Make your skin glow

We all agree that Indian kitchens are unique. Not only because of the wide variety of ingredients but if you go back to the permutation combination classes the sheer number of dishes that you can whip out because of these ingredients are astounding. But the beauty of the Indian kitchen is not limited to just satisfying your taste buds. They are also great for your daily skin care requirements.

Coming to think of it our grandmothers never had the luxury of a parlour, yet their skin glowed (part of it has to be attributed to the physical exercise they got doing home chores alone). But as a kid I have sneaked on my Granny applying whatever she was cooking with on her face (much to the amazement of my grandfather of course). 

Today we are bombarded with hundreds of products that promise miracles. So here I am rephrasing the questions Olay has been asking lately, “Do we need to smear chemicals on our face for a healthy and glowing skin?”

The latest in the cosmetic industry

Not really. Explore the corners of your kitchen and you will see that:
  1. A paste made with besan, milk and ground almonds is the best face scrub you could find
  2. Chandan with a little bit of camphor will fix pimples more naturally
  3. Rubbing tomato skin on your face makes it glow
  4. Applying a paste of neem leaves cleans and disinfects your face
  5. Massaging your skin with olive oil will keep it supple
  6. Massaging your knuckles with coconut oil will keep them from drying and hardening to a brown patch

In addition to all of the above, maintain a good diet and a do a little exercise everyday, even simple walking helps!

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Question: What is that one thing which is common between Queenie Dhody, Kareena Kapoor and Angelina Jolie? They all eat organic food! (That is when they decide to eat of course). But I often wonder why organic food is always associated with the size zero, swanky, red carpet walking, air kissing celebrities. 

Is it the health factor or the expense or the exclusivity or all of these? Frankly all this is really in the mind. Health is a universal cause of concern, not meant only for the rich and famous. Don’t blame organic for being expensive. We have so blindly adopted and accepted the pesticide and chemical laden food that the farmers do not see value in growing organic. A premium has to be paid at every level to reach organic food to you. So now you do the math. Coming to exclusive, anything that is pure, labour intensive and yet trying to elbow its way into the market to grow from niche to popular will be exclusive.

Now that I have reasoned with you let us take a mental journey back to your childhood. Didn’t the food cooked by your mother, in the yester-years of un-corrupted life, taste better? Get my point, organic is the way food is meant to be in the first place! And now when you sing praises about “something being different” about your mom’s cooking and crib over unsatisfying food at home, don’t blame the wife, blame the produce used for cooking.

I know this is where you scream in exasperation, “But organic food is so expensive!” So since you are taking a journey to your childhood, stop by the Economics class and rerun the concept of economies of scale in your mind (and rest your agony in peace). It is you, the consumer, who has to help organic build the brawn in the market. Understand your right to safe and original food and bang your fist on the retails desk asking for more. Just as you would like organic to be cheaper we would love to flex muscles with all the middlemen to bring the cost down.

Let’s cut a long story short and think of ourselves as components to a watch, working together to bring in the good times.

Eating By The Seasons

The New Year has just arrived and ProNature wishes all its patrons a very happy new year...one filled with health and harmony. Christmas and the New Year always bring forth the season to be jolly and we start the year's muse with seasons themselves.

Many of you might be aware of the word ‘Chaturmas’, roughly the period from July to October or approximately the Rainy Season in India, used in the Hindu context. Many Hindus refrain from eating Onions and Garlic in this period. They are also instructed to refrain from consuming non-vegetarian food in this period, in the more recent days of course when non-vegetarian food has found wider acceptance than the days of yore.

We quote that example to ask a question: more than it being a ritual, have you ever wondered why that specific instruction may have been given thousands of years ago by the Rishis to the laymen? What may have been the significance of avoiding those foods in that season and how has globalization affected that instruction? 

In today’s day and age when globalization has made food from all across the world available pretty much at our doorstep, it is sometimes baffling to see mangoes in the market in mid-December and corn being available all year round. And that goes for many fruits and vegetables that are being cultivated/made available to us almost for the whole year by using various mechanisms.

