Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Hello, this is Samarth. Today’s piece is by Ishika Bansal (bansalishika215@gmail.com).

This piece is close to me for two reasons.

First: Ishika, 25, has penned a deeply personal account of how therapy helped her heal in 2025. She shows why therapy is not the same as talking to a good friend, and how it can reveal things about yourself that you cannot see.

Second: she is my sister, and I am so damn proud of her for finding the courage to write this (which also made it one of the hardest pieces for me to edit).

It’s a long piece, and I hope readers can feel the rawness of her experience through her words. Do read and share. For any thoughts or feedback, please write to me at samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com

— Samarth Bansal

I.

In January 2025, while living at home in Delhi, I felt like I was on the ocean floor with no light around.

The two people I loved were not getting along. Things at home were emotionally difficult, my personal life felt unstable, and professionally I was completely stuck. Every part of my life asked something from me at once.

I tied my self-worth to my work, felt the need to be productive all the time, and tried to manage my own emotions and everybody else’s emotions while slowly losing any sense of what I wanted.

I was anxious all the time. My entire life felt like a problem. I was constantly firefighting. All I was doing was reacting, surviving and moving to the next crisis. Any moment of calmness felt like toofan se pehle ka sannata.

My anxiety entered my body. I felt dizzy from the stress. There were times when my resting heart rate would shoot up to 150 or 160, and my chest carried a knot that would not loosen. I felt physically, emotionally and mentally sick, as though my body was absorbing everything I could not say.

I started preparing for the worst. I believed people would become tired of me if they knew the real me. I used to edit my words and actions in front of everyone. I was terrified that asking for too much would make people leave. So I kept saying I was fine and continued functioning as normally as I could while going further into the ocean, until I could barely see any light.

I believed I did not deserve love unless I earned it, rest unless I exhausted myself, and I didn’t even feel entitled to my own pain because I thought somebody else always had it worse.

When something bad happened, all I could think about was how I had ruined everything. What did I say? What should I not have said? What should I have done differently? How could I fix this?

I was so tough on myself every second of the day.

On 3 February 2025, I told my friend:

“My emotions are too much to handle for me and things are just getting harder. It’s not a good thought but I know things are going downhill from here.”

I had so many emotions in me that I knew I needed help. I felt deeply alone, even though my friend and my brother were there for me in ways I will always be grateful for. Their support made things more bearable, but it could not immediately undo what I believed about myself.

And so, on 4 February 2025, I started therapy. Nobody suggested therapy to me. I already knew I needed it because I had been in therapy before. I recognised the feeling of reaching a point where managing everything by myself was no longer working and I did not know what else to do.

II.

Just because I had done therapy before didn’t mean it was easy to start again. The first few sessions (still) feel awkward because you are paying a stranger to listen to your problems, including problems you might not really want to address. And then, you wonder: why trust this stranger?

What if they judge me? What if telling them about my feelings only makes it worse?

Such thoughts are common during early sessions. You do not know how they think. They do not yet know what your silence means. You may not know where to begin because there is too much to say, or because you have spent so long suppressing it that suddenly you cannot find the words at all.

So before my weekly sessions, I would sit with my diary and try to remember what I wanted to tell her. Without it, I often blanked out. I could spend an entire week feeling too much, but the moment the session began, I would suddenly struggle to remember what had happened or why it had affected me.

My therapist told me that this happened because my nervous system was protecting me from all the pain I was going through. So, writing helped me keep track of the moments that had stayed with me and the feelings I had not been able to understand. It also stopped everything from becoming too overwhelming once I joined the call.

Some days I came with pages of thoughts. On other days, preparing felt impossible. I had done nothing, written nothing and did not know where to begin. All I had was tears to shed. On those days, she took the lead.

The single most important thing throughout these sessions—and the reason they helped despite the strangeness of it all—is feeling safe. The sessions are not supposed to feel like a place where you are judged. I think being a natural yapper made talking relatively easier for me once I began, but the real reason I could speak was that she felt like the only safe space I had.

With her, pouring my heart out did not come with consequences. Unlike in my daily life, I did not have to worry that someone would become angry, misunderstand me, or use my emotions against me later. I did not have to soften every thought before saying it. I did not have to protect the person listening from what I felt. For one hour, I could speak without calculating the damage. That is what slowly began untangling my emotions.

III.

It was March, a month into therapy, and things didn’t magically change just because I had attended a few sessions. I knew from the past that the first few sessions were about setting context. My therapist needed time to analyse my personality traits, my problems, and to decode what we needed to work on.

I gave her a map of my current life—my family, my profession, my history with mental health—while I was still lost somewhere inside it. It helped that I didn’t have to frame things in a timeline format. It was okay for me to be all over the place about some things, and she always had follow-up questions wherever needed to fill in the blanks.

A month in, I realised being at home in Delhi was not helping. There was this one session where my therapist told me I really needed a breather.

At first, I thought this meant running away from my problems. But that’s not what she meant. She told me it meant taking a step back, breathing and then fighting back.

I understood the difference. I needed distance. In all this, I had a lifeboat sitting in my corner that my therapist helped me see: my brother. The person who has always been in my corner when everyone else has made me believe I don’t deserve anything.

So I decided to go live with my brother in Mumbai. Low-key, we both thought this would last two weeks. I went with a small suitcase, a few pairs of clothes and no real plan.

It was then, on the way to the airport, that I did something I never had before: I went to the wrong terminal. It sounds like a small mistake, but for me it was a red alert. I was so used to travelling and taking flights that this “small mistake” made me realise how deep into the water I was. I had forgotten how to pay attention to small, basic details.

And so, on my flight, I wrote to myself.

Dear Ishu,

Things are not the best right now. Things are shitty, things are not going as per the plan and it feels like life is taking over you. It’s overwhelming. I get it. I understand you. But this message is for you to know that you are not alone. I am your inner voice. I know you better than anyone else. I want you to know that things are going to get better because you deserve better. You are a strong woman.

I know you don’t think you are one while this letter is being written, but just trust me this once. Mumbai is where you need to go. That city has always empowered you and embraced you in ways no one can explain. It has the power to fill that emptiness in you.

And so it did. The physical distance gave me some room to hear myself. While my personal life was on fire, I had almost no confidence left in my professional life either, but my brother kept pushing me to move anyway: send the email, write to that person, reach out, follow up, apply. I did not feel capable, but he kept nudging me into doing the next small thing until I started doing it myself and finally found myself a job.

And that’s how the supposed “two weeks” in Mumbai eventually turned into a year. The city would play a big part in my healing.

IV.

I started with learning the basics, similar to how it is in swimming, where you learn to float first.

In the first four months, my therapist told me to write about what I felt when I was overwhelmed. I was already so emotionally exhausted that I didn’t do it. She didn’t force me to do it. But gradually, as my relationship with therapy became consistent, I understood that what happened outside the session was as important as the conversation inside it.

Some exercises were structured. Others were things we practised together during the session because she knew I was not always good at sitting down and writing about my feelings on my own.

One thing I struggled with a lot was understanding where my responsibility ended and somebody else’s began. I would get overwhelmed by my mother’s emotions, for example, and immediately feel that it was my job to make sure she was not sad.

Intellectually, somebody could have told me a hundred times that I was not responsible for another adult’s emotions. But understanding that sentence and actually believing it are very different things. So we kept returning to it.

At first, I had to consciously remind myself of that. I could care about someone. I could listen. I could explain myself. I could try to make a situation easier. But I could not control how another person felt about my decisions, and their sadness did not automatically mean I had made the wrong choice. It took months of repeating this in different situations before it slowly became intrinsic. I won’t say it’s fully ingrained in me now; I am still practising this.

We also rehearsed difficult conversations. Before my breakup, I spoke to her about how I wanted to handle the conversation and what I wanted to say. We did the same when I had to tell my mother that I wanted to live in Mumbai, and later when I was preparing to tell her that I wanted to resign from my job.

These were conversations I would normally enter already frightened of the other person’s reaction. Rehearsing them helped me separate two questions that I had always treated as one: What do I want to say? and How will the other person react to it?

I could prepare for the first. I could not control the second. My sessions helped me understand this, which also partially reduced my overthinking.

V.

One of the biggest pieces of homework were the reflections. I had told my therapist about the knot in my chest, the discomfort and the way it had become so overwhelming that I could not concentrate on anything.

She told me to process the feelings by writing and reflecting on them. Even though we took baby steps, it felt terrifying.

She asked me to start by decoding my childhood. I had to go through old material—chats, emails, anything else I could find from the younger me—to understand if my apologetic nature and other traits in my personality stemmed from deeper issues.

After procrastinating for three whole weeks, I decided to give it a try. I deliberately waited for daylight because I knew the work would feel heavier at night. I sat in one corner of the house and went back through messages I had not read in years. And had chills as I read them.

One such moment was about an inter-school tennis match. I wanted to participate in it, even though it was around two weeks before an exam. My family wanted me to focus only on studying. A call was made to the teacher, and I was told I would not be going.

What hurt me years later was not only that the decision had been taken away from me. It was seeing how I had responded.

I did not say “You should have spoken to me first.” Instead, I apologised at least ten times. I promised I would never do something like that again. I saw how deeply ashamed I had felt. I believed I was a bad daughter for wanting something without first “giving” good marks in return.

Another memory was a birthday party. A friend had invited me, and when I asked for permission, I was initially allowed to go, until it became clear that no family members would be attending. Then I was told I had hidden that detail just so I could go out.

It was only a birthday party. But something much larger settled inside me that day. I stopped asking to attend outings until I graduated. Nobody had to say no again because I had learnt to say no to myself first. I began rejecting my own wants before anyone else had the chance to.

Beneath both these memories was a larger debt I thought I was carrying. Boarding school was expensive, and I knew my mother was lonely while I was away. So I believed something exceptional had to come out of me in return: good grades, trophies, a good university and a successful career.

I had turned my parents’ decisions and sacrifices into a loan against my own life. Every want felt like an additional expense. Every mistake felt like a failure to repay them.

Looking through those messages, I realised the pattern was not simply that I apologised too much. I had learnt to prevent conflict by wanting less. I tried to repay love through good behaviour, good grades and gratitude.

Even as a child, love, freedom and pleasure had started feeling conditional. I believed I had to return something of equal value before I could ask for anything.

I cried for about an hour. It did not make me feel better. It made me understand the weight I had been carrying all these years. I was mourning my younger self, who had been so harsh on herself without even realising it.

Then, while sobbing, I wrote a letter to her. Sharing an excerpt here.

You don’t have to be perfect for me to love you and care for you. I like you the way you are. You are already doing so much more than you are supposed to. 9 years later, I want to promise you that it took me almost a decade to realise I deserve better. But now that I have realised it, I want to promise you young girl, I will work very hard to heal you and the pain you went through. The pain no one ever saw in you.

Writing that letter gave me a different relationship with the person—the younger me—who had lived through it. For the first time, I was not judging her for being weak, obedient or overly sensitive. I was looking at her as a child who had tried to survive by becoming easy to love.

It was therapy that gave me the distance to stop asking “What was wrong with me?” and begin asking “What happened inside me?”

That day, something broke in me. And somehow, that break also began to heal me. I found a new reason to keep going. I was no longer in therapy only for the person I was in 2025. I was in therapy for fifteen-year-old Ishika too.

VI.

Some homework was much less intellectual. Once, when I was very overwhelmed, my therapist told me to go to the beach and spend time connecting with nature. I remember the texture of the sand calming me. There was something about being outside, feeling the ground under me and having something physical to pay attention to that helped my nervous system settle.

Another time, she told me to cry. That sounded almost ridiculous to me because crying was already something that happened when I became overwhelmed. How could deliberately doing more of it possibly help?

But she wanted me to stop holding everything so tightly and give the emotions somewhere to go. So I tried. I let myself cry instead of immediately trying to control it, explain it or tell myself that I was being dramatic. And after a while, it did loosen something.

I didn’t suddenly feel better because I cried once or went to the beach once. None of these exercises worked like medicines where you took one dose and woke up different the next morning. They gave me ways of responding to myself that I had never practised before. Sometimes an emotion did not need to be solved. It just needed somewhere to go.

The irony was that my profession required the opposite. At work, I needed to have opinions. I had to contribute, question, disagree and speak clearly. As therapy continued, I began voicing my views more openly. Work became one of the places where I practised using the voice I was trying to recover.

The more of the world I saw, the more I realised I had been living inside a cave and mistaking it for the entire ocean. Outside that cave, the water was enormous. People lived differently, believed differently and made space for one another in ways I had not seen closely before. More importantly, outside the cave, there was a route to the surface.

One morning in October, I wrote about what I wanted from my life. Not what I was expected to want, or what would make the people around me comfortable. What I wanted.

My therapist had given me difficult questions. What kind of life did I imagine? What did I need from the people around me? What was I willing to accept?

I did not yet know exactly where I wanted to live or what shape my future would take. But for the first time, not knowing did not mean I had to surrender the decision to someone else.

Writing that long piece was when I realised I was becoming my own person. It was also when I began understanding what self-love could actually mean.

Self-love was not looking into a mirror and repeating that I was beautiful. It was listening when something inside me felt wrong. It was allowing my preferences to count. It was supporting myself through difficult decisions instead of joining everyone else in arguing against my own instincts.

Something else also shifted slowly. I realised I had been transactional with myself my entire life. Everything I gave myself came with terms and conditions. Therapy helped me notice this in ordinary moments.

I started taking breaks without feeling guilty. I watched old Shah Rukh Khan films without first proving that I had worked hard enough that day. I went to explore a new café in Bandra without asking whether I had done enough to deserve a good meal. These are small things from the outside. For me, they were evidence that something fundamental was changing.

For years, I had given so much to other people and then run on empty because I did not believe I deserved to keep any of it for myself. Therapy helped me understand that you cannot pour from an empty cup.

VII.

I knew, intellectually, that everything was not my responsibility.

Yet from February to July, in one form or another, I continued believing that everything going wrong was a consequence of something I had said or done. There were other adults present in all these relationships. They had their own choices, fears, histories, limitations and responsibilities. But I kept collecting everyone’s share and placing it on my own shoulders. For example, if a conversation went badly, I searched for the sentence I should not have said. (I am sure I must have said the “magic word sorry” a million times last year.)

Therapy helped me recognise the difference between caring and taking complete responsibility for everybody’s emotional world.

The change began with a pause. A small breath between what happened and how I reacted. And in that pause, I had to remind myself consciously: I am a human being. Not everything is on me. A solution does not always have to involve me adjusting, apologising or making myself smaller. I also had to unlearn a lot of things, including saying sorry all the time.

Gradually, I understood that much of what I called selfishness was not selfish at all. Wanting to speak honestly was not selfish. Having an opinion was not selfish. Asking for a choice in my own life was not selfish. Wanting the other person to take some responsibility was not selfish.

VIII.

I can’t tell you the exact day the knot in my chest disappeared. I just know it did. I realised it was gone when I could untangle my thoughts during reflection. I could follow an emotion, identify where it came from and separate it from everything else. I no longer felt as though my entire life was one enormous, unsolvable problem.

That is the strange thing about slow healing. It does not always arrive with a dramatic sense of relief. Sometimes you only notice it by looking backwards.

The dizziness had stopped. I felt more comfortable in my own skin and accepted myself. I began accepting my habits, flaws and qualities without turning every part of myself into a moral judgement. I stopped constantly asking, “What is wrong with me?” and began asking, “How do I want to grow?”

My therapist wrote to me at the end of the year that she had watched me grow from someone made frail by all the noise and conflict into someone who had learnt to listen to herself. I had not been able to see my transformation clearly until someone who had witnessed it across time named it for me.

Life will always have one obstacle or another. Therapy does not resolve those obstacles. It has helped me connect with myself better so that I can respond to them in a healthier way. I was not using force to drag myself through the water—life—anymore. I was learning how to breathe. How to stop fighting every sensation. How to understand what was mine to carry and what was not.

More than anything, I was learning how to let go of things I had learnt that no longer helped me, thoughts that came from overthinking and, more importantly, people and places that disturbed my nervous system.

The benefits were cumulative. One session connected to another. One reflection helped me understand an older one. One sentence stayed with me for weeks and changed the way I approached a completely different situation. Nothing looked dramatically different after a single session.

The thing is… therapy doesn’t offer solutions. It’s like swimming lessons: the instructor can teach you how to breathe, how to float, how to move your arms and legs and what to do when panic takes over, but how you eventually swim is still on you.

It was the same with therapy: it gave me techniques, language, questions and a safe place to practise. But I still had to move. I still had to answer the difficult questions. I still had to make decisions, live with uncertainty, accept grief and support myself through the consequences.

I am still a work in progress, but therapy changed my life. The difference is that I recover faster now.

I still tie myself into knots, but I know how to sit with them. I still remain indecisive at times, especially when making choices about my own life. But some old patterns have changed more than I once thought possible. I no longer go silent when I have something to say. I have learnt to put myself first without believing that doing so makes me selfish.

I still take one session a month. I do not want therapy to be only an emergency service I return to when I am drowning. I want it to remain a place where I understand how I am swimming.

There are still days when I do not feel like going. Therapy demands time, money, honesty and emotional energy. A good session can still leave me exhausted. Difficult questions can still sit with me for days. But the person who exists after doing this work is someone I like.

Someone less harsh with herself. Someone who can feel deeply without automatically hating herself for it. Someone who understands the people around her while remembering that understanding them does not require abandoning herself. Someone who makes more decisions from clarity and fewer from fear.

I want to keep becoming her. After all, I promised my younger self that I would.

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Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Hello, this is Samarth. Today’s piece is by my colleague Anushka Mukherjee, where she decodes one one of the most confusing labels I find when shopping: organic.

To be honest, I am one of those people who didn’t mind paying extra for something a retailer had stamped as organic. It felt like I am doing myself a favour—but I never really understood why.

I do know that every label has a whole machinery behind it: a set of assumptions and ideas that some system has decided upon. The label itself is often only a proxy for something larger. Anushka’s piece reveals the system behind “organic” and leaves us with some helpful ideas for buying better.

I learnt so much from her reporting, and hope you do too. If you have thoughts or personal experiences of buying organic that you’d like to share, please do. There is so much more to learn here, and we’d love to hear from you.

My email is samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com

— Samarth Bansal

One of my favourite labels, when I shop for groceries, is “organic.” There is something about the word: it feels earthy, natural, right. It is at once exciting and vague. In fact, organic food might just be quite so exciting because it is vague. It allows me to project onto it what I believe to be better, healthier food.

And it is everywhere. Open Blinkit and you’ll find “Trusted Organic” vegetables, “Certified Organic” packaged goods, and products bearing the government-backed Jaivik Bharat logo—all sitting side by side, and all of them cost more.

Organic ghee is more than double the price of regular ghee. Organic Sona Masoori rice costs over twice as much per kilo. Organic carrots are nearly three times the price of regular ones.

We don’t generally begrudge these differences. The logic feels clean: organic should mean the food is free of chemicals, somebody should have tested and certified it, so we trust it. Of course it should cost more than bazaar ka aloo-pyaz.

Over the past two months, I spoke with half a dozen farmers across the country, independent certification agents and experts, trying to understand what organic actually means—as a label, as a practice and as a promise.

What I found is not that organic food is a scam. I’ve heard people around me say this, and my own parents are so sceptical of the label that they value their trust in local vendors above any certification.

What I found is something more specific and more useful: the organic label makes a much narrower promise than most of us think it does. And understanding that narrow promise clearly is the only way to actually use it well.

Here’s what I learnt.

I. What organic certification actually promises

When you pay double for organic ghee, the reasonable assumption is that somebody, somewhere, tested that ghee—checked it for chemicals, verified that it was clean—and gave it a stamp of approval. “Certified” makes it sound like somebody checked the product.

But that’s not what happens: certification does not test every product or batch. It primarily verifies a process.

The idea is: if the input process—how the food was grown, produced and handled—follows organic principles, the product should be organic.

For a farmer, following that process involves several things.

The first is paperwork. Farmers must submit a detailed Crop Production Plan: what they are growing, which inputs they use, how often they use them and what those inputs are made of. Each practice must be documented.

Rahul Mathur of OneCert explains that the documents are as important as the intention. “If somebody is doing it right, but it is not documented, then for us it is difficult to certify,” he says. “We know they may be genuine. But then, the requirement is not fulfilled.”

