Horlicks Protein Plus No added sugar review

 A famous blogger who claimed that the secret of her energy was Saffola Fittify hi-protein meal shake a few weeks back now has shifted her loyalties to Horlicks Protein Plus. Earlier I used to find such promotional posts irritating but now I find them so funny and entertaining. How quickly they switch brands with no hesitation!! 😆😆😆 Do brands even have any contracts/agreements with Insta influencers? Do these contracts have a no-compete clause at all?

Anyway, let's focus on the product. I wanted to get the ingredients list but couldn't find it on Amazon or Bigbasket. I found the label on Flipkart. 

When a brand claims "no added sugar", the first thing we need to do is to check the ingredients for artificial sweeteners. As you might notice, it contains Acesulfame potassium. I have written about this ingredient in Women's Horlicks review. All artificial sweeteners have harmful side effects. 

This term "Contains added flavour" without any details need to be looked at as well. Why can't they explicitly state what the flavours are?

This protein shake/mix is just becoming a huge business. Let's not focus only on the protein quantity and ignore the rest of the ingredients.

Book Review: The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukouka

 

 

This book was recommended to me by so many people. I purchased a copy last year but didn't make the time to read it. While reading Mansoor Khan's "The third curve", I noticed that he has mentioned this book in his list of recommendations. That was the "last straw" for me to pick up this brilliant book, which I managed to finish it in 3 days.

I'm starting to believe this statement - "When the reader is ready, the book appears."

Coming to this book, Masanobu Fukuoka talks about the perils of modern agriculture and why return to "do-nothing" / natural farming is the need of the hour. Simplistic, easy to relate, hard-hitting and brilliant writing that I was totally hooked onto this book for the past 3 days. Having been reading up about food and nutrition for the past 7 years, it is a natural transition for me to invest efforts in understanding where and how our food comes from. 

The author starts off with talking about his personal experiences in transitioning to natural farming, growing rice, clover and other grains in his farm. He diligently follows four principles of farming - no cultivation (no plowing of the soil), no chemical fertilizer or prepared compost, no weeding by using herbicides and no dependence on chemicals. For someone with no exposure to farming like me, the chapters that elaborate on these principles would be fascinating to read. 

The second half of the book emphasizes a lot about living in harmony with nature, growing crops according to the season and eating habits that focus on eating simple, local and wholesome foods. The questions the author keeps raising throughout the book related to food, industrial growth, ambition, education, sustainability etc are so impactful that your mind expands to see new horizons. 

Here are a few passages from the book that I liked:

"The consumer's willingness to pay high prices for food produced out of season has also contributed to the increased usage of artificial growing methods and chemicals"

"Until there is a reversal of the sense of values which cares more for size and appearance than for quality, there will be no solving the problem of food pollution."

"Produce grown in an unnatural way satisfies people's fleeting desires but weakens the human body and alters the body chemistry so that is dependent upon such foods."

Until a few years back, cauliflower used to be only available for 3-4 months in winter but it is now available throughout the year. There's hardly any taste whatsoever, but people continue to buy cauliflower as it is being considered a "low calorie" vegetable. The same applies to various fruits and vegetables these days.

The chapter on pricing natural foods was a revelation to me. I had always thought that growing natural foods is expensive and that's the reason for the premium pricing of organic foods. But the author provides a different view:

"Growing fruit without applying chemicals, using fertilizer or cultivating the soil involves less expense and the farmer's net profit is therefore higher."

"As for the consumer, the common belief has been that natural food should be expensive. If it is not expensive, people suspect that it is not natural food."

The lines I absolutely loved:

"If we do have a food crisis it will not be caused by the insufficiency of nature's productive power but by the extravagance of human desire."

"When a naive scientific knowledge becomes the basis of living, people come to live as if they are dependent only on starch, fats and protein, and plants on nitrogen, phosphorus and potash."

I'll stop here, as there are so many such powerful lines/phrases that I have underlined throughout the book.

If food interests you, then this is one book you shouldn't miss out.

