India's top nutritionist Ryan Fernando (middle) seen with Indian cricket coach Rahul Dravid.
With allopathic doctors increasingly having to deal with patients afflicted with lifestyle diseases, be it heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and in several cases cancer, they will increasingly be forced to fall back on strategies beyond simply prescribing allopathic drugs and resort to 'nutrition' as prescription therapy for their patients, opined one of India's top nutritionist Ryan Fernando in an exclusive chat with The Goan.
Bengaluru-based Fernando, who is acknowledged as a nutritionist with a magical touch particularly among top actors and athletes owing to the success he had with medal winning Olympians, is in Goa to deliver a lecture to top medical practitioners and professionals on this very subject: diet as prescription therapy in allopathic medicine.
"Everyone is eating more. The world is eating (consuming) a lot more than say what it did a hundred or thousand years ago. It's natural human tendency to be eating what you like in excess. The catch, however is to zero in what our body needs in terms of nutrition, not calories," Fernando said.
A 'Goenkar' born and brought up in Goa, Fernando schooled at the Rosary School and Dhempe HSS at Miramar, before earning a degree from St Xavier's College at Mapusa and another degree in biochemistry from Goa Medical College.
He moved to the United Kingdom where he earned another masters degree in food and nutrition before returning to India to practice as a nutritionist, more specifically as a sports nutritionist.
Nutrition, according to Fernando, is crucial in an athlete's armour and one of the crucial reasons why India and its sportspersons fall short at the international level.
"Diet (nutrition) alone can contribute to up to 12 per-cent improvement/enhancement in the performance of an athlete," he said, adding that he is aware that most women athletes in India are anemic.
"I know of an athlete, I will not take the name, who had competed at the top level with an Hb (hemoglobin) count of just 11. That is almost anemic," Fernando said to stress his point that India's sports system gives very little weightage to diets of athletes.
Generally, he says, people are eating outside rather than at home.
"E-commerce (swiggy, zomato), supermarkets and malls make it available and convenient. We Indians normally eat culturally and emotionally. The food your mom, wife or anyone at home cooks is done with love and care unlike some chef in a restaurant who's doing it as a job," Fernando said.
Also, the quality of commodities available today is not up to the mark in terms of the nutrients they possess, especially vegetables.
"Our soil is depleted. Farmers have to resort to using a lot of pesticides. The crop eventually is not what it used to be in the past in terms of the nutrients (vitamins and minerals). The tambdi bhaji we got in the 1980s isn't the same as the tambdi-bhaji in the 2000s," he adds.
According to him, most health problems, be it thyroid or any other commonly faced concerns either boil down to poor eating habits that ignore nutrition and lack of physical activity.
Fernando said in a few years the genetic test which analyses eating behaviour will get cheaper and help people with identifying what's wrong with their eating habits and correct themselves.
On intermittent fasting, Fernando said it is a great way to lower one meal intake and allow better insulin sensitivity but he recommends fasting up to 30 hours.
