 I'll start by asking a few that came to my mind. Or maybe just commenting. I think one of the things about milk supplements is that it's not only about the nutrition, but there is a cultural aspect to it. Like you said, there's a convenience aspect to it. There's an aspirational aspect to it. And I think when you buy a product or are able to buy a product off the shelf and give it to your child, it somehow is way cooler than roasting and grinding and putting in one dabba for yourself. It somehow speaks to an aspirational lifestyle which I think is now taken pretty deep root in our culture. It was not like that. But I think a lot of people think that that's the best way to be. And I think that's why. Yeah, that's what we saw with Brian. I mean, that's why I even reached out to Zainab for this talk, which is because people, of a certain socioeconomic status, want to spend money for the health of their loved ones, but they don't necessarily check what's in it because it's just difficult. It's deliberately made difficult to read. It's really fine print. How much information are you going to go through? You're just gonna be standing in the supermarket looking at it. And honestly, the websites that I've seen, like Amazon doesn't give the ingredients list for, and sure, there's incomplete information online, they'll give you, some will give you the ingredients, some will just give you the nutrition chart, and it just goes on from there. It's difficult and it's mathematically challenging. That means for me, it is. No, it is, it is. In fact, as you were going through some of the numbers and what it is with milk and what it is without milk, and I won't say I'm terrible with numbers, but I found myself getting lost and glazing over as when I was like, oh, okay. I mean, can I pull out my calculator? And usually when you're at a shop, that's not really exactly what you're going to be doing looking at that chart. But yeah, and some of the claims, sorry, it turns around, but some of the claims are based on 100 John, some of the claims are based on per serving of 250 ml of milk, some of the claims are based on just the scoopfuls. It's just, I mean, it's whatever is convenient and looks the best, but it's not standardized. True, true. I think there are a few questions, but can I maybe give my first question to start it with? Sure. You know, one of the things I take away from this is that knowing, done a little bit of reading in the area of nutrition and I'm no expert by any standard, but one of the things I have learned is that sugar is something we all should be extremely wary of. And India today is known in various parts as the diabetes capital of the world. If you're not there already, yes. And if you're not there already, we are getting there very fast. The numbers that is very scary. And if we are feeding our children and our elderly with huge doses of sugar. In various forms, that's the thing. It's not sugar by law. You understand? Multidactyl is not sugar by law. Multidactyl is not sugar by law, but it's still, it has a higher glycemic index. By that, I mean that you know that your sugar level, blood sugar level will just break. Even though it says sugar free. Yeah. So if you can just maybe tell us what are the things to look out for that say sugar, but we don't really know that they may be sugar. And these are things that we should be aware of that if there is one, two, three, four, five, they may say sugar at the end so much percent or so much grams. But other than that, there are all these other elements of sugar as well. So if you can just name a few that we should keep that are commonly used that we should sort of be aware of. If it says hydrolyzed cornstarch, if it says maltodextrin, if it says no sugar added, go to the nutrition table. If it just says sugar, you know, if there is, so the label that I've put online is different from the label, the children's label over here where they don't disclose the sugar. And you can, if you don't see sugar in the ingredient list, go to the nutrition label. By law, they're supposed to let you know how much added sugar there is. But also remember that the added sugar is just and just sucrose. It's nothing else. We know that there are a lot of sugars that spike your blood sugar. I mean, that's the reason why diabetics is told not to eat too much fruit in the first place but fruit, sugar and fructose, right? It's glucose and fructose. So added sugar just means sucrose. You have to remember that table sugar is equal to sucrose, is equal to added sugar. Things like maltodextrin, things like maltolol, things like hydrogenate, sorry, hydrolyzed cornstarch. These are also things that will spike your blood sugar that will cause you to gain weight. And also, in addition, you will also have laxative effect on your body. However, those are in larger amounts. So if you're having pre-serving the day, you will experience a laxative effect. But it does draw water out from large intestines and sure for a specific reason has these because seniors are very concerned about bowel movements and it's something of a relief for them to have regular bowel movements. Understand that there are alternatives to the fiber, the high fiber content that is provided by these supplements. There is psyllium husk that you can just take right away, you know, right off the bat, it costs 190 rupees for 200 grams. It'll last you a month or two months if you take a teaspoon with your beverage. It's enough, it's healthier. And it will provide you a much better source of gut health and it's a much better insoluble fiber to have. Insoluble fiber to have. So if things to answer your question in short is if it says no sugar or no sugar added, be very suspicious, check the nutrition label, check the ingredients and understand that something that is like a hydrolyzed starch, whether it's a hydrolyzed rice starch or a wheat starch or a corn starch, it still, your body doesn't differentiate. It'll still end up being glucose, it'll still spike your blood sugar, it'll still cause you to gain weight. Okay, so Kunal has two, three questions