The second is a conversion period. A farm moving from conventional to organic agriculture must follow organic practices for a prescribed period—generally two to three years—before its produce can be sold as organic. To be sure, the waiting period does not in itself guarantee that every trace of previous contamination will go away. It simply establishes that the land has been managed according to organic standards for that period.

The third is a tightly controlled system of inputs. See, crops still need nutrients and protection. So it’s not that organic means farmers stop using fertilisers or methods of pest control. The restriction is on certain kinds of input, meaning farmers cannot use prohibited synthetic fertilisers, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides or growth regulators. They can still make natural inputs on the farm or buy commercial products from an approved list.

This is the fundamental premise behind organic certification: establish a production system in which prohibited inputs are not used, inspect and document that system, and therefore reduce the probability that the food emerging from it will contain those inputs.

This is the narrow promise organic certification makes: a commitment about the process, and not a batch-test of every product.

II. What the label cannot tell you

Once you understand the core promise, it’s easier to see what it doesn’t promise.

First, it doesn’t guarantee that organic food will be chemical-free. See, the food may well be free of residues because organic practices can reduce the risk of chemical exposure, but there are factors beyond the farmer’s control.

Think about it: crops can be exposed to contaminated water from shared water resources, wind drift from a neighbouring farm can introduce unwanted inputs, or contamination can happen during storage and transport.

Which is to say: “grown without prohibited synthetic inputs” and “tested and found to contain no chemical residues” are not the same thing. The latter would require lab testing of the final product. Certification may include selective sampling, but the logo does not mean that your particular product or batch was tested.

Second, it doesn’t guarantee that organic food will be more nutritious.

It is easy to assume that food grown using better practices will necessarily contain more vitamins, minerals and nutrients. But simply being produced without prohibited synthetic inputs does not automatically mean a crop’s nutritional composition has become better.

In 2012, Stanford researchers examined more than 200 studies comparing conventionally and organically grown food. They found little evidence that organic food was consistently more nutritious: vitamin content did not differ significantly, and phosphorus was the only nutrient found at significantly higher levels in organic produce.

To be sure, this is not a failure of organic certification. Because the certification never promised superior nutrition. But it is worth stating because many consumers interpret “organic” as a shorthand for food that is cleaner and healthier. Organic food may reduce exposure to pesticide residues, but the certification does not promise that it will be more nutritious.

So to sum up: the organic logo can’t tell you whether the carrots will be fresh, whether the rice will taste good, whether a product travelled 20 kilometres or 2,000, or what exactly the farmer is doing with the soil. Good things to know, but not answered through the certification.

III. How India checks the promise

In India, two government systems lay down the principal routes for organic certification. The National Programme for Organic Production, or NPOP, operates under the Ministry of Commerce through APEDA. The Participatory Guarantee System, or PGS-India, operates under the Ministry of Agriculture.

Both broadly define the agricultural practices required for food to qualify as organic. But they differ in who performs the verification.

NPOP works through third-party certification. An accredited certification body, independent of the farmer or food business, reviews the records, inspects the operation and decides whether certification should be granted or renewed. This requires money and relentless paperwork.

Fiona Arkal, who has been running Ishka Farms for over a decade, stressed how taxing it can be—financially and physically—to repeat the process year after year.

Aggregators and established farm brands can resource both the fee and the paperwork. But for a small or marginal farmer, it can become a real barrier.

So PGS exists as a more accessible alternative. Instead of relying primarily on an external certification company, local groups of farmers collectively commit to organic standards, educate one another and inspect each other’s farms.

This makes certification cheaper and accessible, but it does introduce a potential conflict of interest: the people carrying out the primary verification are also participants in the same farming community, not an independent third party.

Anil Jadhav of EcoCert described PGS to me as a “kindergarten” system: useful for helping farmers enter organic agriculture, he argued, but unsuitable for larger businesses or exports.

You can identify the route through the accompanying mark: India Organic for NPOP, or PGS-India Organic for PGS.

IV. Where the system becomes difficult to trust

A narrow promise can still be useful if the system reliably delivers it. But this is where the experiences of farmers and certifiers revealed gaps between the rules on paper and the quality of verification in practice.

Start with how inspections and sampling can feel on the ground.

Anjali Rudraraju, who co-owns Karnataka-based Yarroway Farms, says the certification agencies they have worked with take samples, but cannot test everything. “Each test costs them about 20,000 rupees, so they have to do random samples and work it out,” she explains.

Fiona of Ishka Farms found herself surprised by the absence of rigour when she first got certified. Certification actually relied less on physical checks and more on self-attested submissions from farmers, she discovered. In some cases, the paperwork is the verification.

Then there is the question of what happens when certificates lapse or when businesses use certification more expansively than they are entitled to.

Anjali pointed to a practical enforcement problem: once certification lapses, old packaging with the old certification claims may remain in circulation, and ordinary consumers are unlikely to check the current status of every product on an online portal.

Anil agreed that expecting consumers to verify certificate dates for each brand is unrealistic. The burden is more often taken up by business buyers, who ask suppliers for current certificates before making a purchase.

I can’t tell from these accounts how frequently such misuse happens. And this doesn’t mean the entire system is corrupt. But it does reveal clear vulnerabilities.

V. What you can actually do

Here’s what I am taking away from this reporting:

1. I am going to stop treating “organic” as a category that is automatically better. Instead, I will ask what specific problem I am trying to solve, learn about it, and assess whether the claim I am paying for actually solves it. And if it can’t—and if the problem really matters to me—I will look for another way to solve it.

2. If you want assurance about the production process, look for a recognised and current organic certification. Look beyond the common Jaivik Bharat logo for the India Organic or PGS-India Organic mark to know which route of verification was used.

3. If your concern is what is present in the final food, look for actual test reports. For instance, if you are concerned about arsenic in rice, you need a test report that specifically measures arsenic. Even then, check which batch or sample was tested and what level was found.

4. If you care about freshness and traceability, look at the length and transparency of the supply chain: where the food was grown, how long it travelled and how directly it reached you. A shorter supply chain is generally better. For me, the best option may eventually be to buy regularly from a farm I have taken the time to understand, perhaps through a subscription (though I haven’t done that yet).

5. I don’t see myself giving up the neighbourhood sabzi market entirely. There, one anchor for eating better is to buy what is in season and add more variety to what I eat. Recently, that has meant eating—and loving—red amaranth, zucchini, Malabar spinach, jackfruit, litchi, corn on the cob and sweet potato.

None of these choices makes the food “organic.” And that’s my point: organic is only one way of asking whether food is better. There are many others, and we should know what we are paying for.

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Hello, this is Samarth. Today’s piece is by my colleague Charul Bhakre.

When she joined my team a couple of months ago, I gave her my copy of the book ‘Ultra-Processed People’ by Chris van Tulleken (strongly recommended) to induct her into the world of packaged food (and all that's broken there). The opening chapter has a story of the author realising how his ice cream is simply not melting, and then figuring out why.

This was all new to Charul. And as she went deep down the rabbit hole to figure why a four-ingredient food like ice cream now has twenty, I witnessed her emotional and learning journey to decode it. And I knew there is a TBT story here.

Before you ask: no, this is is NOT a case against ice cream. Charul loves it far too much for that. :)

— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)

As a kid, I grew up eating Kwality Wall’s ice cream. Only to learn, as a thirty-something adult, that what I’d been eating wasn’t technically ice cream at all.

The company said so itself. In a recent interview with The Economic Times, Peter ter Kulve (the global CEO of The Magnum Ice Cream Company, which now owns Kwality Wall’s) announced the brand was switching from vegetable fat, like palm oil, back to dairy fat. In his words:

“We are not a frozen dessert company anywhere in the world. In India, we changed everything, everything.”

Give me a break. My ice cream didn’t have milk fat? And frozen dessert? What’s that?

In my head, ice cream is a simple dairy-based dessert: why was there oil in it?

So I looked up the ingredient list of my favourite ice creams—the chocobar especially—and oil turned out to be just the first surprise. There were gums (xanthan gum, guar gum), emulsifiers (soy lecithin and others), glycerine, liquid glucose, artificial flavours, food colours and so on.

I didn’t understand any of it. What’s an emulsifier or a stabiliser? Why does one small cup need four of them? And if there’s already sugar in there, why add liquid glucose too? Isn’t that just more sugar?

This article is me trying to understand what happened to my dear ice cream. Because I really love ice cream.

On bad days, it’s been like a friend who doesn’t ask any questions, just shows up with a warm hug. On good days, it’s made the occasion even more special, simply by being there. And in my head, it was always something simple and wholesome. I guess that’s why I never checked what was in it. I never thought I needed to.

Which is why this feels a little like a betrayal and the ingredient revelation made me feel foolish.

So I spoke to ice cream manufacturers and did my own digging (reading a lot and watching way too many YouTube shorts than I’d like to admit) to find out what changed, why it changed, and what it means for us as consumers.

Here’s what I found.

To make sense of that long ingredient list, I first had to understand what ice cream actually is.

And it really is simple. To make it at home, you need three things: milk fat (whole milk, cream, milk powder, or condensed milk), sugar, and flavour (e.g. cocoa).

The trick is in how you mix them.

If you dump everything into a container and freeze it, you will get a hard, icy, brick-like block. That’s not ice cream.

Because we want ice cream to be smooth and creamy. And that only happens if you freeze the mix while constantly stirring it.

Emphasising again: Freezing and stirring, at the same time. This is called churning.

Churning does two things at once.

First, it gets air into the mixture, which makes the ice cream light enough to scoop it out.

Second, as the mix freezes, the constant stirring motion breaks up ice crystals as they form, so you end up with tiny ones instead of big crystals, which is why it feels smooth on your tongue.

This combination of air plus tiny ice crystals is what gives ice cream its structure. The challenge is to keep this structure intact.

At home, it’s easy: you make a small batch today, keep it in your freezer, and eat it within two or three days. You’re fine.

But the moment you ask that ice cream to travel, the structure starts to break down. And that’s where the ingredient list begins to grow.

Imagine you want to open a small, artisanal gelato shop. You’re no longer making one special batch for an evening party. You’re making it in bulk that has to travel to different outlets across the city, sit in different freezers, and may not be eaten the same day, or even the same week.

We spoke with Darshak Solanki, co-founder and chef at Nuvola Gelato in Mumbai, about exactly this problem. His gelato is made in a central factory and sent out to all 13 of his outlets. That’s a journey: factory freezer, truck, cold storage at the outlet, display freezer, and finally into your hand—sometimes after one more stop in a Swiggy or Zomato delivery partner’s bag.

Every one of those stops sits at a slightly different temperature, Darshak explained. And every time the temperature rises, even a little, the ice cream melts a tiny bit. Then it cools and freezes again.

But it doesn’t freeze back into those millions of tiny crystals. With no stirring happening this time, the water refreezes into fewer, bigger crystals. Do this enough times and your smooth, creamy ice cream slowly turns coarse and icy.

This is the melt-and-freeze cycle. To protect the ice cream through it, you need something extra. And this is where stabilisers come in.

Their job is to hold onto water tightly enough that it can’t move around freely. Less free water means the ice crystals grow more slowly as the temperature fluctuates, and the ice cream stays smooth for longer.

Darshak uses guar gum, which shows up on labels as 412. It makes up less than 0.5% of the mix. A whole kilogram of ice cream might contain around three grams of it.

There’s a small family of these you’ll spot again and again on packs: locust bean gum (410), carrageenan (407), xanthan gum (415), and a few cellulose-based ones (466, 461, 460). All are stabilisers, all of them holding water in place.

Solving the ice crystal problem, however, is only one part of making a stable ice cream.

Now imagine a brand selling ice cream across the entire country.

The shelf life has to stretch from a few weeks to several months. And the journey gets longer: factory, truck, warehouse, supermarket or neighbourhood kirana freezer, delivery bag, and finally your freezer at home, where it might sit for days, or weeks, before you get to it.

The same melt-and-freeze problem now repeats itself many more times, at every stop along the way. But in India it comes with a twist, as an ice cream maker explained to us: the lack of a proper cold chain infrastructure. It is patchy: erratic electricity, long distances, warehouses and trucks that don’t reliably hold their temperature.

So an ice cream travelling a long way melts more often, and for longer stretches, and the structure breaks.

This is where vegetable fat—like palm oil—enters the scene. It does two jobs.

First, it holds up better through the supply chain. Because vegetable fats like palm oil have a higher melting point than milk fat. It takes more heat to melt, so it holds its shape slightly better through the fluctuations.

And second, oil is much, much cheaper than dairy fat. And lower cost of ingredients means a lower price on the shelf, which is what makes ‘mass-market’ ice cream mass-market in the first place.

Make no mistake: while oil helps with the cold chain, cost is the primary driver why this replacement happens. And the moment you do make this replacement, the regulations say you can’t call it ‘ice cream’ anymore.

So what exactly is the line that FSSAI draws?

It comes down to one number: 10% milk fat.

To be called ‘ice cream’ in India, at least 10% of the product’s weight has to be fat that comes from milk. If that fat comes from palm oil, the product is now a ‘frozen dessert’.

Brands are supposed to declare it on the pack. But honestly, until I worked on this article, I didn’t know I’d been eating ‘frozen dessert’ (and not ice cream) all this while.

Because yes, the law changed the name, but it didn’t change the context in which I consume ice cream: everything about it looked the same. It sits in the same freezers, the same aisle at the supermarket, the same restaurant menus and wedding buffets. So how is one supposed to know?

And that’s why, even though I can now follow the logic, it still feels like an act of betrayal.

Now there is oil in the ice cream. But that creates a new problem.

Oil doesn’t mix with water on its own. Left alone, it would just float on top, the same way it sits on top of a dal or a sabzi. So how does an oil-based ice cream come out creamy at all?

Something has to force the fat and water to hold together. That’s what an emulsifier does.

On labels, the most common by far is E471 (mono- and diglycerides), which shows up in nearly every list. And you’ll also spot E433 (polysorbate 80), E477 (propylene glycol esters), E435 (polysorbate 60), and E322 (lecithin).

To be sure, this isn’t only true for oil-based ice creams. Fat and water don’t mix easily whatever the fat is, so many dairy ice creams use emulsifiers too. But it doesn’t have to be a lab-made E-number. And Italy proves it.

Traditional Italian gelato uses egg yolk. The yolk contains lecithin, a natural emulsifier, and brings richness of its own.

Darshak, who trained with Italian chefs, told us it works there partly because Italy has an entire supply chain built around it: egg whites go to the country’s bakeries and the yolks go to its gelato makers. He doesn’t use yolks himself (or any emulsifier at all) because many of his Indian customers simply don’t want eggs in their ice cream.

By this point, I’d started understanding why the labels are the way they are. Everything on it was solving a real, physical problem, which both felt “yeah this makes sense” but also made me realise how ice cream was being optimised for the supply chain and not for my body.

And yet, when I dug into the next thing, it again caught me off guard.

The latest trend in the ice cream market is a whole new wave of “healthier” ice creams: guilt-free, sugar-free ice-creams. And I’ll admit it: I’d been reaching for these more often myself lately, treating them as the safer choice.

And I expected these “healthier” ice-creams to have a shorter ingredient list.

But turns out, they were even longer. Why is that?

Ajay Joe, co-founder of Ulo Ice Creams in Bangalore, told us that sugar does more than just sweeten the ice cream: it helps control how much water freezes into ice and plays a role in giving the ice cream its body and texture.

If you remove that, you will have to add something else to make up for those functions. And that’s why sugar-free ice creams rarely contain just one replacement.

So you will see multiple sugar substitutes—maltitol, stevia, erythritol, sucralose, and so on—and fibres like polydextrose or fructo-oligosaccharide. All of them, in some combination, to bring the sweetness and the body that sugar was adding.

Ajay told us he stays away from erythritol even though plenty of other brands use it in their sugar-free ice creams now. In an interview, he told us:

“We believe ice cream, like most “treats,” should be treated that way. Eat a small portion instead of binging on a ‘healthy’ version with a lot of extra ingredients to make it seem like the real thing. This thought process made us never look into sugar free variants of our ice cream.”

After all this, I can’t look at an ice cream cup the same way again. I read the label now, and I see what’s doing what.

And still, for all of it, I’m not giving up on ice cream. Not at all. What’s changed is how I eat it.

I won’t fall for the “healthy” claims and will read the label and know what I’m putting in my body. I’ll have the frozen dessert when I’m craving childhood nostalgia, and the premium gelato when I want something rich and flavourful. I’ll choose the brands that are honest about how they make what they make, and I’ll tell people about them, so more of us end up enjoying and appreciating the real thing.

And most of all, I’ll just stay mindful. I will eat it once in a while, slowly and properly, whatever I’m craving that day. And let ice cream be ice cream again. Joy. And nothing else.

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Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Hello, this is Samarth. Today’s piece is by my colleague Dhvanil Raval (D), where he writes about his experience of 75 days of consistency with the 75 Hard protocol.

Most of us know that specific day during a fitness program when colleagues suddenly notice a visible shift in your physique. That happened with D in one of our Tuesday Morning Meetings. I then learned he was doing this 75-Hard thing, and then, a few weeks later, when the program was done, I caught him at the lunch table and requested him to write this piece to share what it actually feels like.

This piece is a personal win for me because I have been pushing D to write publicly for more than a year now, and it starts with TBT. :)

D is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at TWT, one of the OG members of the leadership team who built this brand, and currently leads the protein category team.

— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)

I.

I decided to do 75 Hard the way most questionable life decisions are made: on a whim, in an airport, while recovering from a food coma.

For those unfamiliar, the premise is absurd in the best way: follow five rigid rules for 75 straight days. No breaks. Which means if you slip up on Day 74, you restart from Day 1.

These are the five rules:

1. Follow a diet. Any diet—just pick one and stick to it. No alcohol. No cheat meals.

2. Work out twice a day, 45 minutes each. One of these must be outdoors.

3. Drink a gallon (~4 litres) of water daily.

4. Read 10 pages of a non-fiction book.

5. Take a progress photo every day.

I had heard of 75 Hard before—mostly from influencers and YouTubers. The body transformations seemed wildly good. I had watched this content in the same vein as I saw the Olympics—with admiration and awe, but absolutely no hope of emulation. And yet, on the 27th of December, 2025, I ended up committing to it.

I had just spent five days doing what one does in Hong Kong—roaming the streets, inhaling dim sum, and developing a deeply personal relationship with dai pai dong (Hong Kong’s old-school street food joints). As I waited for my flight back to Mumbai, my tongue reeled from Sichuan peppercorn, and my head buzzed with guilt. In that state of bloated contemplation, several threads converged into one dramatic conclusion: I am soft.

There was guilt from the food binge, obviously. There were also recent breakthroughs in therapy, which left me feeling uncomfortably self-aware. And the prospect of a demanding year at work that I knew would require a version of me that didn’t currently exist. I am not doing enough hard things, I told myself.

Something in that airport moment got to me. Maybe it was the therapy. Maybe it was the guilt. Maybe it was the knowledge that my wife, newly pregnant at the time, was being advised by the combined wisdom of WhatsApp forwards and well-meaning aunties to eat only home-cooked food—which meant not going out for 75 days would actually be acceptable at home. Maybe it was that Mumbai’s weather officially enters its Best Behaviour Phase from late December to mid-March, making outdoor workouts less of a punishment.

Or maybe—and this is the part that should serve as a cautionary tale about social media consumption—I simply hadn’t done enough research to know all the reasons I shouldn’t do this.

So, I took the plunge. In a fog of poor research and mild delusion, I committed to 75 Hard.

This is an honest account of how those 75 days actually felt, and what the other side felt like. Fair warning: I find it strangely hard to recommend the programme itself, and yet, given the chance, I would do what 75 Hard represents all over again. I’ll let you sit with that contradiction for a while; I certainly have.

II.

Full disclosure: I made two modifications that purists MAY consider heresy. First, I dropped the “non-fiction” requirement: I just read 10 pages of anything I wanted. Second, I played fast and loose with the progress photo rule; it felt less like discipline and more like a part of the programme designed to feed your Instagram.

In the first couple of weeks, the space between my workouts seemed to shrink to nothing. I was either in a workout, planning the next one, trying to squeeze in enough sleep before the morning session, or too sore to form thoughts about anything other than the workout I had just finished.

