Your New Yardstick: Prana

A few months back, Time magazine carried a picture of scooped butter on their cover page. ‘Did scientists get it all wrong?’, screamed the headline. The story was about how 1970s research, linking saturated fat to heart disea­ses, and which led Indians to promptly blacklist ghee, butter, etc., is not at all conclusive. In fact, new research points out that had we been eating butter all along, we would be a thinner world, with lesser lifestyle diseases like obesity and diabetes.

Now yogic wisdom predates ’70s; it’s as old as our civilisation and views the physical body as the manifestation of the food we eat. For this, it requires us to eat in a way that is simple, sensible and sustainable. Food is so important that it forms one of the yamas, the first step towards a yogic life.  The qual­ity of food is determined by its prana. Where did the food grow, how fresh was it when consumed, how was it cooked, was it seasonal and most importantly, did it taste good, leaving you light and energetic?

Each one of us is capable of knowing and experiencing the above and don’t need gadgets and labels to guide us. Counting calories, on the other hand, has only led to a fear of food. A single variable undermining the centuries- old, tried and tested food traditions. So the mantra is—count prana, not calories.