Cipla Brain Boosters Review

Before our mommy bloggers start posting that their children are the next Einstein because of consuming these brain boosters every day, let me jump ahead and post my review.

The ingredients list look similar to Cipla's Immuno boosters (review posted here). The main promise of this brain boosters is that it contains the power of real almonds and Brahmi. Look at the minuscule percentages - 5% almonds and 0.7% Brahmi extract.

Each chocolate contains 3gm of sugar and harmful hydrogenated vegetable fats.

Children can get all the required vitamins and minerals from natural foods. As parents, it is our responsibility to introduce real foods and ensure they get access to natural, home-cooked foods every day. Let's not rely on such chocolates please!
We don't need to sugar coat everything.

Brands keep discovering new ways to sell junk. Let's be conscious of our choices.

Book Review: The Third Curve by Mansoor Khan

 

 

"Karma", "Fate", "Destiny" - whatever be the name, it feels like I was MEANT TO read this book. Before I write about the book, let me share a quick story of how I ended up buying it. A few weeks back, we were roaming around Brigade Road and stopped at Blossoms Book Store. I was browsing through books on the ground floor and selected a few to buy, while my husband was on the third floor, sitting and reading a book. He kept it back on the shelf and we were walking back to our car. While we were driving home, he said, "You know, I was reading this book. You might like it. I have heard the author speak at IIMB a few years back". I was curious about this book but didn't follow through. After a couple of weeks, I was around Brigade Road, attending a personal finance workshop. The core topic of the workshop was all about growth, high returns from mutual funds and how the markets have fared well in the past 2 decades etc. Though the workshop was informative, I was walking back with a lot of questions running on my mind - how can we make an assumption that the markets would give similar high returns in the next 2 decades, why aren't we factoring in other critical issues like environmental degradation, climate change etc? After having lunch at a restaurant nearby, I told my husband, "Let's go and check if the book you recommended to me is still available in Blossoms". Sure enough, it was there on the very same shelf where my husband had kept it. I didn't glance much but intuitively I felt it was the right book for me. After purchasing it, I realized it was a signed copy by the author himself. That's the beauty of a second hand book store - you might get such surprises!

Coming to the book, the author Mansoor Khan has dealt with a very important topic - that perpetual exponential growth is impossible with earth's finite resources. In the first few chapters of the book, he has explained about the industrial revolution, our extreme dependencies on oil and our constant expectations of exponential growth. The "Concept vs Reality" approach he has used to explain the context and unravel the problem was thought-provoking and easy to understand.

These two passages hit the nail on the head - 

"The Earth is not a huge, inanimate hunk of mud, rock, ores, minerals etc that can spew out resources at whatever rate we wish for human purpose alone. It is not to be viewed as a storehouse of resources for us to extract, loot and dispose of........The Earth in fact is a complex organism. It is as living as each of us."

"A crazy and unreal concept of Perpetual Exponential Quantitative Growth (PEQG) of money leads to chasing and looting half the planet's energy and resources, disrupting ecosystems, fraying social structures and corrupting moral integrity."

After setting the premise of how our expectations of PEQG is unrealistic, the author talks about how we have crossed the Global Peak of oil production around 2005 and it is downhill from thereafter. Given our exponential growth and high dependency on oil, we don't have much time left until the remaining available oil is used up. 

There have been quite a hue and cry over alternative energy sources in the past couple of decades, but the author has explained in detail about how each of the proposed alternative energy sources fails to meet the 5 energy rules. I admit I felt all gloomy and depressed, reading about the lack of alternatives.

But the chapter on Transition gave me hope and clarity. And I will refer to this chapter more often, as my thoughts and ideologies seem to align with the proposed solution.

"We have to now first personally believe that small is beautiful, less is good, local is important, community is strength, sharing itself is charity and diversity is paramount."