I was planning an early exit from the office to accommodate an evening workout, since I had a flight in the morning. I was planning two workouts back-to-back in the morning because I had to attend a party in the evening. The workout was me. I was the workout.

And this strange, relentless grind is precisely why 75 Hard is hard.

Crushing a single session is easy. Crushing two a day is slightly harder. But when you try to do this for 75 consecutive days, fate and nature themselves begin conspiring against you—even more so when you pair it with a diet.

My cooks became unintentional victims of my new consistency. Their days off had always been when we ordered in, and now that option had vanished. They protested by taking actual days off, which meant my diet, against my will, evolved into something aggressively salad-forward. If the founders of Feel (Herbivore Farms), Salad Days and Harvest Salad Co. ever read this, thank you.

Family threw in their bit by summoning me to weddings. I smuggled protein powder sachets into these events and became a source of deep frustration to my fufajis and masis, who found themselves stuck behind me in buffet lines as I wrestled with the task of loading my plate with ‘green salad’. (It is so goddamned frustrating to pick up these thinly sliced frill-cut pieces of carrots and cucumber, because caterers give ‘tongs’ to pick them up! You know the ones I’m talking about? Those tongs are how they choose to insult you because you are choosing raw vegetables over their magnum opus, the analogue-Paneer Lababdar.)

Whether it was colleagues at work, my team with whom I head out once a month, or friends I went out with and watched in quiet envy, I must have heard some version of, “This is a bit much, you must really hate yourself,” at least a hundred times. Some said it with their eyes or gave me a look. Others have been my friends longer, so they simply said it to my face. I shrugged some off, sighed at the others, or returned the death-stare depending on the state of my endorphins.

Even my home infrastructure joined the resistance. After a workout, I found no hot water in my bathroom; the geyser fixture had collapsed! When you are already carrying the weight of relentless consistency, these small overheads can really weigh you down. I bathed in cold water for three days—thanks, Bombay winters—because I couldn’t summon the energy to fix the damn thing. I told myself (rightly so) that cold showers are good for sore muscles anyway.

And then, somewhere in the unremarkable day of the third week, the conspiracy switched sides. The body I’d spent a fortnight fighting—sore, sleep-starved, one salad away from open mutiny—decided to come around. The grind didn’t go anywhere. It just stopped being a sentence I was serving and started being mine.

I worked out at Cult, and the workouts became the single most interesting part of 75 Hard. I loved the high of breaking my own strength PRs: a 62kg clean and press, a 20kg single-arm chest press for 8 reps, a 40kg barbell front squat for 12 reps, and a 20kg single-arm racked lunge for 12. Plus, I ran outdoors for the first time in nearly 2 years and clocked my fastest 5K (ever) in around 31 minutes. My resting heart rate dropped to 55.

Food got even better. By Day 40, my appetite itself seemed to have quietly shrunk, and cravings had all but disappeared. I had had no sugary beverages or desserts, no deep-fried food, and no alcohol. And now, seeing the 4 PM order of Gulati’s at the office did little to weaken my resolve.

I adjusted to roughly 100 grams of calculated protein intake daily, with non-protein foods contributing a little extra. I unwittingly added a lot of fibre through fruits and salads. Consequently, I experienced approximately 40 consecutive days of the best bowel movements I have had in recent memory. (You’re welcome for that detail.) By Day 60, I genuinely felt I could do this indefinitely—with the occasional break to appease friends and let my body recover.

And of course, I lost weight. I started at 86.2 kg and finished at 81.1—a solid 5 kg of net loss. The actual fat loss was probably more, because I was fairly certain I had gained muscle along the way.

Pro: I finally fit into a pair of jeans with a 32-inch waist.

Con: Every airport security check has been slightly frightening since then. I am beginning to realise that CISF has an equally good sense for loose pants and bomb-making material—they reset the intensity of frisking quite professionally.

III.

When I emerged from these 75 days, I felt like I was on top of the world. I wanted to preserve every aspect of this new life and tell everyone I knew.

But after finishing the program and doing proper research before I told the world about it, I discovered that most of 75 Hard actually lives in the darker, gloomier corners of the internet—in the ‘manosphere,’ as Gemini helpfully described it—rather than the fuzzy, motivational territory where I had first consumed it.

Its creator, Andy Frisella, is a supplement company CEO, podcast host, and self-described “CEO of Hardness”, whose content sits uncomfortably deep in the ecosystem of alpha male motivation. In 2024, he ranted about how women shouldn’t be police officers. He has since apologised, then un-apologised, then apologised again, as if public statements were a video game with infinite respawns.

Truth be told, health experts are ‘not fans’ of 75 Hard. The programme far exceeds recommended physical activity guidelines and provides little scope for muscle recovery. The gallon-of-water rule raises concerns about electrolyte imbalances, and the rigid, all-or-nothing structure may do more harm than good for people without a strong fitness base. Doctors urge caution for those with joint problems, heart conditions, no exercise background, or a history of eating disorders. (Luckily, I had none of these preconditions.)

In short, the programme is not evidence-based, not medically endorsed, and was invented by a man whose primary qualification is owning a supplement company and having strong opinions about everything. Sigh.

So yes, I am fully aware that this wasn’t the smartest regimen to follow. And yet, I did. And now that I’m done, I feel absolutely amazing.

This feeling is rare. It is happiness and contentment wrapped into one, with a beautiful contradiction at its core. A feeling of joy, but one that came from letting go of so many simple things that gave comfort and joy.

The dessert after dinner. The drink with friends. The freedom to skip a workout because you’re tired. Small stuff that we take for granted. I gave all of that up for 75 days. And the high from having done so lasted for days after I finished.

And what I learnt is that 75 Hard is not actually a fitness programme or a weight-loss method. It is just... hard. And I suspect that’s the whole point.

We rarely do difficult things without a reason. We push through brutal hours when we are decently good at something and want to refine it, like artists adding minor details. We endure discomfort when the consequences of not enduring are worse, like working harder to submit that project before a deadline. Hardship, in adult life, almost always comes with a payoff attached, or a punishment avoided.

But 75 Hard has no external stakes. Nobody is checking. There’s no prize at the end, no certificate, no medal. If you fail on Day 74, nobody knows but you. If you succeed, the world remains largely indifferent. It is difficult, but without consequences.

There is something clarifying about doing something like this when nothing is on the line. When the only consequence of failure is your own knowledge of it. When the only reward for success is the private fact that you did it.

I will leave it for you to decide if you want to get on a non-evidence-based program like 75 Hard. But I do have one recommendation: go out there and do a genuinely hard thing with nothing on the line. And push yourself to finish it when no one else will care if you don’t.

And then, when you have crushed it, let’s sit together and compare notes. Did it feel amazing? I am betting it did.

For all I know, we’re probably still soft. But I’m a slightly different kind of soft now. The kind that knows what it feels like to hold a line for 75 days when the only person keeping score was me.

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Today’s piece is from Anushka Mukherjee, Charul Bhakre and I, Samarth.

The three of us have been obsessing over cooking oils and marketing over the last few weeks and the head-banging on Slack channel made us write this piece—to show you the logic of the marketing machinery, and to make an argument for reclaiming your agency by setting the questions yourself, rather than letting the marketer do it for you.

(All ads and claims are from actual brands. But we are not naming specific brands here because this is a category-wide playbook.)

— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)

We started researching oils because we were obsessed with a claim found in edible oil marketing: a cholesterol-free sunflower oil.

This is true. Sunflower oil has no cholesterol. But neither does mustard oil or palm oil. Or any oil on the vegetable oil shelf.

Because cholesterol comes from animals, and vegetable oils come from, well, plants. So obviously, every vegetable oil is cholesterol-free. (Just like salt is sugar-free.)

A charitable interpretation would call this a “grey area”: the marketer didn’t lie, because the claim is defensibly true. And yet it feels misleading. The claim makes the oil sound healthy, and it works precisely because most consumers don’t know that all vegetable oils are cholesterol-free.

Which made us wonder: what else is going on in edible oil marketing? What claims are brands making? What matters and what doesn’t?

So we studied ads from oil brands across two decades and read labels across the shelf. It revealed patterns about food marketing that hold lessons for more than just oil.

Imagine you’re the brand manager at an oil brand. How do you grow your business? Two ways.

One, expand the category (sell more oil).

Two, grow market share (sell yours over your competitor’s by showing yours is better).

This applies to most categories. No problem.

But through the lens of the consumer, there is a problem. Because the first lever—selling more oil—goes against our interests. Indians are already consuming far too much oil.

Look at the data: the average Indian consumes around 23 kg of edible oil a year, which is double the ICMR ceiling of 12 kg, and triple what we consumed in 2001. This includes everything from packaged food to outside food to homemade food.

Which means that if consumer health is the concern, ideally you shouldn’t be encouraging oil consumption at all. (But brands do, and we’ll come to that.)

So what else can you do?

You can double down on the second lever and show how your oil is better than your competitor’s.

But the truth is, oil is a commodity. Just like we wrote in the article on eggs, for commodities the most boring things are the ones that matter the most. With oil, what we really need to know is that the bottle contains exactly what it claims and isn’t adulterated. That’s the most crucial thing a brand should guarantee. And don’t get us wrong: this is a real value add in modern times, when supply chains are longer and trust is scarce. But “we sell honest oil” isn’t exactly the most exciting brief.

So this is the conundrum: the brand manager’s job is to sell more of a thing the consumer should consume less of, and to win in the market, you have to manufacture reasons to pick yours over theirs when the differentiation isn’t significant enough.

Every oil ad you’ve seen is solving this problem. The result is an ad ecosystem bombarded with claims that distort the conversation we actually need to be having about oil—that we are consuming too much of it, and that we need a serious awareness push to bring that down.

How does it distort? Let us walk you through two categories of claims mapping to the two growth incentives that cooking oil marketing keeps promoting.

First: claims that manufacture permission to consume more.

This is best illustrated through the stories shown in ads. Two examples.

— A schoolgirl is backstage. She is getting ready for her dance performance. But her tiffin is packed with samosas and puris. A teacher spots it and inquires if she plans to eat all of this right now, right before the performance. The young girl, very excitedly, says yes, because it’s made in sunflower oil, which is very light (emphasis added). She eats, and dances, with full energy and a big smile.

— A wife is concerned as her husband reaches for another samosa during a cricket match. She knows she can’t stop him, so she has stopped trying. But she still cares. And she’s found a solution: the oil she now uses absorbs less of it. Which makes the fried snacking she was worried about feel like less of a problem.

Your “light” oil or “low-absorbing” oil is not solving the problem. If anything, it misdirects. It quietly changes the frame of the problem.

Because, for a moment, assume these are actually better oils. Even then, a better oil only helps when you are replacing an oil high in saturated fat with one high in unsaturated fat (MUFA/PUFA).

Replacement. That’s the key word—and the benefit. It only helps when the better oil is swapped in for the worse one.

Because the lever that actually matters—the one that matters most for your health—is how much oil you consume. The quantity. And no frying technology or supposed lightness solves for that.

Second: claims that manufacture false differentiation.

This one serves the “expand market share” function by claiming to be different from the bottle next to it (when it mostly isn’t). Two examples.

— A mother acknowledges that it’s difficult to keep children away from their favourite fried food like samosas and fries. So don’t try, the ad suggests. Just cook it in an immunity-boosting oil with vitamins and antioxidants.

— Oils that claim to have antioxidants. And they do, so they must be good for you, because antioxidants are. This is mostly a packaging claim.

But the label won’t tell you the commercial reality: those antioxidants are primarily working to stop the oil from going rancid on the retail shelf. They are there to protect the oil’s lifespan, not yours. And btw, high heat actually destroys a lot of these antioxidants anyway.

The edible oil shelf is packed with such claims: from helping you manage diabetes to meeting your micronutrient requirements. But seriously: why are we attaching micronutrient stories to a fat-rich product at all?

So see these claims for what they are: marginal differences—which may or may not be true—amped up to suggest X is meaningfully better than Y, when it matters far less than the real estate and air time the marketer wants you to give it.

These are four of the many examples we found that revealed a clear pattern in this category—and in food marketing in general.

First, raise an anxiety: your food is heavy, your children won’t stop eating fried things, your immunity needs help.

Then, sell the cure: this oil is light, this one absorbs less, this one has antioxidants.

That’s the machine. And once you see it, the first question to ask is to notice the setup—whether the anxiety the cure is solving is a real one, and then if the proposed cure is actually the right one.

Because the setup reflects the debate the brand wants you to have—which oil is healthiest—and as long as that’s the dominant debate for consumers, there is no bad answer for any brand. As long as you’re arguing about which oil, there is always a cure for whatever worries you.

The unseen casualty is the question that actually deserves the attention: how much.

Because that’s the main lever. It’s worth repeating: we are consuming double the ICMR ceiling, and triple what we ate in 2001.

So the questions that matter are the ones that the marketer won’t nudge you towards: are all your home dishes dependent on oil-based cooking? Could one of them be prepped a different way? Do you know how many teaspoons of oil go into a serving? When did you last measure, with intention, what your everyday consumption actually looks like? What are the hidden sources of oil?

A brand whose first job is to sell more oil cannot also be the one telling you to use less. Except, occasionally, it has to, because the law mandates it.

Any oil ad making a “heart-healthy” claim—and a surprising number do—carries a disclaimer in tiny font: that heart health depends on exercise, less saturated fat, a balanced diet, and… less oil.

Yes, it’s right there: the same ad giving you permission to have more is telling you that using less is better. Only one of them can be true.

Now, don’t get us wrong.

First, we are not saying oil choice is meaningless. Our previous article has a full deep-dive and framework on how to choose the right cooking oil. The point we’re emphasising here is where you focus, and what has more impact.

And second, we are not making an argument for a joyless plate. You don’t have to give up pakodas with chai when it’s raining, and for one of us, his mother’s chole bhature is not up for negotiation (not changing!).

The point is not to stop eating the food that brings us joy. The point is to notice and be aware—to choose how much, and when—instead of being sold the idea that you can eat freely because the oil will handle it all.

Because that idea is really just a way of telling you that you can’t moderate your own eating, so the brand will step in and do it for you another way. Don’t fall for it.

You have agency. And at a time when food marketing dominates so much of what we see, reclaiming that agency starts with asking the right questions, and then deciding how much and what you consume in your context. For your health. Not for the brand manager’s KPIs.

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Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Hello! This is Anushka Mukherjee, from the Media Labs team of the Whole Truth, and this week, it’s my turn to share with you what I’ve been reading. (This is the second of our new fortnightly curations. Read the first here.)

My work includes research and reporting, so I end up reading a lot, and sometimes my eyes just glaze over. Not even the most interesting information can stay in my brain, a real shame of this overwhelming information economy. But this also means that if you have a question, or are curious, there is every way to satiate that curiosity. And good, meaningful writing always stands out.

Lately, I have been trying to understand how to rebuild the fondness I once had, in earnest, for eating. If you are, too, this curation is for you.

We try and read in an overwhelming information economy, and we try and eat in an overwhelming nutrition economy. For those of us who can afford the choices and have access to them, the choices are boundless. And the messaging is nonstop. Optimise for health. Nutrition. Lower calories. Organic. Ethically grown. Seasonally grown. Fortified with Omega 3. High in protein. High in fiber. Full of antioxidants. The nutrition of 3 rotis (why not have 3 rotis?). Sugarfree. Pesticide residue free. Coffee is bad for you. Actually, black coffee is great for you. Dairy is not meant for humans. But milk is an amazing source of protein for your kids. Meat is good for you. But meat is full of hormones.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It’s not that I want to be better able to make the right choices. But I do want to be able to understand what causes all this overwhelm in the first place. The following pieces didn’t teach me how to find the right claim, or scratch off the wrong one. They helped me understand why I keep falling for the confusion. I still don’t know what to eat or what to enjoy, but I am learning how to think about it.

I. Your entire way of life depends on one thing: the cold chain

Nicola Twilley is an author and co-host of the food, science and history podcast Gastropod, which is where I discovered her. She has an obsession: the “artificial winter that has reshaped our entire food system.” We underestimate how important just the invention of first ice, then the refrigerator and then entire cold chain network is. It is why women started going to work, why entire residences cropped up in cities, why grocery stores exist.

But much of it remains unmapped. And all of it remains hidden from us, almost deliberately. Most food companies or producers want us not to bother with all these logistics, all this business of imagining where your fruits and vegetables and fish and meat sit in pure, stone-cold silence before reaching you. It is a technically fascinating transformation of food into a global commodity. But this chain is methodical, precise and so nearly perfect that you start wondering about what the words fresh, natural or farm-to-table even mean.

In this crisp, straightforward piece, through six examples—from meat to cheese to bananas to sushi—Twilley shows how the system is built, and how much of what we call “fresh” depends on it.

Read here.

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II. Why is there no pleasure in eating anymore?

I love this old essay by Wendell Berry, which is titled “The Pleasures of Eating.” You think it is going to be a lovely, lyrical account of all the ways in which food brings you joy: the flavour, the texture, the memory, cooking food for yourself and for others. At least these are some things that make eating pleasurable to me.

But no: with the same lyricism, Berry is also honest and visceral in explaining to you how the pleasure of eating has disappeared. We think we are consumers with free will, but we forget that in the era of industrial food, we are so far away from food production, that at best, we are “passive consumers.”

Think about it: if production is so precise and specialised (like in the case of the cold chain), then so will be consumption. Our choices are not outside what is already made possible and presented to us.

But this essay is not a downer. Berry explains exactly what is the pleasure of eating, and how to get it back, even with a few exact requests. Not to spoil it, but within this global food system, the pleasure, Berry explains, lies simply in consciousness. To be aware, slow down, observe, learn, be uncomfortable, and eventually be connected to the world you are living in.

This essay is soothing to me. It is a reminder of why the act of eating is special to me, and why it is fun.

But it also does another thing: though Wendell Berry wrote this in 1989, reading him now, I find a different argument inside it. Berry does not place the burden of all the bad choices we make on us. He explains that when the eater is distanced so strongly from how, where or by whom his food is made, he becomes an “uncritical victim” of the system. He then makes the “choices” that are offered to him by the industry.

But I wonder—if I no longer buy food based on where it comes from, how do I make these choices? It has become clearer and clearer to me: this distance between the food and me is filled by whatever else is most beneficial to Big Food: high protein, groundbreaking nutritional claims, exotic flavours, exciting textures, heartwarming stories, quickness and convenience.

What happens next?

Read here.

III. The hidden cost of nutrition misinformation

Two or three cups of coffee a day lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease! I love that. I love coffee, especially a piping-fresh americano with no milk or sugar, so this is the best news I could possibly receive. But how do we know this? Obviously, there has been a real scientific study with real scientists. I checked twice. Great.

Scientist and researcher Stephan J. Guyenet dug into this specific claim, and found a chain of events. First, the study. The authors of the study are quite clear in their paper about the fact that it is an observational study, which means that we can’t be quite sure if coffee really lowers the risk, or perhaps there is some other difference between the coffee drinkers and non-coffee drinkers.

The academic press release with this study is also cautious. But by the time this study makes it to a prominent news headline, all restraint is forgotten.

Through examining some of this nutrition research, the writer explains why exactly we fall for it so easily. The answer is partly in the murky nature of misinformation itself; for instance, how some claims are technically true in what they’re saying, but can still encourage consumers to think that their choices are healthier than they are. It’s a common trick. But, he also explains, the very climate of health and nutrition information in the world right now magnifies this.

And that the cost is not just confusion, but the slow erosion of our ability to trust what we know about food at all. This, I think, is what happens next: the distance Berry described gets filled, and what fills it teaches us to mistrust our own attention.

Read here.

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Hi there, Samarth here. Today’s piece is the standalone explainer I promised after our two-part investigation on eggs (read part one and part two here). Is the yolk bad for you? Does it lead to heart disease?

Well, no. Really. My colleague Anushka Mukherjee did a deep-dive into the science and history of this cholesterol confusion, and the verdict is clear: egg yolk is not the problem. And yet, the confusion persists. Why? Read Anushka’s piece to find out. This piece genuinely clarified a confusion I’d been carrying myself.