Image Credit: http://www.edb.utexas.edu

But how healthy is it to eat mangoes in December? Is there a reason why they were made available to us by nature only in summer and never otherwise? Have we examined the consequences of eating any fruit or vegetable outside of its seasonal cycle before making our purchases?

The reason we are asking all these questions is for all of us to take a look at the cycle of nature that meticulously planned our diets before the global markets opened up and in fact did not let us consume foodstuff that was not conducive to our geography/climate/ethnicity. If there was a reason why the cycle was designed a particular, for man to eat mangoes in summer and jamuns in the rainy season, should we be disturbing that design at all? Is there a chance that eating locally might actually make good sense for the body?

A part of going organic involves eating locally, food that is available in the season and cultivated in perfectly natural conditions by local farmers. And we believe that eating locally and by the seasons is the best way to eat since it involves eating by the design of nature, which is in sync with what is best for our respective ethnicities/geographies. Use our comments section as the soundboard for any thoughts you have on the topic and let us know if you agree with us…

Mining For Mineral Facts

So you’ve heard that organic food is more nutritious than conventionally grown food. You’ve also heard that it tastes better. But you still have your doubts. Today ProNature aims to dispel them to a certain extent by giving you a small sample of data to ponder about over the weekend.

Image Credit: chiron.valdosta.edu

In a survey conducted among 175 people, 117 preferred the taste of organic food. Clearly in that sample space, organic food came out the winner as far as taste is concerned!

In a study conducted by Rutgers University, USA, the mineral content of organic and non-organic food was compared and the results are here for you to see. You can see how significantly more nutritious organic food really is.

Percentage of Dry Weight			Quantities per 100 Grams Dry Weight				Trace Elements. Parts per million Dry matter
Vegetable:	Mineral Ash	Phosphorus	Calcium	Magnesium	Potassium	Sodium	Boron	Manganese	Iron	Copper	Cobalt
Snap Beans   Organic    Non-organic	10.45 4.04	0.36 0.22	40.5 15.5	60 14.8	99.7 29.1	8.6 0.9	73 10	60 2	227 10	69 3	0.26 0
Cabbage   Organic    Non-organic	10.38 6.12	0.38 0.18	60 17.5	43.6 13.6	148.3 33.7	20.4 0.8	42 7	13 2	94 20	48 0.4	0.15 0
Lettuce   Organic    Non-organic	24.48 7.01	0.43 0.22	71 16	49.3 13.1	176.5 53.7	12.2 0	37 6	169 1	516 9	60 3	0.19 0
Tomatoes   Organic    Non-organic	14.2 6.07	0.35 0.16	23 4.5	59.2 4.5	148.3 58.8	6.5 0	36 3	68 1	1938 1	53 0	0.63 0
Spinach   Organic    Non-organic	28.56 12.38	0.52 0.27	96 47.5	203.9 46.9	237 84.6	69.5 0	88 12	117 1	1584 49	32 0.3	0.25 0.2

It would be a favour to our bodies, which are already under the onslaught of urban living conditions and pollution, to pamper them with nutritious organic food. Clearly demonstrated above, though in a small sample, is the superiority of organic food and how it is perfect for our health. We hope that this mining exercise on mineral facts has helped to make you a little more curious about organic food than before. Have a great weekend!

Is Your Favourite Food On The List?

It is the age of globalization that we live in. Where earlier we could enjoy only food varieties native to our land, today we can sample food from so many other continents and climates! It is fascinating how our taste buds have found a whole new world for themselves. 

It does bode us well, though, to be more aware as new worlds open up to us. Here are the top food items whose samples were found to have the most pesticide content among all. Maybe it’s the way they assimilate what they absorb, maybe their skins are thinner, but for some reason, these foods retain higher percentages of chemicals from pesticides when compared to others.

Food Item	Percentage of Samples Found To Contain Pesticides
Celery	94.5
Pears	94.4
Peaches	93.7
Apples	91
Cherries	91
Strawberries	90
Imported Grapes	86
Spinach	83.4
Potatoes	79.3
Bell Peppers	68
Red Raspberries	59

If your favourite food is on the list above, ProNature suggests switching to an organic variety of it so that you can enjoy the flavour without worrying about high pesticide content.

