How To Discern Between Grains, Seeds and Mighty Millets!
Research suggests that consuming fermented millets can support a healthy gut microbiome due to their probiotic nature. It is important to find millets which are gluten-free and have a low glycaemic index improving the gut health of the consumer. When you take care of your body’s microbiome, you take care of your physical, mental and emotional needs, too.
High consumption of polished rice and refined wheat flour by the urban population, coupled with sedentary lifestyles, has led to a rise in obesity and other lifestyle diseases. According to the Redseer healthcare report, India is expected to be home to about 1 billion lifestyle disease incidents – obesity, diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases running rampant, as gifts of newly scoured modern lifestyles, millets have returned as a viable option to live a healthy life. Millennials today, want their diet to be all natural, nourishing and packed with nutrients.
Nutritionally, millets are:
Each one of us should we at making better choices in every aspect of our wellbeing. Consumption of nutritious local ingredients like Millets – Foxtail millet, Jowar, Ragi, Bajra, have its own natural benefits, helping the body charge itself for the day.
The industry has evolved tremendously and today millet brands have simplified snacking for a modern lifestyle with classic ingredients and a variety of innovative products. They use local ingredients, with natural benefits, to create innovative products that will supercharge your day. A lot of brands today have launched a range of breakfast mixes include Jowar Idli, Jowar Upma, Ragi Multimix, Millet Pancake Mix, Ragi Chocolate Drink and Quinoa Porridge which are indeed some great options of healthy snacking. With all these innovative products, there is also a need to provide the Millennials healthy snacking options which are not just rich with proteins and energy but have a good taste too, brands are experimenting and have come up with products like Millet & Cinnamon Cookie Mix, Millet Pizza Base Mix and Nut & Millet Cake Mix - giving new age snacking a healthier twist. These products are not just healthy but at the same time come with properties as gluten-free, made without refined sugar, packed with plant protein, high fibre and all natural.
Research validates the goodness of millets. In 2010, a study published in the Pathophysiology journal said that eating millets could help bring down blood glucose in diabetics. The same year, a research paper published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry confirmed that all millets are rich sources of antioxidants, while another study in Nutrition Research concluded that millets may be useful in preventing cardiovascular disease.
Millets being rain-fed crops, do not require standing water in their fields, there’s no actual need for big dams, forests going under reservoirs and elaborate canal systems to get water to the farms. Millets do not need any fertility enhancement or pesticides to grow well and yield a good harvest. Essentially, the environmental footprint of millets is a tiny fraction of that for paddy or wheat.
The revival of millet cultivation in India, agronomics say, is a step towards sustainable cropping practices that respect biodiversity in nature. This is exemplified by comparing the amount of water needed to grow rice with that for millets. One rice plant requires nearly 2.5 times the amount of water required by a single millet plant of most varieties, according to the Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).
Millets are thus environmentally, ecologically, economically friendly sources of food and nutrition.
