provided that source of nutrition.
The wrong oils in Indian cooking
Animals like goats, yaks and horses provided fresh milk that could be churned into butter and ghee as cooking oils in the ancestral Indian diet.
The good fats and healthy oils found in nature are an important part of a balanced diet, but the processed oils that most of us use today offer very little nutritional value.
The ancient Harappan squeezed their own oil from nuts, seeds and coconut.
These cold-pressed oils retained their essential vitamins and minerals because they are not heat treated.
In the 1900s when butter use was higher than vegetable oils, heart disease was rare.
By 2012, the consumption of processed vegetable oils was 14 times that of butter, with heart disease now the leading cause of death in most Westernised nations including the South Pacific.
So what are the good oils?
Try cold-pressed virgin coconut, virgin olive and avocado oil or ghee, which all offer health benefits but also need to be balanced in a diet to keep cholesterol levels in check. Whereas the iTaukei are consuming too much processed oil through margarine and fried foods, Fijians of Indian descent are eating too much unnatural oil through their cooking of curry and qisi.
Far removed from an ancestoral diet
Some people may believe that spices and curry are bad for you, but that couldn’t be further from the truth; it is how you cook them.
Turmeric, fennel, cinnamon, saffron and cumin have been an integral part of herbal Ayurvedic medicine for the ancient Indians, and were used to add flavour to foods but also to prevent disease and aid in digestion and growth. Saffron contains a powerful cancer-fighting acid that is said to inhibit the spread of disease.
Cumin, or jeera, not only aids in digestion but contain special compounds that are said to fight prostate cancer in men. The problem with the diet of modern Indians is not the spices and curry but an excess consumption of processed cooking oils, refined carbohydrates and sugar.
Combine this high risk NCD-diet with a lack of fresh fruits, crunchy vegetables, leafy green vegetables, fresh milk and plenty of legumes (beans, peas, lentils), and you realise just how far removed the modern Indian diet is from their ancestral people.
On your next visit to the doctor, ask to find out what essential vitamins and minerals are missing in your body.
The results may go a long way to explain why you are more susceptible to colds, flus and sinus problems than others; or why you have continuous gastric issues; or why you never seem to be able to put on more muscle mass.
Learning to adopt the diet of our ancestors is not easy as we grow older and have more stubborn eating habits.
But to break the cycle of bad diet for the next generation, the answer is simpler; don’t give your infant children the same food as you eat. Before they can walk, talk back and make their own bad choices of food; feed them the fresh foods of your ancestors.
So what is the perfect diet for Fijians of Indian descent? Go ask your grandmother!
Next week: Chef Seeto shares his knowledge of his own ancestral people — the Chinese. Ancient Chinese physicians learned to harness the power of healing foods thousands of years ago, and when combined with a special way of eating their meals, stumbled on the perfect Chinese diet.
* Lance Seeto is the executive chef, author and food writer based on Castaway Island, Fiji. Follow his adventures on www.lanceseeto.com. Through his culinary eyes, the world looks delicious.