here. I'll start with the first one. He says, why is this being marketed to women specially? All those ingredients seem generic and good for all genders. It is generic, it is good for all genders, but women specifically because they have a higher requirement of calcium. Now, this is for women and not pregnant women per se, which is what Brian had bought for his wife, but for women, the danger of osteoporosis is higher and this comes as a result of lesser vitamin D, I guess because of lesser outdoor activity and lesser outdoor exposure, but lower vitamin D means that the calcium that you are ingesting does not get absorbed and then to compensate, the body takes calcium from the bones and makes your bones weaker, which will result in osteoporosis at some point and women are much more prone to osteoporosis than men. So it's being marketed to women as something that is a bone health supplement. Okay, also, yeah, okay. Then Kunal asks another question. He says, where to get malted drinks apart from these drinks? Malted drinks, well, you can just buy malt powder on Dine if you like and then you do have to look at co-ops in Bangalore, I think this is Kunal Vaidenathan. So in Bangalore, you have Navadarshanam, you have Buffalo Bag, you can speak to a variety of co-ops who are, I mean, Ragi is now being touted as such a healthy food which is cheap and not water intensive and hardy and mineral dense with regards to calcium. You can get it from most co-ops now. You just have to do a little bit of the research. If you want, I'll put together a PDF for sources and a couple of online purchases you can make with regards to this. But honestly, in the search for malt, if you're going to consume maltodextrin, hydrolyzed corn solids and a whole bunch of sugar and some emulsifiers and some artificial, this thing is better to not have the malt. I mean, get your sources elsewhere. You can get your multivitamins, you can get your protein, you can get your vitamins, sorry, your minerals as well from other sources of food. Malt is not the be-all and end-all of it. It's not something that is necessary for absolute health and nutrition because it's coming packaged with a whole bunch of stuff and you don't want in your body. So why would you want to go after it? Okay, one last question from Kunal speaking of necessity and then we'll have Shraddha, maybe she can ask her question herself. I'll probably need some help to get her to be able to ask that question. But I'll just ask Kunal's question. He says, is having milk required in adulthood? And I think that's a great question. It's something that you hear both sides of the story. He says, I've heard somewhere that milk is only useful in babyhood and later most can't digest milk. Now your thoughts on that? So this will be some opinion, not very much fact because I don't have the resources to back it up at this point of time. So Kunal will only be able to get my opinion on this. Milk is not necessary. Milk is something that is, you can replace it with a variety of other foods but you have to be very conscious of what milk provides you from a nutritional perspective whether it's the vitamin D, whether it's the calcium, whether it's the vitamin A from the fat. Take a look at what milk provides you and you can break that down and you can get other sources for it. Like vitamin A you can get from or beta-carotene you can get from orange fruits and vegetables like your mangoes and your carrots and other orange or red plant sources. Vitamin D, sunlight again, there are a few things like fish, things like meat. We'll also have some amount of vitamin D but the best place to get vitamin D is to actually get exposure, sunlight exposure, mid-day sunlight exposure, 10 to 30 minutes. With regards to the fats, you can replace them with plant fats. In my opinion, milk is not necessary but it does provide a convenient package with regards to nutrition. Adults don't need it, babies, again, this is controversial. I would rather not get into it without actually citing sources and I don't have those on hand. I can get back to you on this though. I can do research on both sides of the story and give you my opinion again and give you the resources to make up your own mind. Okay, great, that's very helpful. Okay, is it possible to have Shraddha ask for question? Amog? Yeah, I just promoted Shraddha to a panelist and Shraddha, you can now unmute yourself and ask the question. Yeah, so it was an excellent presentation, first of all. Thank you. Hi, Shraddha. Hi, hi. So I'm a food regulatory professional but basically I'm not really aware of the nutrition community as such. So I see a lot of nutritionists themselves recommending because if I go to nutritionists for a diet plan, say for a weight loss, so they just imbibe the supplements into the diet, into their diet chart that they give me. So just wanted to ask what is the level of awareness within the nutrition community on these supplements and do they need any specific training to read those food labels before they can actually start prescribing to their clients is my question. Sure. So I would recommend that if you are going to go to a professional to basically regulate your food for whatever reason, whether it be for reasons of health, whether it be reasons for weight loss or whether it be food allergies or food intolerances, there is a body in India which regulates the dietitians. It's an authority, it's called the IDA that is the Indian Dietetics Association. You do have to pass an exam. You do have to have a professional degree in nutrition which is either a BSC or a BSC and MSC and on top of that you do have to pass an exam and they do have updated curriculum on a regular basis with which you can update your knowledge. The IDA also has a database of dietitians city-wise and state-wise that you can go to and these are the professionals you should be consulting with regards to your diet chart for whatever reason that you do consult. Do they need to know with regards to food labeling, not to the extent that food regulatory professionals need to because they have food