The Protein Problem, Actionable Ayurveda with Salila#5

Welcome to Actionable Ayurveda with Salila, your go-to podcast for diving deep into the timeless wisdom of Ayurveda. I am Salila Sukumaran, your host and guide on this transformative journey. With a lineage rooted in Ayurvedic practices, I am here to empower you to thrive and flourish through the ancient principles of Ayurveda. I'm super excited to share today's session because Today's session is going to be myth-busting. And I know you and I, we've been together for many years now. You've seen me, you have experienced the kind of self-empowering knowledge that I share, and you know that when I'm saying something, it's either substantiated by the Samhitas or this is coming from cutting-edge science, and I'm able to point you to the sources and research papers so you can see it for yourself. Now, when it comes to a subject like protein, and whenever I talk about protein on social media, which tends to be like this busy street corner where any ruffian can come and just shake you up and say anything they wish to say, and the anonymity of being hidden behind our devices just gives us full freedom to just come out and say anything, I would say that one of the most negative and insulting comments usually come from Indian dietitians, especially those who have an agenda for some reason, for pushing more and more proteins onto their community. And I always felt like, why are we Indians, in spite of having such an amazingly varied, rich, delicious, colorful cuisine, why are we constantly made to feel like there is this stick somebody is holding and saying, you are not doing enough, you are not eating enough. You are not healthy, therefore listen to these XYZ people from these countries. And nutritionists, dietitians are taught in India from books that were written in America in the '70s, the '80s, the '90s, and we are continuing to use those parameters as true and tested. Whereas in America, from Stanford, from Berkeley, from Harvard, Stanford. I'm in the neighborhood of Stanford. Research is coming up, which is giving a big round of applause for our cuisine, cultural cuisines from around the world, and saying they got it right. What is working is already working. It's not broken. We don't have to change anything up. So I'm going to now share a little bit more about what I have learned about protein so far. And hopefully you will all walk away from this wanting to learn more, looking up the resources that I share, and feeling comforted that whatever you're doing, you're not doing wrong. And even if you are doing something grossly wrong, what are the signs to watch out for? All of us, especially moms, we are worried about not feeding our children adequate protein. Young women are worried that if I don't eat adequate protein, especially women who have PCOS, PCOD, already their fertility is under a question mark, and they work with dietitians and fitness trainers, and their fitness trainer gives them a big long list and says, here you are, 75 grams of protein a day. And these poor girls are stuffing themselves, crying at meals, and there's so much suffering, unnecessary suffering, that it just breaks my heart. It makes me angry. So here we are. Why do I call it the protein problem? Because literally anywhere you go, there are people shrieking that you don't eat enough protein. There are people freaking out and saying that you need to do more, your diet is not right, this is not how you should be cooking, you— we need to be eating this 3 plates of soy, and if you're a vegetarian, you're doomed, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So let's just demystify all that. What are proteins? Proteins are structures, which are— they're macronutrients. They're structures with an ammonia, an amine, or a nitrogen molecule in them. And proteins are building blocks of the body. Based on the Ayurveda lens, proteins have both kapha function, which is building the structure of the body, and tuff function, which is enzymes, catalysts. Proteins help change things. They are hormones. Majority of hormones are made from proteins. Proteins help the body function. Proteins help do all the activities. So when we look at the body and break it down into its subatomic particles, we see that there are bodybuilding particles, there are particles which are lipid, which are glucose. So glucose, lipids, and proteins, these are our basic building blocks of the body. So I'm a biology graduate and I passed out with honors. So this is something that I love to study. I, I don't think I will ever get tired of studying biology, chemistry, biochemistry. So you don't have to be a biology grad to know this. All human bodies are made up of proteins, lipids, and sugars. What does that mean? It means that to maintain this body, we need to have protein, lipids, and sugars. This also means that every other organic matter in this world is made up of proteins, lipids, and sugars. If we eat anything that is supposed to be eaten, that is considered food, We are getting protein, lipids, and sugars. So we cannot escape these three if we are in this world. Just like the five great elements, these are the three great elements that make up our organic matter, the organic world around us. What