As always, for thoughts and feedback, write to me at samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com. I’m sure some of you have opinions on this one, and I’m waiting to hear them.

— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)

I.

The egg. Small, simple, ordinary. But demonised for the better part of half a century. From the 1960s, when the American Heart Association (AHA) firmly told the nation to cut back on eggs, all the way to the 2000s—and even now—when the fatty egg yolk retreated into the background as egg-white omelettes and egg-white-everything became the symbol of “healthy” eating.

This is because while the milky egg white is mostly water and protein, the yolk is a dense little ball of micronutrients. But never mind that. The yolk is also almost 30% fat, and each one carries around 200 mg of cholesterol.

And a few decades ago, it was commonly understood that cholesterol in food increases the cholesterol in your blood. As soon as we proved that high blood cholesterol, in turn, causes heart disease, the verdict was simple: skip the yolk.

Put that into perspective for the egg: In 1977, the US Dietary Guidelines capped cholesterol intake at no more than 300 mg per day. For one egg at 200mg, over two-thirds of your daily allowance was gone. Two eggs? You’re over the limit.

And so, eggs—specifically, egg yolks—became the villain.

Except that this logic—that higher dietary cholesterol leads to higher blood cholesterol—is wrong. And we have known for a while now. What’s off here has a long, winding story rooted in a misunderstanding of fats and cholesterol.

So much confusion, over such a long time, that it still prevails today.

II.

At the core of this story are two different things: cholesterol and saturated fat.

1) Cholesterol is a waxy, fat-like substance (a lipid, specifically) that the body needs. It uses cholesterol to build cell membranes, produce hormones, make vitamin D.

But nowhere in the body is cholesterol more needed than in the liver: it synthesises 80% of all the cholesterol circulating in our blood, and needs it for multiple functions, including producing bile. The rest comes from food. Animals produce their own cholesterol, but plants don’t. So, you will only find cholesterol in animal products.

2) Saturated fat is a type of fat, made up of fatty acid chains. These chains are “saturated” with hydrogen—every available spot on the carbon backbone is taken—and that’s why these neatly packed molecules tend to solidify at room temperature. Think butter, ghee, or coconut oil in your cool, dark kitchen.

Saturated fats and cholesterol are completely different, with distinct chemical structures, and they have different roles to play in our body (barring some overlaps).

But they often get tangled because they appear together in the same foods. Saturated fats are more prominent in animal products (we produce it in our body) and cholesterol, as we know, is only found in animal products. So butter, ghee, cheese, red meats—are all high in both saturated fat and cholesterol.

The confusion was valid, even scientifically speaking. Early studies into the link between diet and cardiovascular disease found that people with an increased risk of heart disease ate a lot of foods high in saturated fats. And that the same people had elevated blood cholesterol. So the blame landed on both saturated fats and cholesterol.

The two stayed knotted together, appearing side by side not just in further studies, but also in the language we used around heart health. We still do this.

For example, plant-based cooking oils—like seed or rice bran oils—that claim to be “good for your heart” by being low in saturated fat also come with a promise, printed in big bold letters on the packet: “cholesterol-free.” What do the two even have to do with each other in these oils? No plant based oils contain cholesterol anyway.

At the time, a primary, looming fear unified all these concepts, blurring them together in the collective pursuit of defeating it: heart disease. We simply didn’t understand what was causing heart attacks—at least not enough to prevent them—or what increased the risk.

It took us a long time to figure it out.

III.

In the 20th century, a grim mystery confounded scientists studying hearts and metabolism: a lot of young people—younger than 30—were dying of heart attacks. After years of research, the cause emerged: abnormally high blood cholesterol.

But what caused this level of blood cholesterol in otherwise healthy, young patients? It wasn’t their diet, lifestyle or habits.

In 1938, Carl Müller, a Norwegian clinician, described it as an “inborn error of metabolism” that produces high blood cholesterol. It was genetic. You were born with it. It even had a name now: familial hypercholesterolemia.

But what was it? What did this particular gene do, to make the body vulnerable to nearly double the blood cholesterol—specifically, low-density lipoprotein or LDL cholesterol—than normal?

We wouldn’t find the answer for another 50 years.

In the meantime, researchers had started understanding cholesterol better. We knew that cholesterol was a lipid molecule essential to the body, produced by the liver.

We also learned that cholesterol is used by cells throughout the body, and so it has to be transported across our bloodstream by two vehicles: LDL (low-density lipoprotein) and HDL (high-density lipoprotein).

LDL carries cholesterol to different parts of our bodies, where it is used up by cells. But if there is excess LDL in the body, these free-flowing cholesterol molecules are picked up by HDL, which carries them away to the liver. The liver excretes them, and that’s that.

This is what we mean by “good” and “bad” cholesterol—though it’s a bit of a misnomer. There is only one cholesterol; just two transporters.

And it is these transporters that matter more than the cholesterol itself. If there happens to be more LDL in the bloodstream than HDL—that’s where the problem starts.

LDL particles get pushed into the walls of our arteries, where, with no HDL coming to pick them up, they stay. Once lodged there, they get oxidised (meaning, chemically damaged) and the immune system treats them as a threat. White blood cells rush in to clean up, get stuck themselves, and over time the whole mess hardens into plaque.

This condition is called atherosclerosis, narrowing the arteries and restricting the flow of oxygen to our heart. And, ultimately, increasing the risk of heart attacks and ischemic strokes.

So, when we say LDL is “bad,” all we mean is that more LDL can start this chain. It is a slow, silent process that only becomes visible when something goes terribly wrong.

But the question is: what causes excess LDL?

IV.

The first question is: does cholesterol from food—that is, dietary cholesterol—lead to an increase in the cholesterol levels in our blood?

Nope. Not for most people.

Dietary cholesterol has very little effect on your blood cholesterol.

This is because the body is adept at handling its cholesterol. Your liver has a homeostasis system that produces and regulates cholesterol in your body.

“If the dietary cholesterol coming from food is less, then the body compensates by synthesising more in the liver,” Sudha Vasudevan, Senior Scientist and Head at the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation, told me. Inversely, if you consume excess cholesterol, the homeostatic system dials its production down.

In fact, even if you’re not consuming any dietary cholesterol, your body will produce its own, to keep everything running. This is why even vegans can have high cholesterol even though they’re eating no animal products at all. Their liver is producing its own cholesterol.

It seems simple enough. In fact, many American scientists in this space already knew the weak link between dietary and blood cholesterol decades ago. Why have we believed this for years, then?

Over a hundred years ago, we just didn’t really know how cholesterol works in the body. But scientists and researchers had been suspecting that cholesterol in our food does have something to do with plaque buildup. So, in 1913, two Russian scientists, Nikolai Anichkov and Semen Chalatov, fed rabbits a diet of eggs, milk, and meat—all cholesterol-rich foods.

The result was striking: the rabbits developed lesions that closely resembled human atherosclerosis. Interest stirred. The evidence seemed undeniable, and the dietary-to-blood cholesterol hypothesis was born.

But there was one thing that the scientists—and their supporters—failed to take into account. Rabbits are herbivores. They never encounter cholesterol in their natural diet, and their bodies have no mechanism to absorb it or use it. Feeding cholesterol to a rabbit is like pouring petrol into a diesel engine. Of course something breaks.

When this experiment was repeated in rats and dogs, it did not yield anything close to the same result. The experiment was real. The extrapolation to humans was the flaw.

But, as Daniel Steinberg explains in his book, “The Cholesterol Wars,” this set off a decades-long confusion. In the US, at the turn of the century, it was no small thing to say that milk, eggs, and red meat cause heart disease. Deniers were as loud as supporters, and further flawed studies muddied our understanding. It is only towards the 2000s that a flurry of new research started to clear the fog. Even then, it would take a decade for policy to shift.

Finally, now, we are clear: the cholesterol in your food has very little meaningful effect on your LDL.

V.

The next question is: if not cholesterol, does the saturated fat in your diet raise blood cholesterol?

The short answer is yes.

Remember the genetic condition that dramatically raises LDL in the blood? In the 1970s and 80s, researchers Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein studied particularly tragic cases of the condition, in children as young as 8. A pattern emerged: there was something on the surface of the body’s cells controlling the delivery of LDL to the cells.

In 1985, they won the Nobel Prize for discovering this path-breaking mechanism: LDL receptors.

Every cell in our body has these LDL receptors—and the liver, the body’s cholesterol capital, has 70% of all the receptors in our body. Whenever cells need cholesterol, these receptors grab the LDL travelling through the blood and unlock the cholesterol into the cell.

In effect, the receptors act like a vacuum cleaner pulling LDL out of circulation. When there are fewer receptors at work, more LDL stays in the bloodstream, and ends up in artery walls, where it begins the slow path to plaque.

Saturated fat is what disrupts this system. When excess saturated fat reaches the liver, it signals the liver to reduce receptor production. Fewer receptors means less LDL getting cleared, which means more LDL circulating, which means more LDL ending up in artery walls. This is now well established in the research.

So the picture comes into focus: high saturated fat raises LDL. Dietary cholesterol, for most people, doesn’t.

Two molecules that often appear together in the same foods, but only one of them is doing the damage.

VI.

And in the last decade or so, health organisations have caught up to this. The 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans removed the longstanding recommendation to restrict dietary cholesterol to less than 300 mg/day. No upper limit is now specified.

But each major health organisation has a hard upper limit for saturated fat. WHO, the US Dietary Guidelines and the UK NHS all recommend that no more than 10% of your daily calories should come from saturated fats. The American Heart Association (AHA) is even more aggressive at 6%.

Indian clinicians, too, agree on this. Dr. V. Mohan, a leading Indian diabetologist and Chairman of the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation in Chennai, told me: “Diets which are high in saturated fat, e.g. ghee and coconut oil, can increase LDL cholesterol levels.”

“When considering diet, it is important to remember that it’s not one single food item which is taken which matters, but the whole of the diet. For example, in Kerala where coconut oil is used, fish is also consumed, which is very good, and neutralises it to some extent.”

The clinical advice has only just caught up with science, but it’s pretty clear: for heart patients, the priority is moderating saturated fat, not avoiding nutrient-dense foods like eggs because of their cholesterol.

VII.

The chain is much clearer now:

high saturated-fat intake → high LDL cholesterol → plaque buildup → increased cardiovascular disease risk.

Dietary cholesterol does matter, but not as much as saturated fat.

And again, this is not to say stop eating saturated fat. It’s not that one should stop eating butter or ghee. The point is moderation. The ghee in your dal tadka or butter in a yum cookie is not a problem—the problem is when each of your daily meals has ingredients with high saturated fat, which can shoot past the 10% quota so easily.

Alas, the hard part of moderating saturated fat in the modern food environment is the food we eat that we can’t see into. And the two biggest culprits are restaurants (where we can’t know which oil is being used, or in what quantity) and packaged foods (which freely use ingredients high in saturated fats, like palm oil, and trans fats too—which are even worse for LDL).

So yes, how to moderate saturated fat is a problem statement.

But that has got nothing to do with… egg yolk! Which has just 1.5gm of saturated fat. (For comparison: a flaky butter croissant has 10gm saturated fat!)

Which is all to say: eat the damn yolk!

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Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Hello! This is Jaanvi Advani, and this is the first edition of our fortnightly curated picks, where our team and writers share what they’ve been reading, watching, and listening to. Today, it’s my turn.

As a reader-turned-team member of Truth Be Told, what brought me to this publication was a lack of trust in the systems that affect our health.

The right reading, coupled with trial and error, helped me build internal systems I could actually rely on—nutrition, exercise, sleep routines that seem to be working.

But lately, my reading has drifted toward what I still don’t trust or understand: the external systems. Especially medical care, the part we get thrown into despite doing everything right on our end. From diagnosis to treatment, it still feels vague, confusing, and at times, infuriating.

These three pieces brought me some clarity. Or at least, better questions.

I. On diagnosis. And when to seek help.

Five days. That’s how long I went, unable to read a single page without reaching for my phone. By the end of it, I was asking everyone I knew whether they thought I had ADHD. I took online tests. I wanted a diagnosis.

I wanted it not because I wanted treatment, but because I wanted an explanation. A label that would let me stop sitting with the discomfort of not knowing what was wrong.

That’s the revelation I took from Derek Thompson’s piece on over-medicalisation. Drawing on Irish neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan, he makes the case that we’ve quietly shifted from using diagnosis as a path toward recovery to using it as an identity—a resting place.

He’s careful to acknowledge the other side, the genuine good that diagnosis does. But the question he leaves you with is uncomfortable: when our ability to detect problems outpaces our ability to treat them, how much detection is too much? The price of that vigilance, he argues, might be trading one kind of suffering for another.

Of course, sometimes we genuinely do need help. And that’s where the next problem begins.

Read it here.

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II. Why going to the doctor sucks.

If you’ve done enough hospital rounds for a complicated illness, you know the drill. A 3 pm appointment that gets called at 5. A rushed two-minute consultation where you forget every question you meant to ask. A concern about medication that gets waved away before you finish the sentence.

What struck me, while going through it, was how little anyone complained. Because they didn’t expect any better from this service.

Which is why I love this piece by Wait But Why. It’s set in America, from a few years ago, and follows the writer’s wife’s experience navigating treatment for an autoimmune disease in a system that seems designed to test your patience more than treat your illness. It is, to put it plainly, top-tier complaining. With fun illustrations.

But the complaining isn’t just for laughs. It names, very precisely, all the gaps and frictions that make us avoid the doctor like a plague. The piece eventually moves into a startup idea born from that frustration—his wife and her business partner, also a patient navigating breast cancer treatment, decided to try fixing primary care themselves. That section gets into insurance details and business mechanics that may feel like a detour. (Stick with it, or skip ahead. Either way, the first half alone is worth your time.)

You’ll come away asking questions you’ve probably felt but never quite articulated. Why do we avoid going to the doctor? What makes the experience so gruelling? And does healthcare really need to test a patient’s patience this hard?

Read it here.

III. On Intensive Care. And everything we avoid thinking about.

Now we’re going to the deep end.

30% of people who undergo ICU treatment go on to suffer from PTSD. That’s higher than the 20% reported among war veterans returning from Afghanistan. If you’ve ever sat in the waiting room of one, that number might not surprise you. You know this place is mind-boggling.

This is a three-hour conversation on The Seen and the Unseen with Nitin Arora, an intensive care specialist practising in the UK. It’s long (but not as long as Grey’s Anatomy).

There is a lot here about the human machinery around medicine. How trained are doctors in actually communicating with patients and families? Who decides who moves up the organ donor list? When is it advisable to do less vs more?

And then the cultural layer: why is it so common for South Asian families to avoid forward-facing decisions about death? Why can’t we discuss something like a Do-Not-Resuscitate order without feeling like we’re inviting bad fate?

Nitin Arora moves between the systemic and the personal with real ease. He’ll walk you through the four pillars of medical ethics—autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice—and then tell you about the patient who decided to light a cigarette next to his oxygen cylinder and blew it up. The stories are sometimes tragic, sometimes absurd, and always told by someone who has clearly sat with both for a long time.

I’m recommending this because being anywhere near an ICU is one of the most intense experiences a person can go through, and most of us walk in knowing almost nothing about how it works or why. This conversation answers questions I didn’t even know I had.

Listen here (or any podcast app!)

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Hello, this is Samarth. Today’s piece is by my colleague Aashna Rane. In the first townhall after she joined us, she announced her goal to hit 10 pull-ups by the end of 2025. Now that was something. People remembered. People followed up. Over the year of working together, I kept hearing fragments—about her gym, about what she was figuring out, about how it was changing how she thought about work and the everyday bureaucracy of adult life.

So I asked her to write about it. I expected a fitness essay. But I didn’t know the backstory of the pull-up would give us a story about the idea of strength itself—and how its meaning can shift without you noticing until it already has. Make some coffee and read it.

Aashna is the co-founder of Culture Compass, an incubator for communities, and leads the community team at The Whole Truth Foods.

— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)

I’ve always hated the treadmill. Deeply, boringly, soul-sappingly hated it.

In my building gym, there’s a window in front of the treadmill that opens out to rangoon creepers that bloom in the summer and attract pigeons with their shade. I’d make up games between the pigeons, pretending they were battling each other and keep mental score of imaginary bouts to while away the time. Soon I’d run out of games, and run through the list of tasks waiting for me.

Why did I torture myself like this? Movement is important for staying healthy, so I moved. I optimised for the most familiar and accessible one.

Across the gym, my partner Aaron would be weight training. I watched him sometimes. Not because I was paying attention, but because watching someone move freely and joyfully across a space was more interesting than what I was doing.

He took up the whole gym, moving from one machine to the next, exerting his weight on the weights instead of the other way around. His workouts energised him, and he loved playing music while working out. He’d often break into a dance mid set, or come up to me mouth a few lyrics and go back to his weights.

He took up the whole space. I took up a treadmill. I dismissed it as the type of people we are: he’s fun and I’m determined.

I first thought about the definition of strength when I was fifteen.

My father passed away in the thick of my 10th grade. I watched my mother navigate legal battles, financial pressure, grief, and the weight of holding a family together. All while staying true to the dream she and my father had of giving us a good education, a good life.

She was the definition of strong. Things get hard. You push through. You achieve what you set out to achieve. The quality of the journey is secondary to the worthiness of the destination.

Later that year, I sat my 10th grade exams and scored straight A’s. My teachers announced to my class how strong I was to do so well while dealing with what had happened. I received it like a medal. I held it close, filed it away as something true about me.

Looking at the faces of my classmates who had been uncertain about approaching me, I hoped that this signalled to them that I was strong enough to be treated normally now. My results proved that despite my internal state, I could achieve remarkable things on the outside.

My mother pushed through every single thing that was stacked against her and she delivered. That was strength. That was the blueprint.

This idea of strength became a big part of my identity and latched itself to my ambition. You can achieve anything if you struggle just enough for it. You do what needs to be done.

The blueprint served me well for a long time. Until it didn’t.

Towards the end of 2023, when a job for a mission I truly believed in started to break me, I knew what the solution would be. Push through the tough parts. Balance it out with rest. Try therapy. Take a long Sunday. Eat good food. Recover.

I tried all of it: assembled a badminton crew, set alarms to ensure 8 hours of sleep, built a long list of things to do to compensate for the overextension at work.

Even Sundays were planned: leisurely lunch for two hours, nap for an hour, and still catching up to my task list.

I turned to badminton first. It was both fun and effective as a movement that helped clear my head. But the coordination it took made it a mental workout in itself. I’d played competitively for years, and the sport demanded active effort to keep it challenging. It gave me more social rewards than mental ones.

I still needed a regular form of movement in my life, so I joined a Pilates class that was walking distance from my house.

Once the novelty wore off, I found myself getting bored in Pilates too. I wasn’t breaking a sweat and had started assisting the instructor to demo the advanced movements. On my walks home, I wondered if I was in Pilates to feel good about myself or to get out of my head and into my body. The easier it felt, the more time I spent in my head. And I started skipping classes in favour of more sleep.

So if badminton was too hard and Pilates was too easy, what was the sweet spot? Does movement have to be so hard? Was I the problem: lacking discipline to stick to anything?

I questioned myself a lot those days. It didn’t make the emotional experience of navigating a tough job any easier. I was exhausted trying to build a life I was excited about and ultimately feeling nowhere closer to it.

So I planned nothing for the 10 days of Christmas 2023 break. No plans with friends, family, or even myself.

I gravitated towards spending more time with Aaron. Seeing the joy he experienced in the gym, I asked him to show me what he did. I usually never crossed past the cardio section—it’s teeming with men lifting weights that seem one slam away from breaking something. But the holidays meant fewer crowds, and gave us the gym all to ourselves.

I’d always believed strength training was meant for men who wanted to be bigger. My father did it, Aaron did it. I did thirty minutes on the treadmill because that was efficient, adequate and done.

With those assumptions but fewer constraints, I entered my ten day break. Those ten days were slow and exploratory and full of a feeling I had never once associated with a gym: wonder.

We started with a full body workout and every set introduced me to my body in a new way. During a bicep curl, I felt the bicep “travel” up the arm, the rotation of the shoulder when the weight tilted, the pump in my forearm when I used my wrist instead of my bicep.

I was excited to go back the next day. My legs always looked strong thanks to badminton, but I still discovered the tibialis. One set of tibialis raises and I was sweating.

