Boy Shakira reacts to a news report in  our new series; Howzatt?

New Delhi: Dismissing the old adage of breakfast being the healthiest meal of the day, a new study noted that it is in fact the unhealthiest meal in India, reports PTI (1 Feb).

Really? Do you mean middle class India, rural India, or the whole of India? There are lakhs of poor fellows who  have no breakfast at all.

According to the study conducted by HealthifyMe, a mobile health and fitness company, snacks consumed during evening and morning hours make for the most unhealthy eating habits of Indians.

Who? Now do they know the difference between ‘breakfast’ : the first meal of the day ,and a ‘snack’ which is an Americanism for raiding the fridge especially at midnight when the wife is fast asleep and can’t berate you for pigging out on smoked ham and salami ?

“Breakfast has the highest amount of carbohydrates and fat across all the meals in a day,” the study, which factored in 43 million food records of 1 million urban Indians across 200,000 locations, said.

Oho! So your tactics are to scare the living daylights out of us city slickers, eh?

The survey revealed that lunch and dinner have the highest intake of vegetables, making them the healthiest meals.

Eeew, here comes that ‘ Sonny boy, better eat your vegetables or there’s no ice-cream for you’ threat again. As a die hard carnivore, my lunch and dinner better have some ‘vegetarian- fed’ dishes on the plate, get my drift? But hey, it is probably true that most Indians are vegetarians who occasionally eat meat, anyway.

“Dinner is the most protein-heavy food of the day,” it noted.

Baby, all my meals are full of protein: surf and turf as we gourmets like to call ‘em

Data also suggested that snacks are major contributors to ailments like diabetes, hypertension and obesity in the country.

That’s a no-brainer. The more you snack, the more you grow sideways, unless you exercise a lot!

Over 70 per cent people of the sample group of the study were found either to be overweight or obese, and one-third of them were diagnosed with diabetes or hypertension or both.

Whaaat? Where did you get these people from man… that’s scary, considering that I have these teeny weeny love handles … and um… I have three friends who are border-line diabetics … so maybe this info isn’t all that far-fetched ….

“One interesting trend we found is that the smallest foods are the biggest culprits! It is not so much of what we eat during lunch and dinner but what we snack on in between and after, that is causing Indian waistlines, diabetes and hypertension to skyrocket,” Tushar Vashisht, CEO and co-founder of the application said.

That mean’s lay off the Lays, don’t cheat on the Cheetos, don’t pig out on Pizzas with extra cheese, don’t dip into those scrumptious chicken wings …. Aw, shoot!!!

  food, humour