Taste the world in a healthy way. Go organic today!

Images Credits: http://www.fishpondinfo.com, http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk, http://www.ireallylikefood.com, http://www.honeybell.com, http://www.bestfruitnow.com, http://www.statesymbolsusa.org, http://ayeshahaq.wordpress.com, http://www.averagebetty.com, http://home.howstuffworks.com, http://garciasfamouspizza.com, http://www.twincityfrozenfoods.com

Protecting Our Children From Chemical Exposure

Chemicals are all around us. They are being used ubiquitously in our convenience-filled lives today. Is it any surprise then that exposure to these chemicals begins in the womb itself today because of the intrusive farming methods that we have used all these years!

The cord blood that we trust will keep supplying nutrients and oxygen to the developing child, today also supplies many potentially harmful chemicals to the child. Even once the child is born, various persistent organic pollutants (POPs) which are present in pesticides and attach themselves to fatty tissues in humans, reach the child through the mother’s milk.

Pesticides also contain various persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that rather than being flushed out of our bodies, attach themselves to fatty tissues in humans and accumulate. Those fatty tissues are a source of nutrients for mother's milk, so as a mother's body calls on its reserves of fat for lactation, the pollutants go along for the ride, invading mother's milk, and in turn, the baby.

All this exposure to pesticides puts an entire generation ahead of us at serious health risk and switching to an organic diet significantly reduces this pre-natal and neonatal exposure to harmful chemicals. We know that the most rapid development in an infant is in the neonatal stages and exposure to hazardous substances during critical periods of infant development can disrupt the signals of normal development and lead to health problems later in life.

Image Source: http://dianiela.wordpress.com/

So how do we protect our children and coming generations from this exposure to chemicals? While policies need to be devised around all sorts of chemical exposure in our daily lives, as individuals the least we can do is switch to organic food and organic products. It could be clothing and our cleaning products, our gardening, how we handle pests in the home, but we need to look for more natural and effective ways of doing things. Every such change, no matter how small, will increase the odds for a healthy life for our children. 

ProNature helps you do that by trying to make organic food accessible easily for adapting into your lifestyle. And we hope to make a significant contribution to healthier lives and happier people in our own way.

Are You Skipping Breakfast?

So you had a late night yesterday – there was a deadline to be met, there was a friend’s party, you had to study for your exam, the baby did not let you sleep well – the reasons could be endless. Or you just slept in this morning even if yesterday wasn’t a late night. When you woke up, you realized that there was a high risk of you running late for work or college. And what was your first instinct? Let me skip breakfast and grab something to eat later!

It cannot be reiterated enough how important a meal the breakfast is. And yet it is so easy to skip it. It is the one meal that can get our day started on an energetic note and set the pace for the whole day. It also helps maintain blood sugar levels better rather than create spikes due to rather long gaps between dinner and the next meal. And we are sure as a meal it would find more favour among people if it were well known that having breakfast and the right one can greatly help in weight management! Needless to say, skipping breakfast isn’t the best of ideas from the point of view of our bodily wear and tear.

And what better way to have breakfast than to make it healthy and loaded with nature’s goodness. An organic breakfast not only brings you the benefits that come with having breakfast in the first place, but also ensures that you are not loading your body with toxins the first thing in the morning.

And no, it does not have to be the same old fruits and juice every single day for you to enjoy an organic breakfast! Organic products like Poha (Beaten Rice), Daliya (Broken Wheat) and Sooji/Rava (Semolina) let you enjoy your favourite breakfast recipes in the organic form and give you the best of all worlds. If this prospect of a great organic breakfast to kick start your day excites you, ProNature has your favourite breakfast foods available in the organic form for you to enjoy! We invite you to try them out and let us know your thoughts in the comments section…

Bon Apetit and Bon Jour!

A Testimony From The Father Of The Green Revolution

In the past 5 or 6 odd years, you must have definitely heard of the cases of farmers running into heavy debts and being driven to resort to extreme measure like even suicide after being unable to get out of debt. The government has been grappling with this problem and thinking of how to deal with it effectively. And much has been written or said about it.