I didn’t think of a single task that had to be done. I only focused on trying to engage my back muscles, humbled by how hard that simple instruction was to put in action.

My biceps really surprised me. By the end of ten days I’d gone from 5kg to 7.5kg and that fact—which sounds so small—landed like a revelation. Not because of the number. Because I used to be paranoid about a weight falling on me and crushing me. And now I was lifting it above my face. I was more capable than I thought. In something I never even considered was for me.

I wanted to know how every machine worked and what the correct form was for each. Many signals of good form are internal. I found it harder to follow tutorials than to just listen to whether it felt right.

There was a pull-up bar in that gym. I asked Aaron to help me do an assisted pull-up—my first time crossing that bar. After having always looked up at it, once my chin crossed the bar I felt like I’d scaled a summit. I looked down at the weights, at the dust collecting at the top of the machine.

I wondered what it would feel like to do this by myself.

I can’t fully explain what it felt like except to say that the desire to do a pull-up was quiet and mine. Not because it’s a movement everyone should be able to do or because it’s good for longevity. Not in service of anything. Just: I wanted to see if I could get there.

I’m still working toward my first unassisted pull-up. And I find it interesting that this doesn’t frustrate me the way unmet goals used to. The bar is still there. I know what the view looks like. I’ll get there when I get there.

Outside of the gym, I was full of joy too. I enjoyed my food, I got restful sleep, I wrote, I read, I caught up with my friends. Those 10 days were a glimpse of what life felt like when I optimised for feeling good instead of feeling like I was doing the right thing.

What I didn’t realise at the time—and what I only understand looking back—is that the gym was becoming a rehearsal space. Not for discipline but for something I didn’t have a name for yet. Setting a goal that existed purely because I wanted it. Building toward it slowly and imperfectly. Discovering I was capable of it. Again. And again. Until the feeling started to feel like mine to keep.

I went back to work after Christmas and put in my papers.

No plan. A wedding coming up in less than a year. A notice period that I knew would be chaotic and consuming. I quit anyway. Not dramatically, not in a moment of crisis, but with a clarity that felt new.

The job hadn’t gotten worse. I just had new information about how effort was allowed to feel. I knew now what it was like to work hard at something and feel yourself getting stronger rather than more hollowed out. The job failed that test. I couldn’t unknow that.

Choosing myself over the mission I’d dedicated almost 2 years of my life to felt oddly relieving. I kept waiting for the anxiety to hit. It didn’t.

I kept training through the notice period. Not regularly, but I’d steal pockets of time during the gym’s slowest hours to spend some time with myself. Each day was different. Closer to my period, I couldn’t do progressive sets, so I learned about drop sets. Some days, I needed more time and spent two hours in the gym. I met myself where I was.

This translated into my work too. I took on small projects. I let curiosity shape the year: what can I do, what can I build.

I ended up with projects for personal knowledge management, team culture design, community strategy, community experience design. I went curiosity first, instead of destination first. Instead of backcasting from my ambition, I was forecasting from my skill.

The freelancing grew. I built my own workout routine based on what felt good internally. I kept getting stronger, hitting PRs and trying new movements.

When my wedding came around next Christmas, I looked like a different person. I was leaner, had that slight hint of abs and glowed a lot more. I’d be lying if I said the physical change didn’t help me stay committed.

What I was really doing, through that year of figuring out what came next, was accumulating evidence. Evidence that I could choose something, show up for it on my own terms, and get somewhere I wanted to go—without killing myself. The gym gave me that in small, repeatable, low-stakes doses until I had enough to spend outside.

I spent it by taking on projects I wouldn’t have otherwise, meeting people, taking calls with no agenda. That’s how I met my co-founder.

We shared deep passion for the same problem. We balanced each other out well. It felt like a natural extension of the spirit of that year to consider starting a company. Just the spontaneity of it all made this bet feel like something the old blueprint would have called it reckless: wait until you’re more ready, more certain, more sure it’s worthy of the ambition.

I don’t think I would have taken this bet without those months of standing in a gym by myself. Of watching myself in the mirror, in my gear, lifting heavier and heavier weights. Of putting in the reps to make the impossible possible. Of choosing to want something for no reason other than the wanting.

My mother’s strength was real. It built my life. I will never stop being in awe of what she carried and how she carried it. I still aspire to be the kind of woman she is. But the lesson about strength I inherited left no room for caring about the journey towards my ambition. With all those “no pain, no gain” platitudes, I thought being strong enough to achieve your goals demanded suffering enough for it.

But strength is the ability to choose. To choose things that feel good without the whole weight of your identity resting on the outcome. And to trust yourself enough to make the choice real.

I go to the gym when life gets loud. Not on a schedule, not with hard requirements, not to punish myself or to earn something I want. I go because it’s the place where I most reliably remember what it feels like to be someone who sets a goal and gets there. I go to rehearse that feeling so I can take it with me.

The treadmill is still there. I walk past it now.

I’m working on my pull-up.

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Hello, this is Samarth Bansal. Today’s essay by Ruchita Chandrashekar feels personal. It’s her story, and as a clinician her patients’ stories, but it is also my story. And the story of so many millennials who love their parents and want to give them care, but find that the world has changed around that desire—our aspirations, the early onset of disease, a healthcare system that asks too much of families. What remains, as she puts it, is a project management no one prepped us for, and emotional labour we simply weren’t prepared for.

I felt deeply seen reading this piece. I have not come across anything that captures a generation’s caregiving experience with this much care and empathy. How often we forget what a large part of our lives this is or becomes. If you’re a millennial with ageing parents, this piece will give you language for something you’ve been carrying without a name.

Ruchita is a behavioural health researcher and independent psychologist focusing on trauma and post-violence recovery. You can find her at https://x.com/roocheetah on X.

As always, write to me with thoughts and feedback and questions.

— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)

In early 2025, while having coffee with a friend, I asked her what changes she had made to her parents’ day-to-day lives to improve their quality of life.

‘Remember the painting and renovation from last year? I told them that we had to get the house painted or my fiancé’s family would judge us for having a badly maintained house. The leakage was unbearable and they refused to get any work done, because the building is supposed to go into redevelopment.’

‘No way, and they bought that?!’

‘I mean, I had to persist for a few weeks, about all the ways they would judge us. It’s far from the truth, but when has reasoning worked? I had to rely on some manipulation.’

‘The house looks great. You managed it well.’

‘I couldn’t bear the idea of them living in a home with seepage as their permanent roommate, after I’d moved out. I have tried to get this house repainted for years and they’ve pushed back with their redevelopment claims. If this building goes into redevelopment only by 2030, they’ll continue to manage, as they love to claim, like this?!’

Manage.

A word I had heard so often with every elder. Manage, adjust, compromise—elders throw around these words like medals of self-righteousness. I could hear the palpable anxiety in my friend’s voice—and the exhaustion. The mental labour of convincing ageing parents to collaborate on something that would improve their living conditions. Something they do not need to manage.

I know this exhaustion intimately. When COVID hit in 2020, I felt like the head of a household responsible for two senior lives that were willing to play chess with death. Their moves were ‘what can even happen?!’ and ‘we have already lived our lives!’. I moved back in with my parents for that year, and my hypervigilance had surpassed any ceiling I’d known.

Are they opening the door with a mask?

Did they sanitise that package?

Was that a sneeze? Is this from dust or is this the onset of the worst?

Now, my parents are guided by science. They believed that a deadly virus we knew nothing about had a very high potential to cause harm. But I continued to feel like I was at war with my arch nemesis: WhatsApp.

If you are a child of the baby boomer generation, you know that the biggest obstacle to rationality, reasoning, and coherent conversation with your parents is often WhatsApp. As a mental health clinician, it genuinely terrifies me to see how vulnerable this generation is to manipulation. Zoned out into their phones, swiping from one video to the next, it sometimes feels like watching a live simulation of dissociation.

The human brain is highly susceptible to conditioning through repetition. With repeated exposure to the same message, even firmly held beliefs can begin to wobble. You may know the sky is blue, but if someone tells you every day for a hundred days that it is pink, you are likely to doubt yourself at least once.

When I place this reality alongside the sheer volume of misinformation and harmful opinions older adults are exposed to daily, the implications are deeply unsettling. One forwarded message at a time, they are being quietly conditioned.

‘My father has been drinking a concoction of ginger, turmeric and amla every morning to cure his diabetes,’ said another friend. His father couldn’t let go of the 4pm chivda and the ‘sugar-free’ laddoo doused in ghee and jaggery, but he was fully convinced of the magical powers of ginger and amla. Because it is ‘natural’.

My parents are seduced by the word ‘natural’. Any attempt to educate them on the risks of such remedies is met with heavy dismissal.

Why? Because the power dynamic of most Indian families is rooted in authoritarianism. Age equals experience, experience equals wisdom, and the combination determines one thing with absolute certainty: an elder is always right.

I understand where this instinct comes from. Indian parenting evolved in conditions of scarcity, instability and limited social mobility. My parents are older children who grew up in the 1960s, often with one or both parents working all the time to make ends meet. My mother internalised obedience as support to her mother, raising 4 kids at home while her husband was in a different city. She saw how difficult but my grandmother’s circumstances were, and knew she couldn’t be an inconvenience. Challenging, as a behaviour, was never an option; so for the baby boomer generation, obedience was a survival tool.

When I ask my mother why she never challenged her parents, she says, ‘I didn’t know I could,’ in the most neutral, matter-of-fact way. Children of that generation became the primary vehicle for upward social mobility; success depended on discipline, conformity and performance.

But with millennials, something changed. I have an unconventional career in mental health, I studied abroad, I didn’t give into marriage when parents thought the ‘time is right’, I live alone. The exposure afforded to me was unimaginable for my parents. My confidence grew, my sense of self strengthened, I challenged their norms and ideas all the time.

My exposure to global ideas and the internet gave me alternative frameworks for identity, success and well-being. Yet my parents were raised without emotional validation or autonomy, making authority a substitute for emotional competence.

I see this mismatch in my clinical work constantly. It creates a deep generational barrier, and a very heavy emotional burden.

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I’ve lived away from home for almost ten years. First, for higher education, then employment, and then because I wanted to. When access increased for millennials, so did distance. My biggest fear has always been a particular type of phone call. The one that tells you something has happened.

When I lived in Chicago, I became familiar with the anxiety of the middle-of-the-night call. It never came, but it could. I made sure I was always ready. The phone was on loud when I fell asleep. Even on DND, the settings ensured that my parents could always reach me.

There is something strange about a relationship with an imagined emergency—how we build multiple structures of access to feel a false sense of control, while internally scripting every worst-case scenario we must be ready to face. I still sleep with the phone on loud, only for two people.

I remember a conversation with another long-distance daughter who always had access to her mother’s location. ‘If I can see where she is, I am at peace. I don’t want to keep asking her where she is after 8pm, and then spiral as I wait for a response.’

We laughed at how bizarre that was, while also finding comfort in the shared absurdity of it. This is the reality of parenting your parents.

I was 29 when I first started tracking my parents’ yearly bloodwork, protein intake and routine of supplements. COVID was still thriving and I was determined to prepare my parents’ bodies to fight the virus with all their might. I felt promoted to a managerial role without any training or suggestion that I qualified for this so early. Tests were done more frequently, protein powders and Vitamin D supplements were part of every day diet, ‘sitting is the new smoking’ was frequented as a mantra in our living room.

What makes my generation’s experience distinct is not just the emotional weight, but the structural conditions it sits within. India’s life expectancy has more than doubled since Independence—from around 32 years to nearly 70—but this longevity has come with a rising burden of chronic disease. Conditions like diabetes and hypertension tend to emerge a full decade earlier than in most Western countries, often becoming widespread by the 40s and 50s. This shifts the timeline of care: parents may begin needing support in their 50s and early 60s, precisely when their children are still stabilising careers, finances and relationships.

At the same time, family structures have changed. Since 1971, the average Indian household has gone from 5.3 people to 4.4—more than one person fewer per home. The households with six or more members— the ones large enough to absorb the work of caring for an elder—fell sharply between 2001 and 2011, while smaller nuclear households grew.

So the physical architecture of distributed care has changed. The aunt who managed the medications, the cousin who drove to appointments, the grandmother who noticed when something was off—all of that is largely gone. What remains is the emotional expectation that care will still happen, just without the infrastructure that once made it possible. With fewer siblings, that expectation lands on one or two people. In my family, it is concentrated in me.

As a clinician, I see this clearly: the Indian healthcare system is not structured around the patient alone. It is structured around the assumption that a family will manage everything else. It assumes someone will be present at every appointment, because the doctor will not call you back. It assumes someone will collect the reports, because no one will courier them or upload them to a shared system. It assumes someone has memorised the medication schedule, because the prescription is written in shorthand only the pharmacist half-understands. It assumes someone will notice the mood change, the weight loss, the new confusion, and know whether it is worth a visit or just age doing what age does.

That someone is usually us.

Take a 68 year old with a cardiologist at one hospital, a nephrologist at another, and a general physician somewhere in between. None of them speak to each other. His daughter, calling from Pune, is the only person who knows he is on three medications that interact badly. She found out by googling at midnight, then spent forty minutes on hold trying to reach the cardiologist’s clinic the next morning.

Or a 72 year old whose GP noted “mild forgetfulness” in her file two years ago and moved on. No one explained to her son what to watch for or when to worry. He assumed it was normal ageing. By the time he noticed the pattern—the same story told three times in an hour, the missed bill payment, the stove left on—she had been quietly declining in ways that had a name, and a trajectory, and an intervention that had a better chance two years earlier.

This is the project management no one signs up for. Maintaining a shared folder of reports across four hospitals. Reconciling conflicting advice from three specialists who have never been in the same room. Knowing which pharmacy stocks the obscure cardiac medication and calling ahead on Thursdays because Friday they run out. Coordinating leave from work for the appointment which the specialist only offers on Tuesday mornings.

There is minimal geriatric and mental health integration in our healthcare system. No psychoeducation on age-related anxiety or cognitive decline, because clinics are overflowing and care is centred around symptoms that can be treated as physical illness. So no one tells you the things that would have helped.

Like irritability in an ageing parent is not always personality. It is often chronic pain they do not have language for, or the specific anxiety that comes from feeling the body become unreliable—and not wanting to say so. Or when an older adult becomes quieter, less interested, slower to laugh, that is not always just getting old. It is frequently undiagnosed depression, which can be both treatable and commonly missed.

Do you know which one is your parent? Most of us don’t. Not because we aren’t paying attention, but because nobody told us what to look for.

The logistics are only half of it.

There is another layer that sits underneath the spreadsheets and the pharmacy runs, one that is harder to name and easier to dismiss. It is the emotional labour of managing not just your parent’s health, but their fear. Their denial. Their bargaining.

The father who refuses to believe the diagnosis because accepting it would mean accepting that his body has changed and he is no longer the person who does not need help. The mother who cries at 10pm and does not know why, and neither do you, but you stay on the call anyway because hanging up feels like abandonment. The parent who snaps at you for the very care you are providing, and the particular exhaustion of absorbing that without flinching, because you understand, intellectually, that it is not really about you.

This is invisible work. It does not appear on any discharge summary. No specialist accounts for it in a fifteen minute consultation. And yet it is happening in living rooms and on phone calls and in the middle of the night, quietly, without a name.

I have sat across from exhausted adult children in my practice and watched them realise, sometimes for the first time, that what they are feeling has a name. Caregiver grief. Anticipatory loss. Chronic sorrow. The strange guilt of wishing, just briefly, that you did not have to carry this—and then hating yourself for the wish.

These are real, recognised experiences. They are not weaknesses. They are what happens when love is load-bearing and no one has offered to help hold it up.

Who carries this? We do. Without acknowledgement, without support, and often without even a language for what we are going through. The clinician in me can explain why. The daughter in me is still overwhelmed.

The way to break this isolation is to start talking to each other. The 11pm voice note to a friend who just gets it. The group chat that started as a joke about our parents’ WhatsApp forwards and became the place where someone finally admitted they cried in the car after dropping their mother at the hospital. The coffee where you say, out loud, that you are furious at your father for not taking his medication, and the person across from you does not flinch, because they said the same thing last week. Shame cannot thrive in company. Guilt needs companionship. Burnout worsens in silence.

Conversation disarms dismissal and creates language for an experience riddled with overwhelm. More importantly, talking to each other is how we learn—the strategies, the negotiations, the logistics, the small preventative measures that make a difference. We need a community to survive this new shift in the Indian family system.

And amid all the pressure, the stress and the spreadsheets of care, I hope we find ways to laugh at the chaos of it all.

My parents have a name for me. Warden. They have inside jokes about me, like giggling teenagers confronted with the same authority figure—except this one monitors their protein intake and step count and scolds them for watching too many reels.

I have seen fear in their eyes when I’ve caught them eating biscuits with their coffee at 7am. I have heard their negotiating pleas to count sambar as a protein source. Sometimes they send pictures of their sprout salad to get on my good side. Sometimes they claim protein powder causes kidney damage to get on my last nerve.

This, too, is managing. Not the resigned, medal-wearing kind my friend and I spoke about over coffee. The other kind—the kind that shows up, that negotiates, that manipulates where it must and loves through all of it.

For the rest of my years as the invisible head of this family, I shall wear the title of Warden with pride. Maybe get it printed on a T-shirt for the next family holiday, while running a quiet tally on their chips intake.

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Dear readers,

This is Samarth Bansal, your Editor. No article today. Because today I want to have a conversation. And make some asks. And announce one new thing we’re experimenting with.

I’m doing this because we’ve had thousands of new subscribers after our two-part investigation on eggs, and around 50 new folks have filled our feedback form. Which, first, is so heartwarming and reassuring—to see, again, what this publication means to our readers. And second, it’s also a renewed push to do even better. So thank you!

Three things:

1. Our editorial mix is what makes us, us. And we want you to explore it.

I loved seeing all the reader feedback asking for more investigations. As an investigative journalist—yes, that was my full-time thing before I joined TWT to work in the food industry — I know there is so much to be rigorously explored about the food we eat and the safety systems around it. And we’re at it.

But our editorial philosophy has always worked on a mix, from science explainers to history to how-to guides to deeply personal essays. What does working out do on a cellular level? Are your sugar cravings a you problem or an industry problem? How to be a more empowered consumer?

Do read through our archives. All of it is evergreen.

2. We’re launching a curated edition. Starting April.

I moved our cadence from weekly to fortnightly last year. This was primarily due to my bandwidth constraints—and that will continue to be the cadence for our original reporting and writing. But starting April, we’re experimenting with a new format: a curated edition in the week we were skipping.

The purpose is simple. We’re living amid AI-slop, and there is just no dearth of content anymore. And the more there is, the harder it is to find signal amid all the noise.

Allow us to help. We will sift through the internet, books, podcasts, and archives, and apply our editorial filter and judgement to bring you a curated edition that genuinely adds to your understanding and delight.

This new product will be anchored by Jaanvi Advani—TBT’s commissioning editor, growth strategist, and producer, all packed into one. So now you’ll be hearing from both her and me, every fortnight. I’m so excited about bringing this to you.

3. We want to hear your stories. For real.

We’re trying something new: using our reader community as a source for richer reporting. Here are three themes we’re actively exploring, and we need your help.

One, GLP-1 drugs: what’s actually happening?

I’ve already written about GLP-1s. But the conversation has moved fast, and we want to go deeper. With real stories.

Are you on Ozempic or Mounjaro? Is anyone from your family on either? What changed: in your body, your relationship with food, your social life? Did it work the way you expected? Did anything surprise you or worry you? We want to hear the unfiltered version.

Second, fitness and identity: is being healthy making you a worse person?

You’ve cleaned up your diet, you work out regularly, you feel great. But has it quietly made you judgemental—of friends who don’t, of what people order at restaurants, of how strangers look? Has it changed who you want to date, who you respect, how you see yourself?

We want to explore the uncomfortable edges of the “fitness lifestyle.”

Third, staying healthy through chaos: how do people actually do it?

You moved cities. Or countries. Your routine fell apart: the gym was too far, the food was different, the stress was new. And then, somehow, you rebuilt it.

How? What broke first? What did you let go of? What was the one thing that pulled you back? We’re looking for notes, anecdotes, and hard-won advice from people who have been through transitions and come out the other side still taking care of themselves.

