Nutrition in India — an individual’s health problem?
India’s leading nutrition and exercise science expert, Rujuta Diwekar is a vocal champion of using common sense and uncomplicating the act of eating. Diwekar in her talk about weight loss, nutrition and fitness looks at food and health as an interconnection of various components. She takes a macro-level view and sees how individual food habits are influenced by various elements directly or indirectly. Talking about food from farm to plate and comparing local and global trends about fitness at play, she tries to draw a holistic picture of nutrition and health.
One of the main arguments in Rujuta’s talk is that diabesity/obesity/unhealthy lifestyle is perceived as an individual’s problem rather than a systemic problem. The infrastructure of the country isn’t developed in a way which promotes a healthy lifestyle because of this fact. She talks about three main stakeholders that are part of this system — individuals, the government and the agriculture industry. These mini-systems of stakeholders are interconnected, for example, the government exporting and promoting food from outside the country impacts the agriculture industry because the demand for locally produced food decreases as individuals are heavily inspired by trends from the west. She gives an example of a decrease in the demand of pulses which results in a decrease in the quality of soil (reinforcing loop) in farmlands as pulses provide nitrogen and replenish the soil.
She stresses on the fact that to change the pattern of the unhealthy lifestyle a policy level change as well as individual behaviour change is required. All the stakeholders have to work together if we are to see a change in this system. An advocate of locally produced food, she reasons that fad diets and west inspired diets are bound to fail and the only way one can reduce weight is by having proper locally produced meals. She points out that the rich and affluent Indian can help the local farmer by buying their produce which in turn will help the GDP of the country.
Rujuta doesn’t stop here but goes on to give two possible interventions for the described problem, namely the Grandmom test which is employed at school level and the Food Miles test. Getting celebrities to endorse her cause also furthers her ideology about nutrition and health. These interventions might sound right at first, but they have their own set of problems. Rujuta fails to see the generational and globalisation gap when she talks about the Grandmom test. If one has to consider if the food would be eaten by their grandma, they cannot ignore the times and the situation the grandma was in, rendering this test inconclusive.
Even though Rujuta tries to draw a holistic picture of nutrition and health, and tries to iterate that this isn't an individual problem but rather a systemic one, one can see her coming back to only making interventions at an individual level. She fails to mention various other factors that can result in one’s “fat body”, like genetics, hormonal variations, physical health ailments, mental ailments. To propagate a certain type of body as the desired body can be seen as problematic and adds to the already built body image issue that women nowadays go through. Being someone who can influence a lot of women and is generally looked up to, she can adopt more inclusive ways to talk about nutrition and good health.
If we see this as a system, a failure of mentioning all the different components at play, a designer’s intervention to the mentioned problem will not be fruitful. As a designer, it is imperative that we see all the factors and components at play before moving forward into giving solutions, which Rujuta in her talk has neglected.