One solution to the problem involves seeing the wisdom in our traditional ways of farming, and changing the farmer’s situation by going back to nature to seek help. As always, nature hasn’t turned down this request and been generous enough to help.

As part of an experiment called Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA) launched by Ministry of Rural Development in Andhra Pradesh, traditional farming practices are being revived and re-implemented to see if they are relevant even today. For example, farmers use Ghanajivaamrit, a mixture of cow dung, cow urine, jaggery, gram flour as fertilizer and microbes-rich clay for farming. That brings the cost down and also enriches the soil that has degraded over many years through the use and overuse of pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

Image Credit: http://www.organic-europe.net

The CMSA model involves a community approach to agriculture and an effort to make agriculture include the social aspect in addition to the economic aspect of the farmer’s life. Symbiosis with nature is employed to reduce artificial costs; for instance, by understanding the natural bug/pest lifecycle, the need for pesticides is minimized since the crops are planned accordingly.

And it is no surprise that the profit earned per hectare has, indeed, gone up dramatically after these practices were put to use. In fact, the father of the Green Revolution, MS Swaminathan, calls this next era and this awareness the Evergreen Revolution! And there we have the most authentic testimony one can get for what ProNature has always believed in – Back To Nature is the most effective way Back To The Future.

Read the original Forbes article on the topic at this link.

Leading The Way

As an increasing number of celebrities around the world switch to an organic lifetyles, we bring you a few names that might ring a bell and speak louder in favour of an organic lifestyle.

1. Gwyneth Paltrow

This ‘Shakespeare In Love’ actress has a focus to “nourish the inner aspect” according to her food philosophy of eating locally, seasonally and always organically.

2. Julia Roberts

The Pretty Woman is feeding her family organic food…AND from her own organic garden!

3. Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman also grows her own organic veggies.

4. Brooke Shields

Brooke Shields uses BabySoy, clothing made from soybean fibers and renewable materials, in addition to other organic products.

5. ‘Monica’ or Courteney Cox And husband, Scream Star David Arquette

Better known as Monica from the popular TV series friends, she launched her own organic clothing line Propr along with her husband David Arquette.

6. Jennifer Lopez

7. Elizabeth Hurley

8. ‘Spiderman’ or Tobey Maguire and his wife Jennifer Meyer

It was Jen Meyer who recommended Organic Matters, a company that offers recycled alternatives to many commercially manufactured goods, to Courteney Cox. Jen Meyer even inspired Courteney Cox to switch to more eco-friendly beauty products.

Have you heard of any celebs supporting an organic lifestyle lately? Let us know in the comments…

Organic Honey: Nature’s Blessing Delivered In All It’s Goodness

In the wake of revelations about Indian Honey brands not complying with International standards and posing serious health risks to consumers, ProNature takes a look at Organic Honey and how exactly it is different from the branded honey available in the market.

The production of organic honey involves conforming to a set of strict standards, without which the honey cannot even get an organic certification. Right from keeping area around the beehives free of any chemical residues to the packaging, the process is monitored at every step. The bees and the samples are regularly checked for contamination. Even the flowers and plants are kept free from any non-organic elements including pesticides. The same is kept in mind while packaging or transporting the honey; no contamination is allowed to happen at any stage. It is an intensive process that ensures that only the most natural and pure from of nature’s goodness reaches the consumers. 

As a result of these stringent quality checks involved in the production of organic honey, organic honey is free from any pesticide residues. It is also ensured that the bees are not administered antibiotics to keep them disease free and hence contamination by antibiotics is not possible in organic honey. Raw organic honey has the additional benefit of the antioxidants and phytonutrients are maintained at natural levels. 

Honey is nature’s blessing to mankind. It boosts immunity and has antioxidants that help fight cancer. It is also useful in a number of common ailments that we suffer from. It is only fair that these benefits be preserved and made available to the consumers as it is and not through contaminated honey that poses health risks rather than make them healthy. And to ensure this, organic honey is the wisest choice.