is their function? They can be enzymes, they can be hormones, they help do all the activity, they maintain the structure. All the cell walls require proteins, right? Without that, the structure would collapse. How much protein do, do we need? Now, if we talk to a fitness trainer, somebody will say 0.8 grams per kilogram every day. So if you are 50 kilograms, then you are supposed to have 0.8 into 50, which is about 40 grams of protein in a day. Now this is what a good, um, will tell you, right? A trainer who's trying to build muscle in your body will say you need to have 1 gram per kilo day for you because you're building bulk. You want to make more muscles, you want to increase the size of the body. So makes sense, a little bit extra protein, right? So if you're 50 kilos like an average Indian girl, then you will need about 50 grams of protein in a day. Where did this count come from? Now, this count comes from something called as our required daily allowance, the RDA. The RDA says that we need about 0.8 grams of protein. Where did this RDA come from? This RDA came from a test that was done by two American scientists in the '70s with Vietnam vets, and this This experiment is supposed to be, I mean, sounds disgusting, but it's supposed to be so disgusting that no one has ever repeated it. No one is ever likely to repeat it again. What they did is these Vietnam vets who are American men, and you can imagine what their diet will be, they would eat their normal diet and all the protein that was excreted out of their body. So you can imagine how that would be sweat. Feces, everything, everything you can imagine, nail, hair, all the disgusting stuff a human body produces was vacuumed, collected, scraped, and then counted. And they did this over a period of time. They reduced their protein, they increased their protein just to see what was the optimal level where the body was functioning properly. And then they came up with a statistical analysis. When you chart the outcome of a test like this, you you will get lots of data that this is the optimal for, let's say, Bob, and this is the optimal for John, and this is the optimal for Steve, and this is the optimal for Frank. So they will put that in a chart. Now, usually when you have studies like this, the chart will look like a bell curve where the majority will be in the center and the chart will look like an inverted bell curve, and the people who are outliers will be on one side. On the lower end, and the people who are on the highest side will be on the other end. If you take the median of the bell curve, the center of the bell curve, and say that is the optimal protein intake, what happens? Half the people who were taking more protein than the median would then reduce their intake, and they will become deficient, right? So the governments cannot do that. Scientists cannot do that. So what they did is they took the 97.5 percentile of this bell curve and they said, this is the required daily allowance for a human. Now, an American human is slightly different from an Indian human. Height, weight, right? When we say 97.5th percentile, what we are saying is that it is the upper limit. So when we look at the figure of 0.8 grams per day is what is required to maintain the body, it is the upper limit. There were plenty of people who were not eating that upper limit and still they were healthy and they were fine. What does this leave us with? We have to again think of one more thing. An American Standard Diet is usually a big chunk of steak thrown in the middle of the plate. With some sides of vegetables. It'll be like peas and beans, some carrots, and if they're feeling really fancy, then there'll be a roasted potato or a baked potato. This 85% meat-based diet is what these Vietnam vets who were the test subjects were eating. This is not the standard diet of an Indian person. So had they been eating palak paneer and butter chicken, or the simple foods of an Indian home, which is dal and rice and roti and some kind of mixed vegetable or some kind of sautéed vegetable, you bet that Velkhov would've looked very different. That 97.5 percentile would've looked very different. In spite of this, in spite of this, when the Indian nutritionists and Scientists and everybody who looks at this test as the gold standard for throughout the world, for every human on the planet, and says 0.8 grams is the gold standard of protein. What do you think the Indians are coming deficient as when these dietitians and government workers and everybody, they're preparing these reports and saying Indians are not eating adequate protein, they are horribly deficient. 95% Indians are below this RDA, below this 97.5 percentile of daily protein intake. What's the number they are coming up with? Can you take a guess? What do you think that number might be? If 0.8 is the required percentage, is the required daily intake of protein, that is RDA, required daily allowance, How much do you think is the average Indian person coming up to for all these protein mavericks and freaks to go lose their heads and say, oh my God, we are not eating enough. 95% of us are deficient. How horrible. We are in a crisis situation. Can you just throw in some numbers there? 0.45, 0.4, 0.5. Madanji, you're close.

