The Indian food should be generally good in nutrition as the Indian dishes contain vegetables and wholegrains. (nutrition of pulses, lentils, legumes).
Many Indian are vegetarians and they eat vegetables, fruits, whole grains, milk and plant-based proteins. These foods contain essential micro-nutrients and vitamins that produce antioxidants which are good for heart, blood pressure and diabetes.
But Indians, in general, consume less amount of vegetables. Also reheating of vegetarian dishes, a common practice among Indians, destroys the micro-nutrients. "Indians, therefore, face heart attacks five years earlier than people in the West," according to Dr Deepak Natarajan of Apollo hospital, Delhi. Diets rich in saturated fats and hypertension are the main reason for this.
Indian Cooking & Nutrition
By 2010, India will carry 60 percent of the world's heart disease burden, nearly four times more than its share of the global population, according to a study released by Denis Xavier of St. John's National Academy of Health Sciences in Bangalore in April 2008.
Calories in Indian foods and their nutrition depend on the way the foods are cooked.
An Indian dish may be very high in calories/energy (mostly from fat) if it is cooked by deep frying, or it may be low in calories or fat if it is stir fried or baked.
The rich creamy dishes containing foods covered with lot of spice colored liquid are often very high in fat (mostly saturated fat), while the tandoori dishes are low in fat.
Indian often reheat the food, the reheating destroys the nutrients of the food.
Indian food is often overcooked, destroying its nutrition.
The North Indian dishes are very rich in taste and presentation as compared to South Indian food. The North Indian foods, specially Punjabi food are generally higher in calories and fat and lower in nutritional value, than South Indian foods because Punjabi cooking involves tarka or vaghar (frying of spices, onions, etc.) in pure ghee (high in saturated fat), butter, oil or trans fats or trans-fatty acids (hydrogenated oils and fats, dalda) that gives unique Indian taste and texture. Read more on trans fats in Indian foods.
The tandoori foods of North India are rich in nutrition and natural flavours, but often these are loaded with fats. A new research reported at a conference on "Fats and trans-fatty acids in Indian diet" at the Seventh Health Writers Workshop organised by Health Essayists and Authors League (HEAL) in 2007 found that the trans-fatty acids in French fries is 4.2% - 6.1%, it is 9.5% in bhatura, 7.8% in paratha and 7.6% each in puri and tikkis.
However, it is possible to have traditional Indian food recipes that produce tasty dishes with very less fat and keeping the natural nutrition values and low calories. Thus it is possible to keep the calories in Indian foods low to get maximum benefit.
The tables below lists the nutrion values (total fat, carbohydrates, calories, and proteins of Indian foods.
The table contains the data for indian home made vegetables (vegetable curries), dals (dhals), rice, snacks like samosa, idli, milk products, roti/bread/chapatti, and parantha
In the following table "-" means that data are not available.
Use the table as a general guide only, as the values depend on the recipe used for preparing the dish. The fat and the calorie values are particularly dependent on the way of cooking. If you add too much ghee or oil in a dish, then these values will increase.
A single samosa (samosa recipe) contains more than 350 calories, of which 160 calories (i.e. more than 40% of total calories) come from fat because of deep frying. If you eat a baked samosa instead, you will be saving theses 160 calories.
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