The good food guide: building a healthy world for future generations   Premium

Dr. K. Srinath Reddy's book Pulse to Planet Hacking Health and How Not to Die offer smart choices for nutrition, fitness, sleep, immunity, weight management and mental health. The Pegan Diet and Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life suggest dietary changes for better health. Fix it with Food and The Telomere Effect explain how food and exercise can improve health. Lifespan recommends being hungry a little bit during the day for long-term health. Public health experts urge understanding the connection between humans, other species and their shared environment to secure healthier lives.

Public health experts are of the opinion that the COVID-19 pandemic was a result of our dystopian relationship with nature. They also warn that children of today are at a risk of shorter life expectancy than their parents, if the unhealthy practices of food production and marketing driving an epidemic of overweight and obesity, diet-related cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancers, are not checked.

A collective way to confront the impending threats the world faces is to understand the connection between humans, other species and their shared environment. That human health is the single biggest driver for change in environmental management, is brought out well by Dr. K. Srinath Reddy in his new book Pulse to Planet (HarperCollins). He has put together the knowledge of science, medicine and public health to explain the social and commercial determinants of planetary health and how nature and nutrition promote a healthy world.

Unless we connect the dots of our health and food with the health of the planet, the luxury of good healthy living may be fraught with more challenges in the future, the book underlines.

During national nutrition week, the book comes as a timely reminder of how to secure a long-term healthy living by looking beyond biology, beliefs, behaviour, genetics and the internal workings of the body and comprehending how intricately these are linked to the ecosystem.

The author, as a clinician cardiologist and a public health expert, long recognised the interconnected value of health for individuals and for society as a whole, and believes that nutrition disorders, societal maladies and environmental damage can be corrected only when the link between life and environment is respected.

Linus Pauling, the 20th century American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1954) and also the Nobel Peace Prize (1962), believed that good nutrition can prevent 95% of all disease and increase life expectancy by about two decades. But a majority start paying attention to health a little later than they ideally should.

Mukesh Bansal in Hacking Health talks about the relationship between the body and health, advocating smart choices such as nutrition, fitness, sleep, immunity, weight management and mental health. Bansal demystifies science, debunks myths and delineates the human body’s functioning to make it efficient, fit and happy, with good nutrition as the core of wellness.