For each of these, if you have something to share, please send a short note to Jaanvi at jaanvi@thewholetruthfoods.com. Even two short paragraphs are enough to start. We’ll set up a call and use what you share for our reporting. (Full anonymity, if you want it.)

This is entirely experimental. Let’s see how it goes. But I want to find out how we can bring our readers into the storytelling process.

That’s it for today. Thank you for your attention. See you in your inbox next week!

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Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Hi there, this is Samarth Bansal, and I am co-writing today’s piece with my colleague Anushka Mukherjee. This is part two of our investigation on India’s egg supply chain.

In part one (read here), we wrote about the systemic problem of antibiotic residue in eggs. This piece focuses on something more practical: helping you make a better buying decision.

I’m writing this both as a consumer and as someone who now gets an inside view of the food industry through my work at The Whole Truth. And one thing becomes clear very quickly: much of this industry runs on opacity. Eggs move from farms to traders to transporters to warehouses to retailers, and at every step the consumer knows almost nothing.

That gap—the massive information asymmetry between brands and consumers—is where a lot of the industry’s marketing power comes from. What you don’t know becomes an opportunity to craft emotionally appealing campaigns and logical-sounding claims for features that often have very little real value. And the system runs on the assumption that consumer is busy, won’t ask too many questions and will simply use price as a shortcut to ease the anxiety.

It genuinely makes me angry.

Through our publication, in whatever small way we can, we want to break this. We want to reduce the information gap and return agency back to consumers. That’s what we’ve tried to do in this piece on eggs. I hope it helps.

As always, I welcome feedback and comments. You can reach me at samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com.

You walk into a store or open a delivery app to buy eggs. Start scanning through the options and suddenly egg-buying becomes a needless decision-making problem none of us asked for.

Should you buy brown eggs or white eggs? Are darker orange yolks healthier? Do omega-3 eggs really matter? Are loose eggs unsafe? Is a Rs 12 egg actually worse than a Rs 22 one? And oh, what about the DHA-enriched, selenium-rich, UV-sanitised, herbal-feed only or Kadaknath eggs?

Whatever you choose, the shelf—and the internet—will somehow make you feel like you might be making the wrong choice.

Because the industry wants you to believe all these eggs are different. That each variety contains something special which is worth paying extra for.

But here’s the thing: most eggs are nutritionally almost identical.

Eggs are, at their core, a commodity. They are not like specialty coffee or wine. There are no egg connoisseurs discovering rare notes and flavours from newly discovered plantations of the North East. The real magic of eggs happens in the kitchen—in the dozens of ways you can cook them and feel delighted each time. Not at the point of buying.

Yet the food industry has managed to turn a simple food into a source of needless anxiety. So let’s change that.

After speaking with egg industry insiders and reading research on eggs, we built a simple framework for buying them. It comes down to three questions:

Is the egg nutritionally really different?

Is the egg safer?

Do you know how fresh it is?

Let’s walk through each of these.

I. Don’t pay extra for nutrition. It’s mostly marketing.

Let’s start with what you’re already getting.

The humble loose white egg costs around Rs 5-7. And this egg is nutritious: it has 6-7g of complete protein (yes, with all nine essential amino acids), Vitamin B12 and Vitamin D, and a bunch of other micronutrients.

You also get eggs for Rs 15-25. Do they—brown-shell, orange-yolk, omega-3-rich—have something “extra” that will make you healthier? Let’s check.

First, shell colour.

Are brown eggs healthier than white eggs? You know… desi anda?

Well, no. NOOO.

Yes, one of us is screaming because we believed in this for years. Only to learn that colour is purely genetic. It has nothing to do with nutrition.

Look at this.

Yes, some breeds even lay blue or pink eggs. Because shell colour is simply a pigment that the hen’s body deposits on the shell during formation.

A white egg comes from a White Leghorn. A brown egg comes from a Rhode Island Red. That’s it. No nutritional difference, no safety difference, no quality difference.

But just because brown-anything carries the “healthy” perception, it sells. Brown eggs command a premium. Purely on… vibes.

So let us repeat: Don’t pay extra for brown eggs. They are not healthier. Period.

Second, yolk colour.

The internal colour of the yolk is now a marketing battleground. Welcome to the Orange Yolk Supremacy™.

Does it matter?

This is not an open-and-shut case like shell colour. And yet, a bit scammier.

So what determines yolk colour?

What the hen eats. Simple.

The orange colour comes from food rich in carotenoids. It’s the same compounds that give carrots their colour. Think marigold (gende ka phool) or maize. When a hen eats these, the pigment gets deposited in the yolk, and the yolk turns orange.

Now does that change nutrition? Kind of.

Because carotenoids are genuine antioxidants. So a naturally deeper orange yolk does contain more of these compounds. It is not meaningless.

But this is also the point: all the colour tells you is “this has more carotenoids.” Nothing else about overall nutrition. Nothing about whether the egg comes from an overcrowded battery cage or an actual free-range farm. The protein, the vitamins, the minerals… all the same whether the yolk is pale yellow or deep orange.

The problem is that the Orange Yolk Supremacy™ has the Brown Bread problem. It can be gamed.

Because while the orange colour can come from carotenoid-rich natural feed, it can also come from marigold extract dumped into low-quality feed (which still delivers some carotenoids) or from synthetic pigments like canthaxanthin that just colour the yolk with little to no nutritional value.

Either way, the yolk looks similarly orange-coloured on your plate.

It’s actually worse than the brown bread problem. Because the secret of the brown bread deception is visible on the back of the pack: you can see E150A (brown colouring agent) as an additive in the label, which is the caramel colour added to make maida bread look like whole wheat bread. No such declaration of what the hen actually ate is needed for eggs.

This is why we wouldn’t pay extra for orange yolks. Because you simply can’t differentiate between “good hen diet that happens to produce orange” and “bad hen diet with colour added.”

And while natural carotenoids have some value, the overall nutritional difference either way is small enough that it’s not worth basing a purchasing decision on.

Third, the “value added” segment.

Look at this brand.

It has “Heart Eggs” designed for those who want “benefits of Omega-3 and Vitamin E for longevity and a healthy heart” and then “Active Eggs” designed for “those who have an active lifestyle and require additional nutrition.”

How fun. (We can now decide which body part or life function we want to optimise when making breakfast?)

Look, this is not just an egg industry problem. This is a wellness industry problem. Which is that you can fortify almost anything and make claims. But who is checking whether those claims actually matter?

So how does fortification work? Again, hen feed.

Say you want your egg rich in Omega-3. So you add flaxseeds to the hen’s diet, and the egg will be richer in Omega-3. This is real. What the hen eats genuinely changes the egg’s composition. Fortification is technically well-established and widely used internationally.

What’s not clear is whether a given brand actually did it, in what quantity, and whether the quantity even matters.

And even if they did: which kind of Omega-3? ALA from flaxseed is very different from DHA and EPA from fish oil or algae. A brand that doesn’t even tell you which kind is probably making a hollow claim.

Which again brings us to a simple point: standard eggs are already nutritious. Fortification is only a bonus. And if that bonus is claimed, it should come with evidence: specific nutrient amounts per egg, which form of the nutrient, and ideally a published lab report as evidence.

If you put all three things together, you will see what is happening here: extra nutrition is simply the wrong axis to pay a premium on. It’s either meaningless or unverifiable or just practically worthless.

The axis where brands can make a meaningful difference is in ensuring safety. Let’s talk about this next.

II. Pay for safety. Look at process.

There are two big concerns around egg safety.

First, antibiotic residue.

We covered this in Part One.

A short reminder. The problem is that while antibiotics are legitimately used to treat sick hens, their treatment requires strict withdrawal protocols, meaning any treated hen’s eggs should not be sold for at least 7-14 days, depending on the antibiotic, sometimes longer.

But there is no strong enforcement of this protocol. The system is opaque. And there is no traceability in the system, unlike in Europe, where every egg is stamped with a producer code.

What makes this especially concerning is the dominance of battery-cage farms in India, which by design increases disease spread and antibiotic use.

This is a systemic problem. And we must demand stronger enforcement from the government and more transparent disclosure from brands.

Anyone claiming “antibiotic-free” eggs should be able to answer: which farms do they work with? What are their withdrawal protocols? How do they verify compliance? At what frequency is lab testing done? Are reports public?

This is also one reason we’d pay a premium for free-range eggs. Not for extra nutrition, but because the conditions that drive antibiotic overuse in battery cages—overcrowding, rapid disease spread, whole-flock treatment—are structurally reduced.

Yes, this is an imperfect signal. Free-range doesn’t guarantee lower antibiotic use, but it correlates with it. And in a system with almost no signals, imperfect still beats blind.

But if a brand says “free-range,” ask for proof. See if they have photos and videos from farms. See if they have a credible certification. ‘Certified Humane’ is one—but their coverage in India appears small. Some brands even allow visits. The onus should be on them to show credentials, rather than asking us to just trust it.

Second, bacterial contamination.

This is about the egg on your plate being loaded with bacteria, especially Salmonella. Studies have detected Salmonella contamination in eggs and poultry environments in India, with some local studies reporting rates above 7%.

Reducing this risk is where brands can add legit value. Because this is primarily about the supply chain: how eggs are handled once the egg is laid. And this is also the most underrated part of conversations around eggs.

So first, let’s understand what makes an egg spoil.

See, an egg is a perishable food item. It’s not inert like a rock. It spoils. Its quality is simply a race against time. As an egg ages, its internal defences weaken, making it more vulnerable to bacteria that get through the shell.

The first safety factor is time. From the moment the egg is laid, the clock starts. The fresher the egg, the better. The longer it sits, the more vulnerable it gets.

The second safety factor is temperature. Heat makes an egg spoil faster, just like milk left on a kitchen shelf in a 40-degree Delhi summer. When it’s hot, bacteria multiply faster. In a fridge, they barely multiply, and the egg stays good for much longer.

Now factor these two things into the Indian context. An egg travelling from Namakkal in Tamil Nadu—India’s egg capital, producing roughly 60 million eggs a day—to a kirana store in Kolkata. In an un-refrigerated truck. Through Indian summer heat. That journey can easily take 10–12 days.

That same egg, consumed within 3 days and kept refrigerated, is a completely different product.

India doesn’t have a large-scale cold-chain infrastructure for eggs. And for all the loose eggs we buy, we simply have no idea how old the egg is or what temperature it’s been through. Most unbranded eggs sit in open-air godowns or on hot retail shelves. And unlike vegetables, an old egg and a fresh egg look exactly the same.

So the single biggest advantage of buying a branded egg over a loose egg is simply… a date stamped on the box. That’s it. It’s the one thing that is verifiable and that lets you estimate how much degradation has already happened. It’s the minimum information you need to assess risk, and the entire loose-egg system denies you this.

FSSAI’s own guidance says eggs maintain freshness for 10-12 days after laying at room temperature. Refrigerated, they stay good for 4 to 5 weeks.

So yeah, after all the noise—all the premium labels, all the manufactured complexity—the one verifiable, unglamorous, unsexy thing that actually matters for your safety and actually in your control is knowing when the egg was laid.

How boring. But it’s also the thing that actually matters the most. Buy fresh eggs.

So what are you actually paying for with branded eggs?

Not better nutrition.

What you are paying for is process: systems that clean and sanitise eggs, run lab tests, and maintain traceability through the supply chain. In a food system where information is scarce, enforcement is weak and supply chains are long, a careful transparent process that tells us how an egg moves from farm to our home is actually valuable.

A brand that does this well—and is transparent enough to prove it—is worth buying.

And yes, once the eggs are home, a few simple habits help.

Refrigerate them (for the reasons discussed above). Avoid cracked eggs. Don’t wash eggs under running water (read more here). And trust your nose: fresh eggs have almost no smell. In a food system full of myths and missing information, this is one signal entirely in your control.

In 2018, FSSAI published a detailed guidance document on egg safety and quality. The key takeaways from the report are below.

That’s it. Let an egg be an egg.

PS: No, we’re not reopening the cholesterol debate here. We’ll cover that separately.

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Hi there, this is Samarth Bansal, and I am co-writing today’s piece with my colleague Anushka Mukherjee, who led the reporting and interviews for this investigation.

Over the last two months, we’ve tried to decode the egg supply chain of India—which is very opaque—and understand its implication for nutrition and safety.

This is a two-part series. In the first part today, we cover: Why antibiotics are normal in poultry and when they become a problem. How 80% of India’s eggs come from farms that brands don’t directly control. What Europe does with egg traceability that India doesn’t. Why two people can test the same brand and get opposite results.

As always, I await feedback and comments. You can reach me at samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com.

When the Trustified video in December 2025 told us that Eggoz—one of the most visible branded egg companies—had failed blind testing and contained traces of AOZ, a marker for the banned nitrofuran antibiotics, our fitness-focused WhatsApp groups buzzed with panic for days and weeks after.

It was genuinely disorienting. Because eggs are amazing: cheap, accessible, and nutritious. Six grams of protein per egg, plus vitamins and minerals, all in something that costs Rs 5. And now this test is telling us that in the name of nutrition we might also be feeding ourselves something that regulators have banned for links to cancer? Outrageous.

Okay, wait. It gets complicated. Because the thing that didn’t make buzz enough were the two other videos Trustified had put out, which tested other brands and loose unbranded eggs. 9 more samples.

And what did it find? Just Eggoz was off. The other 9 didn’t have the banned antibiotic. So if someone blindly follows the blind-testing results of Trustified, the message was: have eggs, just don’t have Eggoz.

Okay, wait. Again. A few weeks after the Trustified video, Dr. Manan Vora—who has over half a million Instagram followers—posted a video saying he’d paid Rs 1.2 lakh out of pocket to get four egg brands tested, including Eggoz.

And… he found Eggoz eggs totally safe.

Now what should we do with this information? Two guys. Both with large followings on social media. One is saying Eggoz is not safe. The other is saying Eggoz is safe. Both have data to back it. And then Eggoz also comes back and posts lab-test reports of its website saying everything is safe.

Heck. What do we just-want-to-eat-well people do?

We saw this conversation develop with equal parts panic (we love eggs) and curiosity (surely there’s more going on here than is visible). So as journalists, we did the boring thing: we made phone calls. We spoke to eight people, including egg brand founders (Tarun Gupta of Henfruit, Abhishek Negi of Eggoz, Ashok Kannan of Happy Hens, Swati Deshmukh of H3 Eggs), animal welfare activists, a vet, and other industry insiders to understand the egg supply chain in the country.

What we found from our interviews and research won’t fit neatly into “safe” or “unsafe” verdict about this case. But it will help you understand what you’re actually buying inside a system that was never built for transparency.

I.

To make sense of these contradictions, we need to understand how eggs actually get produced in India. Let’s start with what’s normal.

Hens get sick. Just like us.

Abhishek Negi, co-founder of Eggoz, described to us what poultry farms actually look like:

“Poultry farms in general being in the livestock sector are susceptible to open environment. Majority of Indian Poultry farms are open structure. There are possibilities of flies and infections. Disciplined biosecurity becomes crucial to minimize disease risks.”

And birds, like humans, contract bacterial infections. When a farmer notices symptoms in his flock, say one line of birds looking lethargic, the vet says: run antibiotics on this. Otherwise, the flock dies. So antibiotics get administered.

This is normal. An antibiotic is simply medicine for a sick bird. This happens everywhere, not just in India.

That said, not all antibiotics are permitted. FSSAI has long banned certain strong antibiotics in poultry. The contaminant found in the Trustified test, AOZ, is a metabolite of nitrofuran—one of these banned antibiotics. Which is why it caused panic.

Even with approved antibiotics though, we don’t want residues passing into the eggs we eat. For which, there’s a system designed. It’s called a “withdrawal period”.

The idea is simple: the farmer is supposed to stop collecting eggs from treated birds for a few days after administering the antibiotic. That’s the time needed for the hen’s body to clear the medication. To ensure none of that passes in the eggs we consume.

The withdrawal period varies by antibiotic and vet protocol, but as a benchmark, it’s usually around 7 to 10 days.

All eggs laid in this period are supposed to be discarded and destroyed (to ensure no selling). But once the withdrawal period is over and residues are gone, the eggs can be collected and sold again.

This is how it’s supposed to work. The problem is when withdrawal periods don’t get followed. And this—one industry insider who didn’t want to be named told us—non-compliance of the withdrawal period is one of the biggest problems in the Indian egg industry.

Think about the incentives: 7-10 days mean lost income for the poultry farmer. The hen is eating feed, taking up space, but not producing sellable eggs. That’s a real cost.

So the question becomes: who’s making sure withdrawal periods actually get followed?

II.

This becomes hard to answer because of two structural realities in how egg production happens in India.

First, contract farming dominates the industry.

About 80% of India’s eggs today come from contract farms. Which means the company selling eggs doesn’t own everyday production.

The model works like this: the company provides day-old chicks and feed to farmers. Farmers own the land and do the daily work of raising birds. The company buys back the eggs at agreed prices.

For farmers, this means guaranteed buyers and stable income. For companies, it means they can scale production without owning farms. The model took off in the late 80s and 90s, and now dominates the industry.

Most branded eggs, including Eggoz and Henfruit, come from these contract farms.

But this system also created a vulnerability: the company can specify protocols—use these antibiotics, follow these withdrawal periods, maintain these hygiene standards. But they can’t be at every farm every day to enforce them. The farmer is the one making decisions in real time.

Think of a situation where a disease breaks out in a flock. But the approved antibiotic isn’t available. Or maybe it isn’t working fast enough. And now the farmer has to decide what to do. What will they do? Will the withdrawal period be strictly followed?

Much of this system depends on the integrity and judgement of the farmer making the call and their economic incentives. And hence, the powerful “antibiotic-free” claims that brands make mask the uncertainty of a system which largely relies on last-mile trust.

Second, battery cage density increases disease pressure.

About 80% of India’s laying hens are raised in battery cages. These are metal, wired cages stacked in rows, where each hen gets roughly the space of an A4 sheet of paper. Hundreds of such cages are lined together in long rows and stacked in tiers. Each farm—often called “factory farms”—with such cages has anywhere from thousands to lakhs of hens.

You see the high density here? This creates conditions where disease can spread quickly. So if one hen gets sick, the infection can move through the entire line of the cage.

And because birds are packed so closely together, you can’t isolate and treat just one hen. When disease shows up, often, the whole flock gets antibiotics.

Compare that to free-range systems. Look at this.

So much space to roam around. This lower density means diseases don’t spread as easily.

The key difference is that in battery cage systems, the usage of antibiotics is more because they are often administered preventively—even before symptoms even appear in all birds.

In free-range, according to industry insiders, the antibiotics are used less frequently and mainly for treating actual illness rather than prevention. That’s the general understanding.

But free-range systems make up a tiny fraction of India’s egg production. Battery cages dominate because more birds per square foot means more economic efficiency, and lower prices. Roughly, you will find a battery cage produced egg for Rs 5 and free-range egg for Rs 15-20 or more.

Take these two factors together and we have an egg supply chain which structurally creates a situation where farmers are making antibiotic decisions without clear oversight, in conditions that might require frequent antibiotic use because of the disease pressure caused by density.

And then there’s the third problem: no traceability.

III.

In India, when you buy eggs—branded or loose—there is generally no way to know its origin. You cannot know how it was raised. You cannot know in which farm it was laid, or when.

In Europe, that’s different.

Every egg sold in the European Union has a code stamped directly on the shell itself. Not just on the carton, the egg itself. It’s a combination of numbers and letters that identifies the country and the specific farm of origin.

The first digit tells you how the hen was raised. (0 means organic. 1 means free-range. 2 means barn-raised. 3 means caged.) Then comes a two-letter country code: FR for France, DE for Germany, IT for Italy. And then a farm identification number that traces the egg back to a specific registered farm.

So if you’re holding an egg marked 3-DE-045678, you already know: it came from a caged system, in Germany, from farm number 045678.

And in case of contamination—say, a residue issue or a salmonella outbreak—authorities can trace eggs back to the exact farm.

In 2017, tests in the Netherlands and Belgium found eggs contaminated with fipronil. That’s an insecticide which is not authorised for use in food-producing animals.