regulatory professionals have to enforce certain laws that are in place and those laws can be changed but they do need to know how to read a food label. They do need to know what the ingredients are capable of doing within the body, how they're metabolized or are the end results and they do need to know how to monitor the effect of that on your body because not everybody's body or physiology metabolizes ingredients the same way. There was a Nobel Prize nominated or Nobel Prize winning study that was done by the Nutritional Institute in Tel Aviv with regards to comparing different types of foods and how they react in different bodies or how they metabolize in different bodies if you standardize all the other parameters and it was an interesting study, I'll link you to it if I can catch up with you later and what it showed was that people who would have the same cookie, somebody's blood sugar would spike and crash and somebody's blood sugar would just raise a little bit and then plateau. So personalized nutrition is a real thing and responsible dieticians whose names and numbers you can access from the IDA do know about this and will monitor your health and your body's response to different types of foods to see what is best for you. Does that answer your question? With regards to supplements and them putting in supplements if they're not, like I said, even professionals are susceptible to the shiny principle display panel versus a ton of fine print that I find difficult to read. Not everybody dives in so deep. So you do need to find a professional who dives in deep and understands every aspect of both the nutrition label as well as the ingredients list and as well as the claims that are being made which allows them to go back to the study and take a look. So it's a little bit of a long answer but I hope it comprehensively answers your question, Shalta. Yes, yeah, perfect. That was very helpful. Okay, thanks, Huda. Zainab just asked me to give my opinion on Kunal's question and I think it's got to do with whether milk is necessary for adulthood or not. I am not an expert in nutrition so my opinion is entirely based on my experience of milk consumption and my likes and my dislikes. What I do know is that milk is one of the foods that is simultaneously high in sugar and in fats and sugar and fats are a deadly combination. Your tongue just loves that. So one can really want a lot of that but at the same time I feel sugar and fat together can create a lot of metabolic movement that may not always be good for. I found in my case, it's not very, it doesn't work for me. I mean, foods that don't combine high carbs and high fats are something that I have found to be good for me in terms of digestion and how I feel about it. I don't feel bloated and stuff like that. So milk is not something I would personally drink as an adult. As a child, I suppose they have better metabolic or faster metabolic rates and it can be consumed or processed easier by them but I also believe that fermented milk like curds and whey and stuff like that contains everything that milk has but it is a lot easier to digest and I think the sugars have been sort of processed by the microbes so they are easier on the body but that is my non-expert opinion on this so I'll leave it at that. Even my opinion is a non-expert opinion, Yogita. It's just that I have a little bit more experience with regards to food and I do like diving deep into research papers and I do keep myself updated with MOOCs, those are massively open online courses which are provided by a variety of universities. It's fantastic, the kind of knowledge that you can upgrade yourself, upgrade so that you're more aware of things. With regards to fermented milk, I would like to make a note over here. I was severely lactose intolerant in my 20s. I'm 38 now. And it took a sustained drinking regimen of kefir milk. Kefir is, are you aware of what kefir is? I've heard of kefir. Yeah, so kefir is basically a collection of bacteria and fungi in a matrix which ferments milk and it was first found in the Caucasus mountains and it's a very traditional, very old drink. You can't synthesize kefir grains. You can only pass them down. They're still trying in Russia but we haven't gotten that complexity of microbial and basically your flora and fauna of that drink. Kefir is a symbioted versus a probiotic now a symbiote basically is something that provides both fiber as well as the bacteria to help ferment and metabolize and digest certain foods. And I'm a big proponent of kefir milk, but you're right. Any fermented foods are much better for your gut, especially if they're fermented in the correct manner. You do have to make sure that you don't fall sick. Some people tend to ferment and then they see some mold and they still drink it and it causes a lot of damage to your system versus trying to make it better. Gut health is a whole other topic by itself and you can go on for hours and hours but I will leave it at just that. I agree with you. If you're going to have milk, have fermented milk for the most part. It will tremendously help your gut health. It will tremendously help aid in digestion as well and it will allow the nutrition that is available in milk to be a lot more bioavailable. Plus the sugars that are in milk are almost completely gone when they're fermented, especially with kefir. With curd, there is still some amount of lactose which is the sugar in milk. But it's much, much lesser than it is in regular plain old milk. Okay, so thanks for that. Then we have a question from Lorraine. She says, can you suggest something wholesome we can create at home minus milk? I suppose we have one answer here with kefir but maybe some other things that can be made that can be easily made at home if you have any suggestions which does not involve milk. I would say the same thing again, Lorraine. Go ahead, go find co-ops that are doing malt powders like ragi malt and wheat malt and barley malt. You can have them with milk. You can have them with cashew milk which is a lot better for the environment and has a lower carbon