It's 0.7.

6, actually. So it's only— see, Gayatri, it sounds like it's 0.2, right? It's only 0.6, and it's only a deficiency from this RDA of 97.5th percentile of an American man's diet from the '70s, where they were literally eating far more meat. And these are not just any people, these are soldiers. So they worked out, they were probably very big, tall men, and they ate a lot of proteins, right? A lot of meat. Now compare that to an average Indian person who comes from the peasant stock, who does not eat like that. Meat is something everybody in India would eat as a luxury 20, 30, 40 years ago. Today we don't. We eat meat a lot more because there is a lot more abundance, right? Definitely the amount of protein intake has increased for us. But we have to look at how that number was arrived at for us to make some good decisions about our own plate that we put for dinner in front of our family, or when we go to the kitchen and cook for ourselves. So this 0.2 gram deficiency can be made up with one single egg. If a person eats one egg, it's already 6 grams of protein. You're almost done, right? One cup of rice. 1 cup of, you know, uncooked rice has about 8 grams of protein. It's already done, right? So anyone who is wanting to eat, let's say, soy, 1 cup of dry soy will have about 34 grams of protein. Is this making sense that first of all, the RDA is based on a completely different demographic with a very different dietary habit from us? And then we are tested on that particular parameter, and then we are constantly told that we are falling short. Now, moving forward, what is the biggest myth about protein? When we say protein, we are actually talking about something called as amino acids. All proteins, if we break them down, they will all be made up of something called as amino acids. There are 11 non-essential amino acids 9 essential amino acids because there are 20 total amino acids. Why are they non-essential? It means that the body can produce these amino acids by itself. We don't need to have— we don't need to eat protein to make this protein. What are the essential amino acids? These are the ones that the body has to produce from a protein source. We have to eat a protein source to create those proteins in our body, to have those proteins in our body. And we need to have all 20 for our body to function well, for the enzymes to be made, for the hormones to be made, for the activities to be done, for the cell walls to be strong. So for the structure to be held up, for us to build muscles, right? Now, when I studied nutrition 20 years ago, I studied that not all plant foods had all essential amino acids. Only some plant foods had it. A year ago, I was also sharing this, that flax has all essential, quinoa has all essential plant proteins, amaranth has all essential plant proteins, all the 20, right? I was coming up with all these and helping my vegetarian community to feel good about themselves that you don't have to worry, you don't have to eat eggs, you don't have to eat meat. If you eat these millets, if you eat this quinoa, it's— you are going to be able to make up for the essential and the non-essential proteins, right? You don't have to feel like, oh my God, my body is deficient. I need to take supplements. What is the latest science coming out of Stanford, of Harvard, of Berkeley? All plants, every plant has every essential and non-essential proteins, all 20 amino acids. Are present in everything. The proportions are different. Some are very low in certain amino acids. So before this, whatever we had to test them out, maybe it did not detect it. But now we are advanced. Science has advanced. Everything, including rice, has all 20 amino acids. There is a reason why in cultural cuisine from around the world, we have rice, beans, lentils, and legumes as something we eat together. If we have rice, we always say dal chawal, right? Dal and then chawal. In Mexican cuisine, it's beans and rice, right? In the Mediterranean cuisine, it's chickpeas and some kind of pilaf, some kind of rice, right? So these cuisines, even without their, our advanced technology, our science, our computational abilities, they figured out somehow that rice, beans, lentils, legumes is a great combination. How is that? Because rice is low in an amino acid called lysine. Beans, lentils, legumes are low in an amino acid called methionine. So when we have a combination of this, then they have helped each other complete their nutritional profile, complete all amino acids that is required for the body to function properly. So now that is a complete meal. Throw in some veggies. This is an amazing meal with tons of