So authorities used the egg codes on the shells to find exactly which batches were implicated. They made that list public. If your egg had one of the listed codes, you were told not to consume it.

Farms linked to those codes were identified. Investigations traced the chemical use back to a specific pest-control company supplying those poultry houses.

You see what happened here? It is not that the European system prevents fraud. Tens of millions of eggs were affected across 26 EU countries. But the key point is that the shell-stamping system enabled regulators to pinpoint the exact source and act surgically.

This is what traceability means in practice: the ability to trace a food risk back to a specific source and respond accordingly. India is far, far from it.

So what are our brands actually doing within this system?

Abhishek from Eggoz walked us through what they do to monitor farms. In an interview, he told us:

“In the last few years, we have deployed dedicated quality executives at each farm to monitor SOPs and compliance. On a frequent basis, a field team of junior vets visit each farm to check for problems. On a regular basis, we do basic audits: checking hygiene, infrastructure, disease signs, productivity rates.

If bird productivity drops or mortality increases, even if the farmer hasn’t flagged it, we can catch it pre-emptively and investigate. Our senior vets stay in regular touch and visit each farm for deeper check-ups.”

That’s their system.

Eggoz also has batch-level traceability. If you enter the batch number printed on their carton into their website, it tells you which farm the eggs came from.

We checked the Trustified report. It was batch ‘GM21199’. We entered it on the Eggoz site and found the tested eggs were from GM Poultries in Mohali.

And clearly, something is better than nothing. But it has limitations. The batch number does not reveal the exact date of manufacturing on the site. You still have to rely on what’s printed on the carton itself.

And when we looked for historical test reports from that specific Mohali farm (there is a ‘View Reports’ button), we could only find one report of one specific batch. So we don’t know anything about the long-term track record of that farm.

And more importantly, knowing “which farm” doesn’t tell us what happened next after the Trustified report was out. We don’t know what Eggoz did internally. We don’t know whether FSSAI conducted follow-up testing. We don’t know whether that farm was re-audited, suspended, or cleared. Or if anything happened at all.

Now, zoom out.

Eggoz works with around 25 farms. Trustified bought eggs from one shop. Manan Vora tested a different batch, from somewhere else. These are likely different farms.

Maybe one farm didn’t follow the withdrawal period. Maybe it was just that specific batch. Or maybe it’s a broader issue across multiple farms. Or maybe the contamination didn’t originate at the farm level at all. It could have entered through feed suppliers before the eggs were even laid, or even from the borewell water that the hens drink.

If all we have are conflicting test reports, we cannot know. The brand cannot prove their protocol works everywhere. The tester cannot prove it failed everywhere.

This is what a low-trust system with structural vulnerabilities looks like.

IV.

After the latest controversy, FSSAI stepped in to cool the panic: they said the viral “cancer eggs” claims were misleading, and that trace findings in a lab report aren’t the same as demonstrated health risk. They also asked their teams to collect and test egg samples more widely.

But to understand why they said that, it helps to understand one technical detail that got lost in the noisy discourse.

FSSAI has banned the use of nitrofuran in poultry. Full stop. But they’ve also set what’s called an Extraneous Maximum Residue Limit—EMRL—of 1.0 microgram per kg for its metabolites.

This doesn’t mean trace amounts are acceptable. It means below this level, regulators don’t initiate enforcement action. This threshold exists because trace amounts can show up through inadvertent contamination, not necessarily through direct use of banned antibiotics.

The Trustified report found AOZ at 0.73 microgram per kg in Eggoz eggs, which is below that enforcement threshold.

So…

FSSAI’s position: it’s below the threshold, so it’s not a regulatory violation.

Trustified’s position: it’s a banned substance, so why is it showing up at all?

Eggoz’s position: we don’t use these antibiotics at all, and one test from one batch doesn’t indict our entire supply chain.

All three positions are technically defensible. Which is exactly why this controversy generated more heat than clarity.

So how to think about this about the eggs we buy in India?

Look, if eggs in India were causing widespread acute illness, we’d expect clearer outbreak signals. We’d probably already know. So acute harm is probably not what we should be most worried about.

But long-term, low-level exposure is harder to detect. Which is why surveillance and traceability matter. Which India lacks.

So here’s the honest reality: you can’t buy eggs in India with full certainty. The system relies on trust across too many players, with too little verification and too little enforcement.

But that doesn’t mean we’re totally helpless. There are ways to buy eggs that reduce uncertainty—some of which have nothing to do with which brand you choose or how much you pay. Some brands are doing some things genuinely well. But there’s also a lot of bullshit passed off as premiumness.

In part two of our eggs investigation, we’ll tell you exactly what to look for when buying eggs—for both nutrition and safety. What actually matters versus what’s just marketing. (Coming soon.)

Update on Feb 28, 2026: After the publication of this article, Tarun Gupta from Henfruit reached out to share additional details about their safety protocols. We have not independently verified these claims, but are sharing them as stated:

At Henfruit, we follow a three-level safety protocol. Every contract farm has a dedicated vet on our payroll who visits every 10 days and also on-demand during outbreaks. If antibiotics are prescribed, we immediately stop collecting eggs from that farm for the full treatment period, as well during the 7-day withdrawal period and a 3-day safety buffer—and we compensate farmers for this duration, so there’s no incentive to sell the eggs.

Every incoming batch is tested in our in-house lab daily for all 11 antibiotic families and banned substances. Being completely tech-enabled helps. Our unloading bay is app-controlled—the door won’t open until QC signs off. We additionally send samples to an NABL-accredited third-party lab every day for banned drugs, and monthly for all antibiotics, to independently validate our results. Daily test reports are now publicly available on our website.

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the weekly food and fitness newsletter published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor's note: Hi there, Samarth here. We went on an unannounced break, but we’re back to our regular programming. I’m kicking off the year with some reflections on fitness from my own journey over the last twelve months.

— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)

I.

At the start of 2025, I was trying to do two jobs: I was building TWT, and I was trying to build a magazine. I loved doing it, but both asked a lot of me, which meant I had to extract more hours in a day, which on some days meant editing a journalistic piece at 12:30 am at Starbucks, inhaling Kenya Roast pour-overs, in the mistaken hope that maybe caffeine could make up for my lower cognitive ability, because work had to be done.

I am not complaining. I chose this. It was a phase—a phase where I told myself mad effort is needed till I find my equilibrium. And at that point, even if I told myself “yes you must go to the gym”—you know what happens.

And so when fitness discourse talks about inputs—the plan, the calories, the consistency—without talking about whether your life actually has space for those inputs to land, it’s missing the thing that matters most.

II.

When I did reorient my work in the middle of the year, things fell into place. I started mapping everything in my calendar, which made me confront the finiteness of time and gave a solid reality check of what was actually possible. And when you sit and plan intentionally, when you know fitness matters to you, that you want 7 hours of sleep - you plan to ensure there is space for that. You plan so you can wake up and hit the gym.

And once this set in, things changed. If the first half of 2025 led to a slight degradation in my fitness levels, the second half turned it around: I found a new gym where I found community (read about it here), which made me want to show up 4-5 times a week to lift weights. I ensured I was sleeping on time most days. I intentionally didn’t let overflowing work be the reason to deprioritise fitness.

I have been the biggest proponent of how being fit is the greatest input into productivity, and that has been true for me over the last four years. And yet, just a life change in those six months and then getting back from it reconfirmed that. We go through phases. And that’s okay.

III.

Transformation feels hard not because the inputs are hard. Those remain the same—and the biggest input is just consistency. It’s hard because different goals ask for different levels of focused cognitive effort: do I want to “be fit” or do I want to “get to 15% body fat”?

This distinction is so underrated because it makes context invisible. I could be lifting regularly and hitting my protein targets, but if I haven’t called out “I am working towards this exact goal,” my entire relationship with the practice changes.

It’s the difference between a general lifestyle and a series of minor acts of resistance. When you’re chasing a specific number, every 5:00 PM cookie or extra slice of pizza becomes a high-stakes negotiation. You have to ask: ‘Yes or no?’ every single time. These choices don’t necessarily make you ‘unfit,’ but the mental tax of constantly saying ‘no’ to keep the plan on track can be a bit exhausting. It’s a level of cognitive friction that I realised I didn’t want to pay for in this phase.

My primary interest, right now, is in feeling energetic through the day and having a body with the functional capacity to move well. As long as that’s happening, I feel fit.

And because skipping the gym even for a week makes my body feel off, I go regularly. Goal-less.

IV.

I’ve started noticing when my body has truly had enough. I am not talking about work-tired or deadline pressure. I am talking about an overloaded nervous system, thanks to our environmental load. The Bombay traffic noise. The air quality. The constant sensory bombardment of the city. It accumulates.

When I feel this, “rest” doesn’t mean watching or reading something. It means zero sensory load. It means sitting on my sofa and staring at a blank wall—telling all the “wants” of productivity to wait. I know I’ve hit that zone when I feel a physical sensation in my head. It’s hard to describe scientifically, but it feels like a racing heartbeat inside my skull. A race is happening, and the release is like knots finally unlocking. I can actually feel the movement when I touch my head.

Fitness, I’ve realised, is as much about identifying these invisible stressors as it is about physical movement. To give my nervous system the space to actually relax.

V.

Learning to “listen to your body” always felt abstract to me. Since I can’t see inside, I never really knew what was happening. When I felt sore, I’d wonder: is this the “good” kind? The kind where muscles break down to rebuild stronger? Or is it something else?

Through massages this year, I learnt something I genuinely didn’t know: muscles can stay chronically contracted. Not workout-sore. Just clenched from how we live.

When I’m at my laptop, I’m holding a static pose. My muscles aren’t moving, yet they’re working incredibly hard just to keep me upright. If they don’t get enough movement or release, that “invisible” contraction becomes the new normal.

I didn’t even realise how heavy I felt until those knots from the contraction were taken away. Because once those muscles finally let go, I felt a lightness I hadn’t known was possible.

In that sense, the transformation that makes the most sense to me is experiential. Each fitness upgrade—physical or mental—is simply experiencing a state that says: “Oh, this is also how I could feel.”

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the weekly food and fitness newsletter published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor's note: Hi all, this is Jaanvi from the editorial team. This is a piece from last January, written for those who want to begin their fitness journey. It seemed like the best time to republish, when everyone’s pausing, resting, and also actively planning their 2026 routine.

It’s for those who have never stepped into the gym. Or those who have but feel lost. Or those who just don't know if they should.

Absolute basics, by our resident pro, Ankush Datar. He explains it all: the equipment you will find, the movements you will hear about, his five-day lifting plan, and tips for effective training. Read it for a refresher. Or share with a fresher.

Ankush is an investment professional and an active blogger on wide-ranging topics spanning psychology, health, wealth and how they converge in everyday life. He’s also written a book called "The Health and Wealth Paradox”.

I've had a love-hate relationship with the gym for the past 16 years. I love it for the mental wellness and sense of self-worth it has given me. I hate it because showing up and doing the hard work isn't always easy, but then, that's also what makes it worthwhile.

If you’ve decided to hit the gym this year, here’s everything you need to know.

I. Why the gym matters

First, let's address why the gym deserves a place in your fitness journey.

It offers something irreplaceable: a controlled environment with specialised equipment designed specifically for strength training. While running can be done in parks and yoga at home, proper strength training requires tools you typically only find in a gym—from basic dumbbells to sophisticated resistance machines.

Many people say the gym is boring—and they're right. But that's precisely the point. The monotony is where the magic happens. Growth is slow and time-consuming, requiring consistent effort over time. The gym's predictable environment eliminates variables that might affect outdoor workouts, letting you focus solely on progressive improvement.

Most importantly, strength training isn't just about building muscle or losing fat—though it excels at both. It's about fighting the natural muscle loss that comes with aging.

This condition, called sarcopenia, begins as early as age 30. Regular strength training maintains muscle mass, supports bone density, improves metabolic health, and enhances overall functional fitness. This makes everyday activities easier and helps prevent age-related decline.

II. What to do in the gym

Let's break down what you'll actually do at the gym.

A. Understanding your tools

In any gym, you'll find two main categories of equipment: free weights and machines.

1) Free weights—like dumbbells and barbells—allow for a full range of motion and engage stabilising muscles, making them excellent for compound movements.

2) Machines offer guided movements that isolate specific muscles, reducing the risk of form-related injuries and making them ideal for beginners or targeted training.

Free weights demand more balance and coordination, machines provide a safer alternative for individuals rehabbing injuries or focusing on muscle hypertrophy without overtaxing stabilisers. Neither is superior; they serve different purposes and complement each other. The best results often come from incorporating both into a well-rounded workout routine.

The goal really is to contract the muscle effectively, regardless of the tool you use.

Note: This guide is focused on strength training, so we are skipping the cardio machines like treadmill and elliptical trainer.

B. Understanding your movements

In weight training, exercises generally fall into two categories: compound movements and isolation exercises.

1) Compound movements engage multiple muscle groups simultaneously.
Imagine picking up a heavy box from the floor—you're using your legs, back, and arms all at once. That's a compound movement. In the gym, exercises like squats, deadlifts, and bench presses mirror these natural, multi-muscle movements.

They form the foundation of most strength training programmes because they're efficient and functional—they train your body to work as a coordinated unit.

2) Isolation exercises, as the name suggests, target specific muscles individually. Think about doing a bicep curl—you're focusing solely on the bicep muscle. They help strengthen lagging muscles and refine your physique.

A well-rounded workout programme includes both types of exercises. Typically, you'll start with compound movements when you're fresh and have more energy, then move to isolation exercises to further target specific muscle groups.

C. Structuring your workout

Never walk into the gym without a plan. It's like showing up to a foreign country without a map—you'll waste time and likely get lost. Instead, follow a structured workout plan that ensures you target all major muscle groups efficiently.

Two popular approaches are:

1) The Push/Pull/Legs Split (PPL): It organises workouts based on how your muscles naturally work together. Think about how you move in daily life: you either push things away from your body, pull them towards you, or use your legs to move around. This workout split follows the same logic:

• Push days focus on any muscle that helps push things away from your body—mainly your chest, shoulders, and triceps. Think of movements like pushing open a heavy door or pushing yourself up from the ground.

• Pull days target muscles that pull things towards you—primarily your back and biceps. These are the same muscles you use when pulling open a drawer or climbing up a ladder.

• Leg days concentrate on your entire lower body, including quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves. These sessions strengthen the muscles that help you walk, run, jump, and maintain balance.

2) The Bro Split: This traditional approach dedicates entire days to specific muscle groups—chest day, back day, arms day, and so on. You might spend Monday working only chest exercises, Tuesday on back exercises, and so forth.

While this approach is straightforward and popular, I found it had limitations. When I focused intensely on one muscle group per session, I often felt too sore to train effectively the next day.

My switch to Push/Pull/Legs made a significant difference. My muscles recovered better since I wasn't overloading a single group in one session.

If you're interested in understanding the science behind this, I'd recommend Jeremy Ethier's detailed video explanation. It helped me understand why this approach worked better for my body. It touches upon a meta-analysis by Brad J Schoenfeld in 2016 which states that training each muscle more than once a week can lead to more growth than training a muscle once a week.)

Another practical advantage of Push/Pull/Legs is its flexibility. You can adapt it efficiently to a 3-day or 4-day workout schedule depending on your availability. It simply felt more sustainable and produced better results for me.

Both approaches can work, but I'd recommend starting with Push/Pull/Legs.

Here's a sample 5-day workout plan that incorporates these principles:

Make a workout plan that ensures you target your muscles or achieve a specific goal. This plan should be non-negotiable.

Note: Weight training isn't gender-specific. There's no such thing as male-centric or female-centric workouts. The fundamental principles of muscle development and strength training apply universally. Your goals might differ, but the tools and techniques remain the same.

III. Tips for effective training

Some encouraging news if you're just starting: you'll likely see rapid improvements in your first few months of consistent training.

These ‘newbie gains’—as they're called in the fitness world—happen because your untrained body responds quickly to new demands. Even basic exercises can trigger significant adaptations in strength and muscle growth during this period.

Enjoy them while they last. ;)

Here are more tips for everyone:

1) Form first: Perfect your technique before adding weight. This isn't just about safety—proper form ensures you're actually targeting the intended muscles and getting maximum benefit from each movement.

2) Understanding progressive overload: Here's a fundamental principle that many beginners miss: to get stronger or build muscle, you need to gradually increase the demands on your body over time. This concept is called progressive overload, and it's simpler than it sounds.

This means slowly increasing either the weight you lift, the number of repetitions you perform, or both. For example, if you can comfortably do 10 push-ups, try for 11 next time. If you're lifting 5kg dumbbells with good form, consider moving to 7.5kg.

3) Time under tension: This term simply refers to how long your muscles are working during each exercise. Instead of quickly lifting and lowering weights, try slowing down your movements. Lower the weight slowly, hold it in the final position for two seconds, and then lift it back up. This increased time under tension helps build strength and muscle more effectively.

4) Rest periods matter: A common mistake many beginners make is not resting enough between sets, thinking shorter breaks mean a better workout. This isn't true. Your rest periods are as important as the exercises themselves.

For compound exercises (like bench presses, squats, or deadlifts), take about three minutes between sets. These movements tax multiple muscle groups and your central nervous system, so they need more recovery time.

For isolation exercises (like bicep curls or leg extensions), one to two minutes is typically enough. These movements are less demanding on your system, so you can recover relatively quickly.

There are exceptions to these guidelines depending on your goals:

• For building pure strength: Rest 2-5 minutes between sets for peak performance and safety.

• For muscle growth (hypertrophy): Rest 30-90 seconds for balance between intensity and recovery.

• For endurance: Rest 15-45 seconds to sustain elevated heart rate and build endurance.

That time between sets isn't wasted—it's when your muscles replenish their energy stores, allowing you to maintain proper form and intensity in your next set. Use a timer on your phone if needed; proper rest is as crucial as the lifts themselves.

Never feel pressured to cut your rest periods short. A study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that longer rest periods (3 minutes) between sets led to greater increases in muscle strength and size compared to shorter rest periods (1 minute).

5) Recovery matters: Before wrapping up our essential tips, let's understand a fundamental principle: how your muscles actually grow. When you lift weights, you create tiny tears in your muscle fibres. During rest and recovery, your body repairs these tears, building the muscle back stronger than before—but only if you give it proper nutrition and rest.

This is why the gym alone isn't enough. Your workout creates the stimulus for growth, but the actual improvement happens while you recover. And this is why factors like rest, nutrition, and consistency are just as important as your actual workout routine.

IV. On personal training

If you have the money to invest in a personal trainer, don't think twice. And if you can afford it, pay for a year's service upfront.

I learned this through failed experiences. Time and again, I would take a trainer's services for 6 months, see no dramatic results, and blame it on poor coaching techniques.

What I didn't understand then was that building muscle takes years of consistent work, doing the same exercises incrementally better. But here's the reality: it often isn't in a trainer's interest to communicate this hard truth and risk losing a client.

Many trainers feel pressured to constantly create fancy, novel workout plans to keep clients engaged. This is why people often fail to stick with a trainer long-term—they're chasing novelty rather than mastering fundamentals.

I've spoken with many trainers about this, and this is their consistent feedback. You can't really blame them; it's a systemic issue.

My father approached this smarter than I did. He understood that paying for the service would make the trainer accountable to him. He paid the gym fees before even visiting. Once he found a trainer who shared his long-term perspective, he committed to a full year without hesitation.

Note: If you are looking for some paid courses that can guide you through the process, here are my recommendations:

1) Jeremy Ethier’s Built with Science Course

2) Join an online coaching service like Fittr.

Standard Disclaimer: I don't endorse any of these courses or links, just sharing them here for a better understanding of readers.

V. Making it stick

Success in the gym comes down to consistency. Here's how to make it easier:

1) Choose a gym within walking distance to eliminate transportation excuses

2) Keep your gym bag packed and ready with essentials so you can start your day in gym clothes or change into them immediately after work to build momentum

3) Find an accountability partner so you both can workout together and stay committed

4) Create an energising playlist that gets you motivated

And always remember: the hardest part is showing up. Once you're there, you've already won most of the battle. The gym might seem daunting at first, but it's simply a tool—one that, used correctly, can transform not just your body but your entire approach to health and wellness.

Start with these fundamentals, maintain consistency, and trust in the process. Your future self will thank you.

