The academics as well as professionals in the vast field of nutrition make it a point to emphasise the importance of balanced diet and the rich rewards by following their mantra that seem to fall on deaf ears, particularly in the camp of gourmets. The key issue that is missed in prescribing the set of do’s and don’ts for adhering to balanced diet, particularly to be wary of sugar, fat and salt, in same order, unarguably, happens to be the kick that people at large seek from gobbling their favourite dishes, sugar-loaded, fat-rich and tastefully salted. One cannot be faulted to aver that people eat food and not nutrition. The protagonists of balanced diet have their say in the assembly of people who dare to violate the rules of the eating game only to get bugged by health disorders, deficiency diseases,  aches and pains, but it may be too late in the day to restore their balance. Eating for enduring from dawn to dusk and lasting from cradle to the grave are different kettles of fish.

The land’s ancient generations, by hindsight, must have scrupulously followed a regimen of eating food to meet the needs of the body, taking care to avoid yielding to greed. The ubiquitous eateries of our times, particularly in urban spaces, Mysuru too in their august company, seem to be the greatest threat to the cause of eating appropriately to endure in every sense of the word. The expression balanced diet has vanished into thin air.

The mass of the land’s headcount in impressionable age, most choosy in the matter of their food habits, cannot be faulted for their choice of dishes that are poles apart from the land’s rich stock of tongue-smacking foods that are matchless for their nutrition and tastes that appeal to all sections of society. The millet-dominated diet of the rustics that has endured for centuries is marked by the factor of enduring their energy needed for the toil in the field for long hours. While the merits of balanced diet cannot be over-emphasised, the factors of accessing food without hassles, affording without  difficulty and eating with relish win the day in the debate on food. Nutrition is both integral and incidental component of whatever food one chooses to eat.

Ultimately, all points bearing on our food considered, the choice is between enjoying food with relish irrespective of the advisory to stick to balanced diet opening the doors to ill health or to endure for an extended life span. The idiom As you sow, so you reap reflects the right and wrong of eating food with balance or otherwise.