Afu Puja, Health is Wealth

Written by Fulbright Researcher Alden Towler and originally published by The Republica Newspaper of Nepal on April 30, 2009.

While researching food habits and health in the Kathmandu Valley on a Fulbright Scholarship is the reason I have been living and studying in Nepal for the last seven months, I have also become very fascinated by local religious culture.  This past Tihar I was invited by a Newari friend to his home for mhapuja, or ‘worship of the self’.  While I am no expert on the religious culture of Nepal, I would love to share what such a celebration and worship of the self means to me in the context of eating and being healthy here in Kathmandu.

No matter what religion you follow, your world would not exist without the living tissues that you call your own body.  Whether or not we say that god exists within ourselves, can we not agree that this body, this self of ours is an astonishingly beautiful thing that deserves much respect and celebration?

We can respect and worship ourselves everyday by eating the foods that our body will thank us for. In this sense, you do not really have to be Newari to do mhapuja. And really, eating healthily should not be such a hard thing do to. However, in our modern circumstance this is not the case considering that the lifestyles and food available today are often at odds with the lifestyles and foods for which our bodies are best suited. 

Health professionals speaking from both classical Ayurvedic and modern scientific perspectives agree that the food which is healthiest for humans today is the same food which our ancestors have been eating for millennia. Of course having some sort of physical activity/exercise in one’s daily life is the backbone of good health. In America, where I was born and raised, many people have become extremely confused about what they should be eating and have forgotten what to eat.  The foods and recipes from our ancestors have been largely replaced by the advice from doctors and magazines who seem to change their minds every other year about what foods are best to eat.  Food becomes fad instead of staple.  As a consequence, the USA leads the world in its number of people suffering from what I will call ‘metabolic illnesses,’ which include obesity, insulin resistance, Type 2 Diabetes, Heart Disease, and high blood pressure, with over 50% of our population affected.

India and China combine to host a quickly increasing number of 60 million Type 2 diabetics.  Kathmandu falls geographically just between those two countries. Today close to 30% of urban Nepal’s population suffers from metabolic illness according to a recent study.  While sedentary lifestyle is also to blame, diet plays a very important role creating illnesses. Today’s modern world has become plagued with the fruits of industry–overly refined foods.   

Here in Kathmandu people have not forgotten what to eat—in fact Nepalis know exactly what to eat and prepare it exceptionally well, Daal, Bhaat/Dhido, tarkari nai khaau—but instead the problem is more that the foods people are eating have changed their form and have lost most of their most vital nutrients. The main three issues I generally see are too many refined grains and refined oils, and too few fruits and vegetables in the diet. 

Refined grains such as white rice (as opposed to ‘pura polish nabhaeko chamal’- brown rice) and white flour (‘maida’ as opposed to ‘atta’- whole wheat flour) that have been stripped of their vitamins, minerals and fiber are now the main ingredients of Kathmanduites’ diet.  Such over-processed carbohydrates, which are quickly converted to sugar upon ingestion, can be a main cause of both metabolic illness and malnutrition. Processed vegetables oils like soybean and sunflower oil along with dalda (margarine) have an unhealthy ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 fatty acids (their ratio is 1:10 while 1:3 is the preferred healthy ratio) and can also contain trans-fatty acids which are becoming outlawed in the USA (these oils also often go rancid during industrial production).  So let me say this simply: fresh, pure mustard oil (toriko tel) is exceptionally healthy (and tasty) with a perfect omega 3 / omega 6 ratio of 1:3.

Since when did ultra-polished white rice become the only thing synonymous with food or ‘khaanaa’ in Nepal?  So many people have told me that this omnipresent white rice is preferred because it is pleasing to the eyes, it is good to look at.  Do our eyes eat rice?  If so, the habit of eating a mountain of white rice twice a day would be a wonderful puja to the eyes. But because this is not the case, I am afraid that such rice is partially to blame for many of Nepal’s health problems. (And by the way what ever happened to buckwheat (‘phapar’), millet (‘kodo’), corn (‘makai’) —acknowledged widely by all Nepalis as the most nourishing grains?  Will these completely disappear from the diet as white flour becomes everything we eat—biscuit, momo, chowmein, chowchow, pauroti, dunot, naan, samosas, mithai…?  I hope not.)

It is the essential vitamins, minerals, and fiber which are stripped away from rice and wheat which could otherwise be properly nourishing all people—students, businesswoman, fathers, and mother alike—the way they had been for millennia before the recent advent of the machine mill. Essential micronutrients are found in the bran of grains, the layer residing under the hull (‘buss’/‘bokra’) known in Nepali as ‘chokar’.  Today chokar sells on the market for 15 rupees per kilogram so that it can be fed to animals.  I love animals too, but don’t you think we should be feeding the most nourishing part of our food to ourselves?  Afulai puja garnu pardaina? 

The foods which the people of Kathmandu avoid like brown rice, dhido and sisnu (partially because people associate such foods with the antiquity and ‘poor backwardness’ of the village) are actually the best foods there are for our bodies!  The reasons behind the prevalence of the overly refined foods I have mentioned are too complex to summarize here.  But people from all walks of life should recognize the beauty of the self and work to overcome the silly social constructs which get in the way of the most important puja of all, afupuja.