footprint than almond milk. And it does not have any residue left behind. Basically just soak cashews and water overnight, grind them down to a fine liquid and then you can add your malt to it and you're fine. Goa has a lot of cashews by the way. Lorraine is from Goa. So, cashew milk is much, although it does have a little bit more sugar and it does have more carbon hydrates than almond milk, it's significantly better for you. And it's locally grown. Try and eat what's local to you. Yes, that is always a good idea. Okay. Cashew milk can also be fermented to make cheese and yeah. So, you can also do that. So experiment, it's something that you can do at home. It's an exciting experiment and cashew milk is really delicious. I mean, you can have it with your malted powder. You can have it with a little cocoa as well and you'll sort it. All right. Do we have any more questions from YouTube or from elsewhere? No, no. Yugita, we don't. We could wrap up the session. Okay, so that was really actually a good session. Lots to learn from me as well. And I think on my part, the biggest takeaway, I noted two things. One of the things you said, Huda Pran, is that be suspicious of all labels. Like go in there thinking, I don't trust what you're saying. I'm gonna look at this more closely. So I think that's a good, healthy approach to have. Especially if they have those little superscripts like that C over here. The women's thing is just hilarious to me because you know, it has this one over here, there's two, there's three, there's four, there's five and then at the back of it as well, there's multiple of those. And then for children, you have something like these plus plus symbols and this little arrow over here as well. Compared to those who did not. If they say something like that and they have all these little superscripts, go down and see what they're talking about. Because when you say, Horlicks versus a non fortified beverage, it could just mean water. And of course, something with vitamin D and calcium and phosphorus and all these vitamins and minerals is going to be better for you than water. In certain cases, water is really good for you but it definitely doesn't have the vitamins and minerals that is present in this fortified beverage powder. And so adding to that, I think one more thing that I realized with what you've told us is that, especially with the Navadarshanam package was that if you can't understand what the ingredient is, I would stray clear of it. Like when there is malted, you know, one, two, three and I know what these ingredients are, I can pronounce the names. I think I would be comfortable eating those things. But the minute you get into Fracto-Oli saccharides and all, I mean, I don't know if I pronounced that right, but there are all these names that you find hard to pronounce and you don't understand them. I would sort of stay clear of those unless I absolutely know what they mean. It is to go with things that have fewer ingredients. I'll give a small example with chocolates. I love chocolates. You pick up a regular commercial bar of chocolate and you'll find like with these milk things, the first two, three ingredients talk about chocolate, but then it breaks down into a bunch of chemical soundings. It reminds me of my chemistry classes from way back when and I'm like, okay, what is all of this? As opposed to you take one of these artisanal bars of chocolate and you find, yes, they are more expensive, but there'll be like three or there'll be four ingredients and they're all things you can pronounce and things you understand that can be associated with chocolate. So that's the other thing I take away that keep it simple. And if you don't understand what it says, stay away from it. I'm actually going to provide a counterpoint to this and I'm going to say that evolve, educate yourself. If you can't understand or if you can't pronounce this thing, go look for it on the internet, but don't go to Healthline or WebMD or these websites that break it down for you and dump it down for you. Go to the places where they publish the papers just put in those three keywords or put in that and put in milk supplements. Like say for example, put in hydrolyzed corn solids and put in milk supplements. You will get scientifically published papers and you just need to read the abstract which is written in very simple English for you to at least understand what it does and where it comes from. So although you can still clear of a variety of things, I'm coming at it from a researcher's point of view. So I do, there are some friendly things that are also hard to pronounce. And what I would like to do is I would like people to just have better critical thinking when it comes to food labels. Can't understand it, take a photo of it, go back, read about it. It'll take five minutes. That's a great idea. Ask someone who can. That's a great idea. Any final closing comments from Zena? Anything you'd like to add? No, not really. Thanks both Yogita and Huda for doing this on a Sunday. Let's see if the world changes post-pandemic since this is what we've been discussing just before the session started. For everybody else, there are a bunch of sessions coming up in September. We have one by Shuba Ardas who's gonna tell us why microwaves are very handy and he's going to talk about it from the point of view of water molecules and fat molecules. And he's really gonna teach us how to do a chocolate mousse or a chocolate cake in nine minutes. Now, I mean, we've got a demo that's all of what we discussed in the session. But yes, please indulge yourselves. This is on the 20th of September. And there are a bunch of other sessions that are coming up on Kilter. There is one that will be held on the last Friday of September which will be on why diets fail. So I think we really have a trail going from this. And yeah, I mean, have a good rest of the Sunday and the rest of the week. And let's see if the world changes next week. On that note, goodbye and good luck. And thanks once again, Yogita and Huda for doing this. Thanks. Thank you. Goodbye. Good night.