fiber as well. What's the problem with having just meat as a source of protein or just having lentils and legumes as a source of protein? There's only so much our stomachs can fill up, right? So if I am aiming for that 0.8 grams per day or, or, or that 1 gram per day because I'm working out, And my fitness trainer has said that you have to have all this protein. So I am taking a far bigger portion of lentils, legumes, beans, or I'm eating this big chunk of meat. What am I lacking in? The beans, the lentils, legumes have some amount of fiber, which is better, but the protein from the meat has almost no fiber. So I'm losing out on the prebiotics that my requires to thrive. And if my microbiome is not thriving, I'm going to be deficient in a lot of vitamins. I'm going to have diarrhea constantly. My digestion is not going to be good. So when I have lots of vegetables, adequate amount of rice, adequate amount of lentils, legumes, beans, or meat, then I'm making sure that my diet is balanced. I'm getting fiber as well. Fi— if protein is important, Fiber is equally, if not more important for a healthy diet. And in cultural cuisines, our normal menus are rich in fiber because we eat a lot of vegetables in so many different ways, especially vegetarians. Vegetables are the mainstay of the dinner plate, right? So when we look at people who are eating a lot of protein, people who are working out, or people who want their bodies to develop extra muscle and they are forcing themselves to eat more paneer, eat more soy, eat more, um, mung, eat more peas, forcing themselves to eat 8, 10 eggs in a day because they want to make up that protein requirement that the dietitian, their fitness trainer has given them on a chart. What happens with this extra protein? The body has a very fascinating way it stores these 3 basic things that we talked about. Talked about sugars, lipids, and proteins, right? So sugars, whatever the body needs, it'll either store it in the liver or it'll store it in muscle cells. And once it reaches a threshold, it cannot store it anymore. The body will convert this carbohydrate, this sugar, this glucose into fat, into a lipid molecule. The body has limited ability to store lipid molecules. Our lipid molecules can be shrunk into a tiny cell, or it can balloon up into— it's very plastic, it's very pliable and plastic. These lipid cells can balloon up into whatever size. So from 50 kgs, I have the potential to go into 500 kgs if I ate that much lipids. Now the proteins, the body has nowhere to store it like carbs. It cannot put it in any organ. It cannot store it in any muscle. What it does is it'll convert it into glucose. And then if it has excess, if it, if we worked hard and at the end of the day there is a surplus, what it's gonna do with that glucose is it's gonna convert it into fat and store it in the body. So all all this extra protein that someone might be eating, after a certain point, it will be converted into fat, right? Mind-blowing again, right? So what are some good sources of protein? Definitely 100 grams of meat will give us about 22 grams of protein. 100 grams of uncooked soy will give us 34 grams of proteins. But when we cook it, we have to divide it by 3 because it will increase 3 times in size. An uncooked cup of dry peas will give us about 20 grams of proteins. So we have to again divide it by 3 because it will— we call it what, vataana, dry peas. It's a part of our daily cuisine. We cook it with spicy curry, as a spicy curry, right? Again, divided by 3, that's the amount of protein we get. Mung bean would be something like 24 grams of protein per 100 grams of dry mung bean. Again, divided by 3 if we were going to cook it and boil it. Some cuisines, like the place where I come from, Kerala, we have proteins for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which is a good thing to learn from because we start our day with a lot of boiled mung bean. North of India used to have that habit. North of India would start their day with kitchadi, which is at least half or a third mung. South of India also starts with idlis and dosas, which is at least a third of the recipe is protein, right? Lentils. We start our day with lentils in some form. It's good to have a higher amount of digestible protein like mung when we start our day. It's good to start with some kind of a savory porridge with mung. So that we are getting a good amount of protein right from the morning. But even if we don't pay any attention, our deficit is not so bad that we have to now like go on a war effort to get it back up. Our deficit is only about 0.2. A non-vegetarian can make that up with 1 