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Dr. Manjari Chandra is a Functional Nutritionist and practices Nutritional Medicine.
Manjari has been a recipient of many prestigious awards
- ASSOCHAM award for “Popular Consultant in the field of Wellness and Nutrition”
- World Women Leadership Congress 2022 “Exemplary Women Leadership Award”
- Global Choice Awards 2021″Women Icon of the Year (Wellness Author and Coach)”
- AYUSH award for “ Excellence in Wellness and Nutrition”
- CMO ASIA World Leadership Award – “Women Super Achiever Award”
Manjari is also a regular contributor for leading Newspapers and Publications such as Times of India, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Indian Express, Outlook, Men’s Health etc. She is an expert panellist for Television channels including NDTV, India Today, Zee Business, CNN News 18, Mirror Now, Republic TV, and AajTak
Manjari has treated thousands of patients for various chronic medical conditions by clinically using nutrition and lifestyle to reverse cardio-metabolic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, hormonal imbalance, autoimmune and neurological disorders all the way to Cancer. Her work entails changing her patient’s lives by reversing their diseases using ancient Indian wisdom, and herbs and blending it with bioregulatory nutritional medicine and modern science.
Manjari’s First book “Eat Up Clean Up” was published with “Fingerprint Publications”.
Her Second book “Heal with Foods” with “Rupa Publications” is available across bookstores in India. She is also the Principal Consultant for healthcare applications such as Bonatra, Smart Diet Planner and Calvary.
In Conversation with Dr. Manjari Chandra – Preeti Juneja
Q. How do you approach bringing changes in lifestyle and food over pills in the fight against sickness? Do you follow any particular practice, like Ayurveda, Naturopathy, or therapeutic strategies for treating specific diseases?
All these disciplines are largely used for fighting or managing chronic diseases. I largely practise contemporary modern medicine, which is allopathic medicine. What we are doing in modern medicine today is sickness care; it’s not healthcare in the true sense. At the same time, the entire essence of healthcare was for people to be healthy and not just deal with sickness. For example, people would only go to an Ayurvedic practitioner or a Homoeopath saying, ‘I have diabetes; I don’t want to take a pill which my physician has prescribed’.
We are trying to do something called Functional Medicine or Nutritional Medicine. It’s a treatment wherein you work on the root cause or correct what causes the condition in the first place. For example, in gut cleansing procedures, we have massages, such as ayurvedic massages and colon wash to name a few. These not only prevent but also help in the treatment of serious conditions.
Q. Weight loss is an age-old health issue. What is your experience with specialized diets (e.g., vegan, ketogenic, gluten-free)? Any diet regime that you have personally adopted and advocated to your clients?
There’s no harm in becoming a vegan; it’s a good thing to do. It should be your own choice. The same goes for avoiding carbs and getting into a low-carb diet, fasting, or anything healthier for the body. Whether it is the ketogenic diet, which is essentially to reduce too much carbs because we eat carbs all the time. Some may say, why gluten-free? Because we are just eating gluten all the time. At some point, you have to come into a space where you get into moderation and are not extremely, very extreme with what you are doing.
Q. What are the most common nutritional mistakes you see people make?
Over-eating, over-nourishing and over-feeding: Things that I feel most people do wrong.
The constant urge to think that if we have to nourish ourselves, we need to eat a lot of food is completely contradictory to how human physiology works. Your body requires very little food for optimal functioning unless you’re a professional wrestler, miner, or farmer. Our body, with the sedentary urban lifestyle, requires very little food for normal, optimal functioning. This over-hype – nourish your children, force feed your children is a commonly seen mistake.
Completely given up on intuitive eating: If your body is asking for rest and sleep but you’re still working, fighting it, you’re only creating havoc. The same happens with food. You’re not respecting your body’s hunger, satiety, and requirement of food. You eat because of a pattern. We have completely given up on intuition, knowing our bodies’ cues for what is going to work for us and what is not.
Very nutritious food has to be very fancy, complex and costly: Instead of looking at the labels and the super components, the fortification and so on on packaged food, better would be to embrace your cultural intelligence and traditional intelligence with food that we already have. Going back to roots, home-cooked nutritious food.
