-by Sheela Rani Chunkath
If you have a sweet tooth and are not diabetic you can sometimes indulge in sweets.
Rather than using plain sugar, use our traditional sweeteners, many of which are packed with vitamins, minerals and enzymes. So if you want to make kheer use jaggery rather than plain sugar. If you can get organic jaggery that would be the best. Organic jaggery is made by concentrating sugarcane juice and removing the impurities without using any harmful chemicals.
I have a friend who is an organic farmer, who revels in the process of making jaggery. He is diabetic but he says that he uses a bit of his organic jaggery with his food and finds that it does him no harm. I would not, however, recommend it for diabetics except as an occasional indulgence.
Now, what this farmer does is take quantities of the sugarcane juice and pour it into a huge iron vat and have it boiled till it reaches a certain consistency at which point he adds slaked lime. He says our body needs calcium.This removes impurities in the sugarcane liquid. Boiling is continued until the mixture turns a lovely brown. The next step is to bring down the temperature of the liquid. For this, some castor oil or coconut oil is added. At this point the liquid will have 12% moisture. This is just tested by hand by the workers who through years of experience know when exactly to add the oil. Once the oil is added and the seething, bubbling liquid calms down, so to say, the sticky liquid is transferred a wooden vat. The workers wait for the mixture to cool down a bit but not too much and shape the sticky liquid into round balls of jaggery. In Tamil we call it mandai vellam or head-shaped jaggery. Organic jaggery has excellent nutritive value and contains iron and folic acid, B complex vitamins and calcium. Boiling in iron vats and adding slaked lime adds to the nutritive value of the jaggery.
Palm jaggery is made from the juice that drips when the flower spathe of the palm tree has been tapped, cut or bruised. The crystalline form is palm candy. Ayurvedic vaidyars prescribe palm candy with turmeric in hot milk for a sore throat. Palm jaggery and candy contain carbohydrates, appreciable amounts of B complex, vitamins and minerals like iron in an easily assimilable form.
Yet another natural sweetener is honey. Ayurvedic vaidyars are very particular that honey should never be heated, not even gently or by double boiling. According to them heated honey releases toxins in the body and contributes to the build up of ama. Earlier I used to look for wild honey while buying honey from the shops. Now, I have located a bee farmer, a young enterprising girl who has set up her own bee farm and handles the bees with great confidence and ease. I ask her to give me raw unprocessed honey. She takes the combs from the hive, carefully removes the wax caps and, with a centrifuge, extracts the honey in a container. She strains the honey and gives it to me. This is the only kind of honey I use. In commercial processing, the honey is heated gently in a double boiler to remove more of the wax etc. I decided that I would rather go with the purists and generally use only raw unprocessed honey. Again, the vaidyars say honey is okay for diabetics. I would once again request diabetics to use honey in small quantities only. Honey is a wonderful food for all kinds of convalescents, for the tired and weary, in fact for most of us. Honey should never be heated, so it cannot be used for baking, in cooking sweets, in hot drinks etc.
Honey is a source of carbohydrates, containing mostly fructose and glucose. Due to the high level of fructose, honey is sweeter than table sugar. It contains 2% minerals, vitamins, pollen and protein. The vitamins present in honey are B6, thiamin, niacin, riboflavin and pantothenic acid. The minerals found in honey include calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, sodium and zinc. This natural sweetener also contains antioxidants and is fat free and cholesterol free!
Among other natural sweeteners, stevia is a sweetener from a tropical plant. It is gaining popularity and is considered safe for diabetics.
Another sweetener is sucralose, not sucrose. This is a sugar substitute and is said to be safe for diabetics. I do use it sometimes but I am quite wary of all things new as further research will usually throw up some unwanted side effects. The comfort with classical and traditional foods and medicines is that we have had aeons of times to discover side effects, if any. The Sarangadhara says only the best remedies with few side effects have survived over the years.
--- The writer was earlier Health Secretary, Government of Tamil Nadu and is currently Additional Chief Secretary and Chairman & Managing Director, Tamil Nadu Handicrafts Development Corporation. She can be reached at Sheelarani.arogyamantra@gmail. com. Earlier articles can be accessed at http://arogyamantra.blogspot.com/