Hello and welcome to the nutrition diva podcast. I'm your host

Monica Reinagal. I recently got an email from Madav who wrote from India and asked if I could address how people

eating a more traditional Indian diet could apply nutrition advice that's based primarily on Western

dietary patterns.

So joining me on the podcast today is Vandana Chef.

She's a registered dietician and the author of the book My Indian Table.

Vandana knows a lot more about Indian cuisine than I do as much as I love it and

she's joining me today to help explain the nutritional pros and cons of the

traditional Indian cuisine, how to select the healthiest options, and even how to make our own healthy Indian food at home.

Welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast, Vondana. Thanks so much for joining me.

Hey Monica, I am so excited to be here.

Well, I knew as soon as I got this email that I had the perfect person to call to get answers to some of these questions.

And I think this is such a great question about how we can reconcile what we understand about building a healthy diet with cuisines that may be a little

bit less familiar to some of us here in the United States.

So India of course is a very big country.

I know that it had had just like the United States

it has a lot of regional culinary tradition so we can't really say that Indian

cuisine is a single thing right? Absolutely so India does have great diversity in terms of foods,

spices, culture, and flavor. And just like the Mediterranean diet, there is no one

single Mediterranean diet.

Same thing applies to Indian cuisine.

There is no one single Indian cuisine.

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