The whole process of eating is wrong: Whether we study, work, eat, or do anything in life,
the more mindful we become about it, the more effective it becomes for us. You cannot eat on a tube or in your cab or, on the run, on the go. You have to understand that, for the body to process, assimilate, digest, and absorb food, there is a physiology. Your mouth needs to make saliva, your body needs to make digestive enzymes, the pH needs to be correct, and you have to chew your food well. It is your physical health; you have to make some time to be mindful about the way you sit and eat food.
Q. On your vision to bring indigenous food and healing therapies to the forefront and allow nutrition to become a pillar for reversing disease, you have written books, regularly contributed to newspapers and TV channels, and online blogs, and given talks at various public health conferences, conducted sessions in various organisations corporate, NGOs, educational and more. How do you measure your success in translating your thoughts on nutrition to active adoption of healthy lifestyles by people? Share your success story with some anecdotes.
This is not a prescriptive thing; you can write and hand it to people, and they’ll follow it.
Firstly, people are very intelligent, and if you ask them to do something that will especially change their behaviour and food, they have to understand why they have to do it.
I’m here to sit with you and understand what’s bothering you, and then I’ll try to reason out why you should do this and how it will benefit you. Not only is it a disease condition, but also because that is the right thing to do. So, one of the things that we do is work with the people and sit with them and explain how this works on their body, impacts their physiology, how it will change the way they will digest and process food and how their mind, how the gut works, how the brain is connected to it.
Second, counselling and hand-holding help a lot. Sometimes, we have people who work with me. Being constantly in touch with those people and trying to understand what they’re able to do, not able to do, where the challenges are, sometimes nudge them, sometimes coerce them. You have to be a part of the journey because it is a journey of changing behaviours, changing food, and seeing better health.
Third are the success stories. Frankly, innumerable of them. I find it too much of an invasion of privacy to document them or put them anywhere, so I don’t do that, but we have in our files and folders and enough contacts thousands of patients that I work with. They all keep coming back with small goals that they reach, and then larger goals that they hope to achieve, and how they will keep doing it until they reach them.
Q. Women are juggling efforts between work and home, multitasking and, in all this, they have to raise healthy children. Taking care of oneself and the family’s nutrition is often compromised with outside food that is easily available.
a) Work-Life-Balance is crucial for maintaining both mental and physical health. How can this be best achieved?
b) What tips would you like to give working women professionals on their everyday food habits and how they can healthily increase their energy levels?
a) If you want to be a normal person, you must have a work-life balance. Eventually, we will look for family, friends, love, and social connections. If I don’t feel loved enough and I don’t have my supportive family, a place of complete security, and if I don’t have the right social connections, then I’m not going to be healthy.
So, work-life balance is extremely important, and it’s not even something you should think about choosing. The problem is it’s easier said than done. So you have to keep making choices. Otherwise, the sky is the limit. If you concentrate on work, there is no end to what you can do. But then, at the end of the day, you want to return home to your family.
b) Understanding what is causing them that fatigue or what is keeping them at a low because, many times, reasons are different. Some people may just be feeling low and tired all the time because their stress levels are extremely high. We just know how to be reactive to stress and haven’t done anything actively to manage our stress. That’s why there are stress management techniques taught in the Art of Living.
We have a parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. That sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system knows how to react to stress. For example, if somebody is screaming at me, the system knows that I have to save myself, so I’ll probably hit back or scream back. That is what I know in my physiology. But I have to teach myself to understand that stress need not affect me and stay calm and remove myself. So, one of the things I think people feel unhealthy and fatigued is because their stress levels are very high and have not been actively managed.
Nourishing your body with the right type of food and understanding the food is important for you. Some food items look very fancy but carry no life or nutrition in them. The first change people can make in their food habits is to go back and eat real food, even if it means buying some good quality wheat and making some coarse flour. It will be many times more nutritious than what you get in a packet. A lot of people are eating inferior quality food, which is readily available, has a longer shelf life, is very easy to use, and is quickly made, but it’s not nourishing their bodies.
As women, the last thing on our minds is our health. Because there is neither any time nor anybody asking us whether we ate or slept well. Because we are always living by the clock. One day, we will have to sit down and see what we need to prioritize and ensure time for it.
- Maybe just chop a few pieces of vegetables and carry them for our lunch. Just when it’s winter, get some green vegetables and put them into a nice broth or soup.