egg, and a vegetarian person can make that up with a single cup or a cup and a half of chickpeas or rajma or moong or any other kind of lentils or legumes. So one thing, when we think about proteins, it's not just, just grabbing these foods off of the internet and saying, okay, from now on I'm going to start cooking 5 cups of this, 3 cups of that, and then my protein will be done. That's not the right way of eating protein. We have to think of our digestibility. Which Ayurveda talks about. If your Agni is low, if your Agni is manda, we are not going to be able to derive all that nutritional benefits from the food. If our Agni is firing up too high, if our Agni is high pitta, again, we are burning through that food. We are not getting any of the benefits from the food. It's just passing through our system without being processed properly. Then the bioavailability. All these lentils, the legumes, chickpeas, and the mung beans. These have to be cooked in a certain way so that the protein becomes bioavailable. Right from soaking, slow cooking, skimming, salting, smashing, spicing, and then using our saliva to chew this well increases the bioavailability of proteins from the plant sources. Then the biggest factor is satiety. Satiety, or our satisfaction with food, is a complex matter. It is contextual because it depends on so many things. I could be eating a cup of moong and feeling really good because I am remembering my time with my family back home, having breakfast with mom and dad and my brother, sister, and my extended family. It's a celebration. There's joy associated with it. It's spiced a certain way. So I feel deep satisfaction with a cup of simple boiled mung dal with a ka or a tempering of curry leaves and mustard, right? And I feel very happy with that. But you may not feel happy with that. You may want to convert it into a curry before it becomes palatable for you. You may eat that and feel like, no, this quite doesn't hit for me. This doesn't feel good for me. I would rather have a nice cup of chola bhatura or something else, right? Maybe you're somebody who loves a bit of tofu in the morning, right? So satiety, satisfaction, that feeling of like, oh, I feel so good. I feel so full. My body feels nourished. That is also very important when it comes to food. We cannot force ourselves. And eat our food half crying and beating ourselves up why we signed up for this program and expect our body to absorb all the nutrition, right? And Ayurveda talks about this, that if we are not sitting in front of our plate with a sense of gratitude and joy and excitement, then that food is no longer medicine. It is going to be poison in our body. Why? There is going to be a higher residue of non-digestible matter that is going to clog our channels. We call this ama or toxins in Ayurvedic language, and it is not going to help us stay healthy. So we need to understand what protein deficiency looks like, right? Because everybody in India, you take any nutritionist from India, any dietitian from India, go to their social media page, And they will be shouting, howling, screaming that not eating enough protein, you guys are hurting your bodies. We need to up our protein intake. And we need to understand what does it look like when a body is deficient in protein? First of all, there will be muscle wasting. Our muscles will not look strong and big. They, they will not be able to hold their shape. The muscles will hang loose. It'll be very thin. Our body would have edema everywhere. We'd have swelling all over the body. There'll be swelling in our joints. Our body will be hurting very badly. We'll be chronically fatigued. Usually this happens during famine situations where there is not enough food to eat. Do you remember the last time you were in India? Did you see anybody who looked like they were in a famine situation? Right? So, When we have protein deficiency, physicians are trained to look for protein deficiency. If you need to improve your protein intake, first get yourself checked by a physician for protein deficiency and then start to tweak your diet. If you wanted to make a stronger body, build more muscles, yes, then it makes sense to go after a certain number, but if you just wanna get through your daily life and you don't have any of these muscle wasting, edema, pain, chronic fatigue kind of symptoms, and your physician has confirmed that you don't have a protein deficiency and I don't need to treat you for a protein deficiency, we are all okay. That was the end of my presentation for today. Anybody has any questions? Let me look at the chat. Okay, Jasmine, thank you for sharing that. So everything