Well researched, hard-hitting, thorough analysis and at the same time, easy to understand, I highly recommend this book to all who want to understand the hard reality - that the way we are consuming planet's resources is not sustainable in the long run and we need to take corrective action NOW. Changing our light bulbs to CFL or buying "energy efficient" refrigerators won't make much of a difference.

 

This book is available as a free download on the author's website. Do check it out.

Protinex Lite Review

Products that were earlier launched for diabetics are slowly making entry into the mainstream, given that most of us are becoming health conscious and want to take preventive measures against lifestyle diseases like diabetes, blood pressure, thyroid issues, high cholesterol etc. Until 4-5 years back, artificial sweeteners were exclusively consumed by people with diabetes. But now, these artificial sweeteners are positioned for health-conscious, urban population, irrespective of whether we have diabetes or not. Many brands capitalize on this "fear factor" riding on the latest health fads. "High protein" seems to be the most popular fad these days.

What used to be a health drink for diabetics is now repositioned for the general population. As mentioned in the pack, Protinex Diabetes Care is now Protinex Lite.

Ingredients:

Skimmed milk powder,

Stabilizer [gum arabic [acacia gum]]

soya protein isolate,

maltodextrin,

corn flour,

soya fibre,

maize starch,

wheat bran,

stabilizer [guar gum],

vitamins [ascorbic acid, dl-alpha tocopheryl acetate, retinyl acetate, nicotinamide, ergocalciferol, calcium pantothenae, thiamine hydrochloride, pyridoxine hydrochloride, riboflavin, folic acid, d-biotin],

minerals [magnesium oxide, ferric pyrophosphate, zinc sulphate, cupric gluconate, potassium iodate, sodium molybdate, chromic chloride, sodium selenate], 

taurine

1. This drink contains 30% protein. More than the quantity of protein (gms) in these protein drinks, we should be concerned about the source of protein - based on the ingredients, protein is from skimmed milk powder and soya protein isolate.
1. As I had mentioned in my earlier post on meal replacement bar, more than 93% of soy planted in the United States is genetically modified. In India, only cotton is genetically modified as of now. Unless brands explicitly confirm that soy used is non-GMO or they mention that the source country of soy is India, I'm extremely skeptical of consuming soy products.
2. Given that most commercial milk is adulterated and the cows raised in large-scale dairy farms are given antibiotics, growth hormones and what not, I don't consider "dairy products" procured from a commercial large-scale industry as a reliable nutrition source for protein (or calcium). I would urge all these protein supplement brands (that use skimmed milk powder/whey protein isolate/whey protein concentrate as their protein source) to first prove that their supplements are free from antibiotics/growth hormones residues.
2. The second ingredient is gum arabic which is mainly used as a bulking agent. According to Noshly, a bulking agent is a filler substance that increases food bulk without increasing available energy value significantly. Gum arabic or acacia gum is a possible allergen, triggering asthma and skin rash. 
3. There are so many unwanted ingredients such as maltodextrin, corn flour and maize starch. Many such protein drinks use maltodextrin, a starch-derived food additive that raises blood sugar levels rapidly. If we are neither extremely active nor participating in sports/athletics etc, then regular intake of maltodextrin may eventually lead to insulin resistance. 

The sugar-free claim might be true, as sugar (sucrose) is not present in the ingredients list. But there are other ingredients that have a high glycemic index, which are equally detrimental to our health like sugar. 

Protein is an important nutrient, no doubt. But I would rather get my dose of protein (vitamins and minerals too) from natural, plant-based sources than from such chemical concoctions. 

Mother's day is nearing. And I see many "mom bloggers" and "food influencers" promoting this pack, saying how their energy levels have spiked up by consuming this drink and how they are able to multitask and handle various responsibilities. Please, what a boatload of lies!  (I wanted to write a different phrase, but prefer to keep my blog space clean without any swear words). Social media la indha maadhiri promote panradhellaam periya responsibilityaa??

Fellow moms, eating simple, homecooked, real foods, being physically active, getting a good night's sleep and taking care of emotional self are the clear shot ways to boost one's energy levels. Please don't fall for such traps.