- Sometimes we invest a little bit of our own money into our health. Get blood work done, and go see somebody if you’re not sure what you’re doing is right or not.
- If you feel that the body is already telling you that there’s something wrong, it’s better to take that cue and act on it instead of, you know, waiting for it to become bigger and more difficult to manage. I know all these things are very easy to say and difficult to do, but they have to be done. Because otherwise, you see, women are already at the receiving end of a lot of things. And to have compromised health is only adding to their woes. Your health is completely your responsibility.
Q. Nutrition is an upcoming lifestyle trend and market for pharmaceutical companies, as stress in people has risen post-pandemic. Do wellness drugs for healthy skin, hair, liver, etc., nutritional supplements, and protein powders pose a big threat to people’s lives? Should the government ban the sale of over-the-counter health wellness drugs in the country?
[A report indicated that one in three people felt their stress levels had increased after the pandemic. An increase of 12% in stress levels among individuals aged 26-35 years and a 13% rise among those aged 36-45 years was observed compared to pre-pandemic figures. Additionally, women reported slightly higher levels of stress post-pandemic compared to men, with working women experiencing a 14% increase in stress post-pandemic compared to pre-pandemic levels.]
The answer to this long question is not very black or white. What we are saying is actually in the grey space when we say nutraceuticals, supplements, botanicals, or herbals, which are not mainstream pharmacology drugs but bio-identical to the human body. For example, I am deficient in a micronutrient like a vitamin or a mineral. In that case, I’m not eating enough of it through food, or my body is not assimilating and absorbing enough of it because of poor digestion, poor acid production in the stomach, or inflammation in the body, or a compromised system. For some time, you may need these in higher doses. This is what the nutraceuticals or supplements do. They provide you with bio-identical substances identical to what our body can use or become bio- available.
Nowadays, many people are being influenced that consuming these will give them better immunity, skin, and hair to become healthier versions of themselves. But that’s a far-fetched story. Say, I will not put effort into cooking or eating good food but just pop in some minerals and vitamins, hoping they will keep me healthy and robust. That’s not how it works.
With more and more supplements and synthetic protein, it is eventually counterproductive because you’re using it as a quick fix. There are regulatory guidelines. It’s not that they don’t exist. Even then, a lot of these supplements are found to have toxic chemicals and heavy metals. Yes, it is a grey zone.
On Whey Protein:
People in India have been convinced for years that they are short of protein, lack protein, our mostly vegetarian diets are deficient in protein, and we are a protein-deficient population. Today, the market is full of these large boxes of whey protein.
The person consuming it is the least informed about what they are, how they work, and how they benefit, but somehow, he is convinced it will work for him.
Protein is the wonder thing required to make you super healthy, muscular, energetic, prevent breakdown, etc. Glorifying protein is not the truth at all. A lot of it is fabricated.
Research and clinical trials at the premier institutes of India found that these protein powders have pre-steroids, pre-hormones, toxic metals, and heavy metals. How clean this supplement is is also very questionable.
However, it may be right to say that Indians eat less protein because we mostly eat wheat, flour or rice. We are not eating nuts and seeds, the right vegetables, and the right form of lentils and beans or millets as our ancestors ate. So, we may be protein deficient to some extent, but consuming Whey Protein does not go well with your systems at all.
Large amounts of whey protein not only put too much pressure on the liver and kidney. The liver has to break it down into amino acids and then de-aminate the amino acids, creating a lot of ammonia. It also puts a lot of work on the kidney to remove that ammonia in the form of urea, uric acid and creatinine from the body. So, it not only plays havoc with your liver and kidney, which are super vital organs, but it is also highly inflammatory. It creates latent chronic inflammation in the body, keeps your systems inflamed, and keeps your body highly injured and inflamed. It’s not a healing form of supplement. It’s not like you take black pepper or turmeric or pudina or lemon or aamla, things that heal our bodies. So it’s highly inflammatory.
- It’s not required; this perception has been built to manufacture and market protein.
- The correction for reduced protein intake lies in changing and improving our food and not in taking a protein supplement.
- They can create a lot of havoc with the human body, especially for very young people.
- There is almost no regulation on these protein powders.
Sadly, social media makes it impossible for us to understand what is right and wrong. It’s difficult for a normal person to comprehend, and many who don’t consume it constantly feel that they are missing out on having something good. That is not the case!
