There is a reason for people eagerly buying junk food for any meal of the day rather than opting for healthy food. Taste is one of the factors which dominates our food choice. Around 22% of 15,139 people in seven urban localities of India have cited taste as a reason for not consuming more millets.
This is a finding from a study titled ‘Assessing Millets and Sorghum Consumption Behaviour in Urban India: A Large-Scale Survey’ published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems on Friday.Another barrier is the method of turning a healthy food tasty. The website https://www.smartfood.o
rg/recipes/ lists out recipes using millets. Recipes according to millet such as finger millet, pearl millets, or type of meal: breakfast, main meal, soups, salads, is listed in the website. Little millets papdi, crispy multi-millet fingers, millets vermicelli falooda, are some of the options detailed there.
The study’s first author and Assistant Director General (External Relations) and Executive Director of the Smart Food initiative at ICRISAT Joanna Kane-Potaka said that health awareness alone would not be enough to influence the population to consume millets. “The report emphasised these insights to show the need for tasty products and simple recipes made from millets as well as the need for changing the image of millets,” said Ms Kane-Potaka.
A group of researchers who conducted a large study — led by the Smart Food initiative at ICRISAT-showed that people with diabetes who consumed millets as part of their daily diet saw their blood glucose levels drop 12-15% (fasting and post-meal), and blood glucose levels went from diabetic to pre-diabetes levels. The HbA1c (blood glucose bound to haemoglobin) levels lowered on average 17% for pre-diabetic individuals, and the levels went from pre-diabetic to normal status.