I'm sharing is coming from Dr. Christopher Gardner. He's a nutritional scientist with Stanford and Berkeley. He's working with the US government. So it's coming from that source. And this is the latest, latest research finding. And according to him, we have to follow cultural diets. Cultural diets have gotten it right for 1,000 years, for thousands of generations. We don't have to fix anything. Nothing is broken here. Himanshi is saying, how does your protein requirement change when you're working out a lot more? We get hungrier, so we feed ourselves balanced meals, and then naturally the body will make whatever protein it needs to make. Dr. Christopher Gardner shares an experiment where they were trying to tweak people's protein levels, and they gave people strict guidelines and said, this one group takes only 15% protein and this next group takes only 25% protein. And they figured out that when people were left onto their own devices, everybody kind of took 20% proteins because that's like the optimal level. So if we are eating instinctually, we are taking in about 20% protein, and that's all we require in a balanced diet. Any more than that, it will affect the palatability of our food. It would affect the feeling of joy that we have when we are eating protein. We can't have 4 cups of beans or 5 cups of cooked soy and call it a good day. But a lot of fitness trainers, a lot of dietitians, that's what they are pushing their clients into. Eat protein, then if anything is left over, then you have this rest of the stuff. Exactly, Sindhu. When fitness trainers suggest the numbers, nobody is looking at the sources already in place from our Indian diet. And again, they're looking at the RDA, which we talked about how the RDA was created from American men in the '70s who have a naturally 85% meat diet. In persons with Pitta imbalance, they find it difficult to digest high protein foods such as chickpea, rajma, and so on. Yes, Pitta imbalanced person will have problem digesting anything because the metabolism is affected. Shalini is saying, I see huge difference in people who have become vegan or changed their cultural diet. Even superfood is abused. Yes, the problem is in not becoming vegan. Indian diet also has a lot of vegan options. The thing is that they have shifted their diet to soybeans, tofu far more to make up for that meat they are missing now. And because of that, bioavailability is affected. Their body simply does not have the ability to digest soy. I thought I was digesting soy very well when I was on soy for nearly 3 years, but I've realized that my body wasn't working so well with soy. So now I am sticking to the lentils and the legumes that I know that work for my body. Himanshi is asking, can you please talk about differences between pea protein, vegetarian protein, or other sources? So Himanshi, the latest research is saying that there is absolutely No difference between animal protein and vegetable protein. Obviously, animal proteins are definitely a tad better than vegetable proteins because some vegetables don't have everything in optimal proportion as the human body wants, because naturally the animal flesh is closer to the human flesh than a handful of spinach, let's say, which is why we eat food in combination with other food groups. So when I'm eating rice, which is lower in lysine, I am eating it with, let's say, beans, legumes, or chickpeas, which are higher in methionine. And then I'm eating it with vegetables, which are going to complete the profile even better. When we put them all together, then the deficiencies are made up and the excesses the body will use and then excrete it out. We don't need to do pea protein powder shakes, if that's what you meant, Himanshi. We don't really need to do that if you're eating a well-rounded, culturally appropriate meal. Himanshi is saying, I can't agree more, it is scary how much protein trainers are pushing now. Yes, thank you so much for confirming that. Shalini is saying, sattu is best protein for Indians. Yes, sattu is amazing. We've had it, especially if you're a North Indian. Sattu is Roasted chana dal, roasted chana dal powdered. And if you see all our Indian food, there's a little bit of protein we throw in for everything. In our tempering, we roast a little bit of dal. So no food is like without a little protein. So even if our digestion is super challenged, we are eating a tiny bit of protein from chickpeas or from dals or from beans. On a daily basis, we are doing this. We throw in a little peanuts in everything. Any snack we have, we do a little fried peanuts so that we are getting adequate protein in every meal.