Q. Tell us about the wellness and health workshops with leading corporate and educational institutions.
I started doing these smaller workshops with 20 to 50 people, mostly, working professionals or people who are highly educated but I was surprised at how little they knew about their bodies and health. If you Google, there will be so many search words, but still, nobody is sure what fat they should eat, what oil they can use for cooking, whether they should do fasting or not do fasting, whether they should eat three times or just eat once a day or eat six times a day small frequent meals. So, even basic things people are super confused about and the reason for it is that there is so much talk and information and contradictory information available. So, there’s a lot of confusion.
In these workshops, I put the basic things together, simple things like making them conscious of the fact that what they’re eating can improve practically by small changes, just how they’re eating, when they’re eating. Simple things, like respecting their hunger using mindfulness. Sitting on the floor once a day and eating cross-legs improves digestion by 20-30% compared to always sitting on a dining chair. So many small things and takeaways we try and do. And so everything is actually, in a way, adding value.
If people have specific issues about weight loss and a disease condition or sickness, or they have cancer in their family, and they’re scared they’ll get one, and they don’t know what to do about it. Then, we try to make a session according to that. It’s very, very rewarding to do it.
It’s very heartwarming to do these sessions. I like doing them much more than sitting individually with one patient and doing the consults because I feel I can help improve the health of a large group of people.
Rapid-Fire:
- What inspired you to become a nutritionist?
I loved the human life form and the science behind biology, zoology, physiology, and anatomy. When I started doing my MBBS, I realized I wanted to work in a healthcare space that is not mainstream pharmaceutical modern medicine. Some 25-70 years ago, only a few people studied nutrition or practised it. It excited me when I went through the course. The more I learnt, the more I became passionate about it. Seeing how I can impact my own life and other people’s lives by practising this. It was an inspiration for me. - What is your magic mantra for a healthy lifestyle?
Health is not rocket science. It is just going back to basics.
– Sleep: Respect that your body is a machine and requires rejuvenation, repair, and sleep.
– Movement: The body is intended to do activity, not sit on a chair for 12-14 hours daily.
– Food: Eating the right type of food. Eating too much than what your body requires, and far too much junk food that is difficult for your body to process. - What is your message for women entrepreneurs?
The sky is the limit. Health is one space where they fit in beautifully because women naturally have empathy, resilience, and sensitivity that give them an edge when they practice medicine or healthcare. - Any personality who has left an indelible mark on you?
I admire people for two things – Knowledge and being humble and real. There’s somebody I’d like to name Dr. Alok Chopra. He’s a very well-known cardiologist in Delhi and has been practising integrated functional medicine for the last ten years. His knowledge, hard work, sincerity and the fact that he’s super humble is what I look up to.
One-Liners:
- Weight-loss management is respecting the limits of your own body, not breaking those limits, and never abusing your body.
- One nutrition-related myth you debunk: You have to eat very complex food, exotic food, or a lot of food to be nourished.
- Inspiring women to: Live more wholesome lives and break from this shackle of looking good or dressing good because it is the wholesome people who realize that knowledge is eventually what will take them forward.
- Superfoods include: What it is made as close to how nature made it. Something that is less processed, packaged and canned. The less out-of-season, out-of-context it is taken the more super nourishing super food it becomes.
About Author
Manjari Chandra
Her work and experience range from being a Clinical Coach to advocating Holistic Wellness. Besides Integrative Clinical Coaching, she is also a noted Speaker, Media person and Published Author. She features as an Expert on the “My Gov. in” Website promoted by the Prime minister of India and has authored many Research and Review Scientific Papers in Indian and International Journals.
Manjari has worked for leading hospitals in India, namely Max Healthcare, Manipal Hospitals, Columbia Asia etc. She has been a keynote speaker at various public health conferences and symposiums at ASSOCHAM, FICCI, HEAL, FSSAI, TAAI, and ISMA.
Manjari has conducted wellness and health workshops for Ernst and Young, Infosys, Hero Motors, Pullman Hotels, Pepsico etc. She is a Guest Faculty for Allied Health Universities – Institute of Home Economics, AMITY, Sharda, SGT University. She is the Official Nutritionist for Helpage India and leads the vertical of Nutrition and Wellness at the ASSOCHAM Women’s Forum for Delhi- NCR.
27th December 2023
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