Yeah, in chutneys also we add.

Right, right. Our chutneys, we add protein. In Kerala, we use coconut instead of that. In Tamil Nadu, we will use some chana dal. North India has a habit of having like a nice big side of Dal. Madanji is asking, even for bodybuilding, can my body absorb all the protein I eat? It depends on bioavailability, how you have cooked it, whether you grew up eating this particular protein. If we eat what we grew up eating, we love and enjoy a recipe, that will work for us way better than some recipe a fitness trainer will share with you and say, here, boil this 3 cups of Soy, and now eat it with some salt and pepper. No, that's not going to work. Whatever is your feeling to feed your family, and if you're following a balanced Indian meal, you don't have to worry about protein. You're getting it. Your cheeks are nice and shiny. I'm not seeing any protein deficiency in you. Your child is happy, healthy, running around playing. There is no protein deficiency. Everybody is fine. We just need to drop this now because The dietitians and the fitness trainers have made such a big noise about protein that we are constantly worried that every meal we are cooking, we are worried about the protein. We should be thinking about joy, about love, and about happiness. When this food is cooked and it's presented, how happy will my family be in eating this particular meal? If they are happily eating it, They are fine.

So, but we don't take any non-veg. And since we are in Urisa, remote village of Urisa, fish and other things. So that was the, that was my biggest concern.

Yeah. You had, like I said, right? This is the latest research coming out of Stanford. This is a nutritional scientist who has done 40 years of research, who has mapped out every plant food with these advanced, you know, machinery computational techniques. And he has figured out that all proteins are present in everything. There is no difference between a meat or a vegetable. Of course, the proportions of those, the analogy of the alphabets, right? The number of A's in one may be more, in one food, the number of Bs may be more in something else. The number of Xs and Ys may be more in one particular food, and maybe the Ls and the Ns would be less in one. Which is why when we take all this together and prepare a plate with vegetables, protein sources like lentils, legumes, chickpeas, rajma, urad dal, millets, rice, eggs, everything has protein. So we have to now stop worrying that, oh, oh, this is rice, it has no protein. No, rice has protein. 1 cup of cooked rice has 2 grams of protein. 1 cup of uncooked rice has 8 grams of protein. When we cook it, it becomes 3 to 4 times more, which is why it has 2 grams. So we are getting everything we need. Sorry, Supraja.

No, I just want to thank you for extending the invite to this because we have always been in this fearmongering. And now it's like, yeah, it's all covered. Even if we don't, like, all, we don't need to always concentrate on, are we taking the right protein? Are we taking enough?

Right, right. You know, even if you take what I've said and show it to a nutritionist or trainer, and they are going to tell you not to believe me, you can just forward them Dr. Christopher Gardner. Just Google him and you will find his lectures. Just forward it to them. This is the latest cutting-edge research coming out of Stanford, and it sounds great to me. It sounds liberating to me. It sounds common sense to me. And, you know, it just shuts everybody up who's banking on this fear. What's happening is fear and doubt is created And people are exploiting that to fill their own pockets. That's where I have my problem with this whole protein narrative. Like, if you were creating— if you were raising an alarm to help, that makes sense. That I can be on the side of. But when you are raising a false alarm, you're not using critical thinking skills. You're not looking at the latest cutting-edge science. You're studying from a manual that was written in America in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, and you are using old technology to help people who are living in today's current world, and you are dissing 1,000, 5,000-year-old cuisine to simply sell some stupid supplement you have or your fitness program. That angers me. Shalini is saying that doctors in Canada and Germany have, have never questioned me about iron and protein when I tell them that I'm vegetarian because you are not showing any deficiency. You're healthy. You're showing up with shiny skin, bright eyes, happy. So you find—

It's because also I tell him I eat Indian meal. Most of the Indian, and I make everything, dal, roti, sabji, chawal, dahi, everything is in my meal. And that's what I feed my children. They're vegetarian too. And my husband is German and he's also vegetarian too. I did not turn him vegetarian.

I gave him a choice.

I said, and he made sure our kids were vegetarian and All the credit goes beside me cooking, the credit of him keeping the children vegetarian.

Oh, that's wonderful.

And it's a big thing when people, oh, India mein, when I'm traveling, oh, I'm hearing parents saying, I'm like, no, it's genetic.

It's genetic.

Any hotel ke strom ni bandhao ke, meat khanese, anda khanese.

It's a fact.

If you eat properly and you think healthy, you'll be healthy, you know. So I just had to put this in.

Sorry. Yeah, totally, totally, totally. Yeah. I'd love for all of you to have pride in our Indian cuisine, whether you're vegetarian, you're non-vegetarian, what you're doing, you're doing right. If there is any scope for improvement, we have now the knowledge to eat just that little bit more and feel free to reach out to me if you need any help. Thank you again. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Ari Babad.