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Originally published on The Whole Truth Foods’ website.

Editor’s note: Hello, this is Jaanvi. Truth Be Told, we don’t have an editor’s note this weekend because Samarth is missing. I thought it was only fitting to publish an essay about running, given that our editor has run away.

We are republishing Shantanu Kishwar’s refreshingly honest essay, which captures the multifaceted nature of fitness journeys as he describes the various phases, from apathy to inspiration to obsession and uncertainty. His essay serves as a reminder that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to personal fitness.

If you’re running this marathon season, this essay may help motivate you.
If you’re feeling reflective, it may push you to document your own fitness journey through 2025. Happy reading!

You can follow Shantanu on Twitter and subscribe to Multitudes.

1. Indifference

At the age of 14, the crowning glory of my nonexistent athletic career was coming second to last in a 600-metre race.

I remember the day quite clearly. It was a winter morning in 2010, and as we neared the finish line, my closest competitor was a fair bit ahead. I’d resigned myself to last place; by that point, my breathing was becoming faster, but my legs were slower.

And then, the miracle. A heaven-sent second wind spurred me on. My legs galloped as we rounded the final curve. The gap shortened. He was taking it easy. He — and everyone else — didn’t expect me to catch up. But, powered by my galloping legs, I stumbled past him. He didn’t have the time to wipe the confused look off his face and chase after me. I crossed the finish line with an adrenaline-dopamine-serotonin-powered smirk, basking in the knowledge that over 600 metres, there was someone just a tad bit slower than me.

Clearly, I wasn’t fond of any strenuous exercise. I attended cricket practice at school, but this was when athleticism was peripheral to the game’s concerns (Virat Kohli’s fitness revolution was still a few years away). My teammates and I jogged before sessions as a formality, as if to prove that we were indeed part of a sporting endeavour — just not a serious one. I don’t think I ran more than a kilometre until I was 18. I certainly never enjoyed it. When it came to playing the game, I cut the figure of a very round child chasing after a very round ball.

2. Change

At the age of 18, after my first year of undergrad, I wanted this to change. 

I was very overweight and felt odd aches across my body. More than anything, I was tired of seeing a fat kid in the mirror because of body image issues inflicted by years of minor bullying in a preppy Delhi high school. I was sick of my round face making me look like a child throughout my teenage years and classmates saying I was “lactating” from my “man boobs” when I spilt water on my t-shirt. 

It may not have been the healthiest motivation to lose weight, but it finally got me to act.

I don’t know why, but as much as I hated it, I thought I had to run to make this happen. It felt like the price of admission to the Club of Healthy People. So, I begrudgingly started making rounds of my neighbourhood in Delhi. I doubt I moved faster than I walked initially, but I certainly swung my arms and legs a lot more.

Ultimately, at the end of that first summer of my undergrad, a combination of running, cycling, yoga, and dieting saw me lose about 15 kilos. It wasn’t the healthiest weight loss, but it felt worth it when, on my first day back, a friend said, “Damn Kishwar, you’ve got a jawline!”

Academics kept me busy during college, which meant working out only during summer breaks, starting from scratch each year. A friend and I would start around 9:30 at night: run, try some callisthenics, finish by 11, and have dinner at midnight. This was my routine all summer long. I didn’t set any running goals. The concept of even remotely long distances still escaped me. It took my four years of on-and-off running to push myself to a 3k — the first time I ran that, I felt like I’d finished a marathon. I didn’t think it was ever physically possible for me to go further.

And then, a chance encounter in 2017 changed it all.

3. Inspiration

It was on my first solo trip. I’d just graduated from college and travelled to Ooty to beat Delhi’s summer heat. In a hostel there, I talked with a fellow traveller who’d come there to practise hill runs. He’d been a marathoner for years and was now venturing beyond even that, prepping for an 80km race through the mountains of Ladakh. I thought him clinically insane but also slightly inspiring.

We talked extensively, covering books, travel, and more during a 22 km walk along the train tracks from Lovedale to Coonoor. What stuck with me was how he spoke of running.

It seeped into every part of his life. His days were planned around long runs, and his work around long races. He didn’t do it for glory. He did it because he wanted to run, living by the same attitude Haruki Murakami professed in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

“People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.”

Somewhere along that walk, this became something I aspired to. A few months later, I read Born to Run, the runner’s Bible by Christopher McDougall, and this urge was pushed into hyperdrive. 

The book’s argument was simple: our bodies, right from the arch of our feet to the size of our glutes to ligaments that hold our heads up straight, are designed to run. I was taken in by the outlandish feats it documented of humans powered by nothing but willpower and mild insanity: people running 100+ mile races in Death Valley and Mexican tribespeople that ran 50 miles in one go like it was nothing.

If McDougall said that humans were biologically engineered to run, then run, I would. It mattered diddly-squat whether I enjoyed it, which I still didn’t. I bought into delayed gratification; I knew I’d feel good after a run, so I drowned out my body’s protests with podcasts and music, taking one step at a time.

4. Progress

By then, I was done with college and living in Delhi with my parents. I was trying to embrace the runner’s lifestyle, but the gap between intention and action didn’t miraculously disappear. I ran once or twice a week, pushing myself further every time. I wasn’t suddenly completing marathons, but I moved from a personal best of 3k to 4k and then 5k. In March 2018, I did 7k on the slopes of a hillside, no less.

In February 2019, I overcame my fear of double-digit distances, signing up for and completing my first 10k. It meant running for an hour, which seemed like an eternity. Yet on a winter morning with the temperature at 6°C and an AQI of 200, I set out with a few thousand others and did just that.

I finished with a time of 54:30 and, for the first time, felt proud of what I’d achieved. 

I’d somehow gone from being a round child stumbling through 600 metres to a less-round adult finishing a 10k at a decent pace. I’d spent years being angry at myself for being overweight and unfit. But I didn’t want that to be my destiny and ensured it wasn’t.  I had achieved this. I set a goal and followed through. My athletic career had a new crowning glory.

Consistency still eluded me, though. At the start of every year, I set myself a target of 520k for the year or 10k a week. This was easy enough to achieve in any week but harder to sustain over time. A one-day break inevitably turned into a one-week break and then a one-month break. Before I knew it, a small pause that started in March ended only in November.

5. Introspection

Fast forward to 2022, and familiar patterns played out. The 520km target was set and forgotten by mid-Feb.

Around October is when, for the first time, things really changed. 

After severe burnout from my last job, which had me work twelve hours a day, six days a week, I wanted to take care of myself. My sleep was terrible, my resting heart rate was high, and my clothes were tight. As the fog of anxiety from that job lifted, I realised I couldn’t go on like this.

All the white pop-culture pundits of good health — Rich Roll, Peter Attia, and Andrew Huberman — convinced me that changing my lifestyle would be worth it. It meant more than exercise: I’d also need to eat healthy and sleep properly. 

And so I committed to a better version of myself, devoting my time, energy, and money.

I resumed running but also got a year-long CultFit membership in October to add strength training and yoga to the mix. Little did I know that I’d come to regret that decision.

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6. Injury

In my first strength training session at Cult on the 6th of October, poor form and over-exertion left me with a dull ache in my lower back. I assumed it was dormant muscles voicing their protest and ignored it. After a dance fitness session the next morning, that pain grew. By 2 PM that afternoon, I couldn’t move.

In four hours, my lower back turned into a single, solid brick. Pain radiated up my spine and down my legs. The tiniest motion had me gasping. If hell existed, such agony surely was a staple of suffering there.

I stood up thrice in 24 hours to use the bathroom, hunched over, grabbing everything I could for support. I lay on my stomach throughout, turning my head sideways to shovel food into it at meal times.

I later discovered there was a bulged disk in my spine pressing on my sciatic nerve, which I’d caused by pushing myself harder than my core could handle.

Surprisingly, and fortunately, the recovery was almost as drastic as my collapse into pain. In ten days, I could walk long distances. In a month, I felt like I was physically back to my old self. 

Mentally, though, something changed.

7. Obsession

Lying in bed while injured, I was frustrated and angry. I was trying to do the right thing. The hard thing. Every fibre of my being wanted to push itself and be tired after a good workout. I was rebelling against the convenience of a world designed for sedentary living. Yet, all my good intentions got me were severe pain, huge physiotherapy bills, and a prescription to lie in bed.

This frustration also brought clarity. This isn’t how I wanted to spend my life. I’d taken the ability to move, walk, and run for granted. I assumed that I’d always be able to be active. Now, the privilege of a healthy body stared me in the face, forcing me to cherish it.

Those days spent bedridden were filled with inordinate amounts of screen time. Since I couldn’t run myself, I lived vicariously through those who broadcast their running on YouTube. Hellah Sidibe, Kofuzi, and Casey Neistat became a steady company.

Casey’s videos, more than anything else, got my feet tingling and my soul roaring. Unlike Hellah and Kofuzi, he wasn’t a professional runner. He had enough and more keeping him busy, from his filmmaking career to his family. 

Despite this, he laced up his shoes every morning and ran to keep his sanity intact. It was a non-negotiable part of his day and life. 

The best part? He’d done this despite an accident that shattered part of his leg and after doctors told him he’d never run again. He’d come back from that. What was I worried about? 

He brought me hope when all I saw was frustration and anger.

Two videos, the ones above and below, nearly brought me to tears. They were less than 5 minutes long together, but they changed me. I saw someone who understood, as I now did, that the ability to run was a gift that couldn’t be taken for granted. It was a gift that gave the more you committed to it. 

A switch flipped, a bulb went off, whatever. Instinctively, I knew I didn’t force myself anymore. It wasn’t a choice. I finally felt like a runner — so I would run.

8. Action

I started moving again as October turned to November. Short walks became long walks which turned into short runs and then long runs. Even during a month of travel, which would have been an excuse to stop earlier, I stuck with it. My baseline had become a 30-minute/6k run, double what it had been any time before.

I wanted to end 2022 on a high, so I gave myself a goal: 55 km in December to hit 200 km for the year. It wasn’t a massive goal, but it was more than I’d run in a month for a long time. It would demand consistency; I’d need to run thrice a week to hit this. 

Most importantly, it felt like enough to get momentum going for 2023, a year in which I saw running being a non-negotiable part of my daily routine.

Running post-injury felt different. As I made my way through those 55 km, I’d listen to podcasts, music or nothing for the first time. I’d give myself questions to ponder, letting thoughts run through my head as I ran around my neighbourhood. I was smiling while running, not after. 

Earlier, running always felt more mentally taxing than physically. Now, my mind was in sync with my body; it stopped protesting the next kilometre, didn’t want to quit short of my target, and didn’t force me to obsessively check my Fitbit to see how long I had left.

I was on course to hit the 200km mark for the year. By the 28th of December, I was 49 km through my 55 km target for the month. 

That day, I set out for the remaining 6k to hit 200 and smiled as I made my way down sunny, tree-lined lanes. I felt happy, hopeful and fulfilled. 

Just for that moment, the world was perfect.

But that idyllic moment didn’t last. I never made it to 200.

9. Injury (Again)

My lower back seized up just after the halfway mark on that “perfect” 6k run. It was a disturbingly familiar pain. The ghost from October returned to haunt me. The momentum of my increasingly energetic legs slammed against the brick wall that was my dysfunctional spine.

I stopped running immediately, ambling home with a single thought: “Please, God, not again.”

But, again, it was. 

I reached home, got into bed, and stayed there for the better part of two weeks. When I eventually emerged, my doctor showed me an MRI of my spine and told me my core wasn’t strong enough to negate the constant shocks running on roads sent up my vertebrae.

My last goal for 2022 fell apart and, at that moment, took away all hope I had for 2023. In a week, I went from humble bragging about a personal best 10k time to saying, “I could walk a little today with the help of a crutch.”

These words had no business coming out of a 27-year-old body, but they were. I felt betrayed by the universe, punishing me again for wanting to be healthy. 

I’d done what every self-help book had told me to. I’d built habits, been consistent and really wanted to be better. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t. Instead, I was forced back into bed and left to contemplate the prospect of spinal surgery.

It felt like I’d lost all hope of being a physically active person. I was terrified by the fragility of my body. I couldn’t trust it — a wrong step anywhere could land me back in bed. 

Both times so far, I’d been walking distance from home when I got injured. What if the next time I was alone on holiday in a strange place? 

That gloomy fog lifted, eventually. Aided by a steroid shot in my back, in three weeks, I was functioning like someone with a (mostly) normal spine. My doctor deemed surgery unnecessary and told me that if I diligently strengthened my core and avoided running for a while, I could return to my best in about two years. This feels like an eternity, but three years of COVID passed in the blink of an eye. I’m sure these also will.

And because I’m a sucker for meaning-making, I’ll concede that these bouts of bedriddenness have taught me a fair bit.

10. Uncertainty

In October, I realised I was allergic to sedentary living. Indifference to good health was a thing of the past, and I didn’t need body image issues or miraculous inspiration to motivate me anymore. 

The convenience of staying put was nothing compared to the happiness I felt when I really exerted myself at the end of the day. Every kilometre I ran felt like a barrier broken. Every day I exercised, I felt myself moving towards a version of myself that lived a longer and better life.

If that was October’s lesson, December taught me that I couldn’t be pig-headed when trying to be active. If the highway to hell is paved with good intentions, so is the path to my orthopedist’s office. Being healthy still matters to me — now more than ever, in fact. But I’ve learnt that exercise, if done poorly, can also be the enemy of good health.

These are simple lessons, but if they had to be learned, I’m glad I’m learning them at 27.

My doctor also wants me to run again, eventually. I don’t know how to feel about that. After everything that’s happened, running is no longer the object of my obsession it was a few months ago. It exists hazily in my periphery, bearing the aura of a poisoned chalice. 

It has so much to give but maybe, even more, to take away. It’s a game of Russian Roulette, with equal chances of dishing out either ecstasy or agony. At the moment, I’m too terrified to pull the trigger. 

Eventually, I suppose. It’s better than never. For now, that’s good enough.

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Welcome to Truth Be Told, the weekly food and fitness newsletter published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s Note: Science says you should have a max of 400mg of caffeine (4 cups of coffee), 25g of added sugar (6 teaspoons), and 2000mg of sodium as upper limits for a day. What about alcohol? Well, the optimum amount is... ZERO. Yup. Read this Slate article for the historical roots of this divisive health advice.

This fact induces no discomfort in me because I’m a teetotaller—but so many friends find this just hard. And so while zero is best, they’re intentionally choosing not to quit (joys of life, they say) but do want to drink in a relatively healthier way. Can they? Well, my colleague Jaanvi loves this older piece by TWT CEO Shashank Mehta, which talks exactly about that, and nudged me to say it deserves a republish as many readers get into the end-of-year holiday zone. So here you go.

— samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com

How to Manage Alcohol Intake?

Many who start on the fitness journey, dread this question.

Will I need to completely give up alcohol?
Does fitness come at the cost of my social life?
What! No Beer? Whaaaaaa!

And it’s a fair question: what with the fitness industry’s relentless anti-alcohol stance? What is it about alcohol consumption that sparks such an extreme reaction amongst fitness enthusiasts? More importantly, is the path to fitness one of complete abstinence? Or can you do something about it? Let’s find out.

The Three Problems with Alcohol

One: Empty calories

Empty calories are calories from foods that have zero nutrition. Foods that are just plain calorie bombs. Foods that are, in effect, just (some form of) refined sugar. Alcohol is the king of that category.

That’s the prime reason why fitness nerds hate alcohol. Because it eats up your calorie quota but gives you nothing in return: no protein to build muscle, no good fats for lubrication and no good carbs for energy.

Just calories that your body has no use for. So it doesn’t really process them—just stores them away. Bad deal.

Two: Diuretic

The second problem with alcohol is that it dehydrates you. And dehydration hinders your body’s ability to synthesise protein. Which leads to muscle loss (or lack of gain after a strenuous workout). Along with all the other dehydration-related issues that you might have heard of. (If not, read this.)

Three: Alcohol begets alcohol

The third, and perhaps the biggest problem with alcohol, is that unlike food, the more you have, the more you want. It’s the reason why restaurants have ‘happy hours’ and ’shots on the house’. Ever seen them be that generous with food? 

So, what’s the verdict? Should you stop alcohol consumption forever?

Well, I’d say yes if it was possible. 

Clearly, when it comes to fitness, there is no good that alcohol brings (if you ignore the stray ‘wine improves heart health’ sort of articles). 

But equally clearly, stopping drinking isn’t a solution for everyone. But maybe managing it is. 

Here are some pro tips

One: Reduce calories

First up – below is a visual list of calories in different alcoholic beverages.

And here is an alcohol calorie calculator for you. Go on, check how many calories from alcohol alone are you consuming every day/week/month.

From the list, you’d notice that most hard liquor — whiskey, rum, vodka — has a similar number of calories per ml. What makes one alcohol worse than the other, then, are two things:

1. What do you mix your alcohol with?

2. How much of it do you tend to have?

As you’d notice, cocktails have about 2-3 times as many calories as neat alcohol. 

Clearly, all that extra sugar is coming from the mixers. The juices and the cokes and the syrups that make your cocktail so yummy. And it’s the yumminess of the drink that makes you have more than you ought to. 

Well…did you know that alcohol is actually a depressant? 

The reason you feel high and happy while consuming it is because of all this extra, unnecessary sugar that’s entering your system.

So first and foremost, cut the mixers.

Like most people, I started drinking with the ’tasty’ drinks like Screw-Driver and LIIT and Baileys (which is a calorie bomb if there ever was one). But once I learned this truth, I’ve trained myself to love the simplest of drinks: Whiskey + Water.

This is a combination you can find anywhere, that adds no extra calories, and that compensates for the alcohol-caused dehydration right from the start. Which brings me to the second point.

Two: Hydration

We’ve spoken about how important water is in the fitness scheme of things. Well, that importance doubles in the presence of alcohol. 

So either find a drink where water is the mixer or follow this simple thumb rule: Have a glass of water for every glass of alcohol you consume.

This has dual benefits. One, it’ll keep you hydrated, and reduce your ability to overdrink. And two, you’ll have a much, much more pleasant morning the day after.

Three: Over-drinking

Which brings us to the last problem. How to drink but not keep drinking? How to consume in moderation?

This is the Holy Grail, really. A few drinks at a few social gatherings aren’t that big a problem. It’s when few become quite-a-few that things start getting really ugly. And as we know, alcohol has this peculiar way of making you want more. So what can you do to break this trap of alcohol consumption?

There are three tricks that work well for me. Two we’ve discussed: don’t have ‘tasty’ cocktails or mixers that make you want to drink more and drink a lot of water to hydrate and keep yourself full.

The third trick I use is to eat after two drinks. And I eat a full, protein-heavy, low-carb meal. It’s important to note both the meal composition and timing.

I eat after two drinks because overtime I’ve noticed that it’s around the third drink that I begin to lose control over how much I want to drink. That heady feeling settles in and I get into my “oh c’mon I deserve this” mode and put back a few more and then it’s all downhill.

You should notice your inflection point and eat before that. The presence of food in your tummy will get your body back in action (trying to digest the food) and not let the alcohol wreak havoc on your brain. 

Your inflection will ensure you reach the right path.

Even more importantly though, don’t let that meal be full of carbs. (I know, that’s exactly what you crave when you drink). Carbs are a bit like those sugary mixers when it comes to activating the reward sections in your brain.

Simply put, too much carb will push you further into the ‘happy feeling’ seeking mode, which will, in turn, lead to more alcohol. (At least that’s how it works for me. The minute I have some bread or some dessert with my alcohol, I suddenly am like ‘bring-it-on’.) 

Eat a lot of protein instead, and the body will need to do some hard work breaking it down. Also, the extra protein will help compensate for the protein-synthesis hampering effects of alcohol that we spoke of earlier. A win-win.

Wine and Beer

These two deserve a special mention. Especially beer. From the calorie list, you’ll see that a glass of beer has more calories than 30ml of any other alcohol. But that’s not the main problem.

The problem is the way we consume these drinks. In pints, by the glass, and maybe thrice a week. That’s the problem.  I just wanted to call them out because they aren’t as innocent as they look. They are more calorie-dense (given the unit of consumption) and more harmful (given the frequency at which we consume them) than regular alcohol. So beware.

There is also something to be said about snacks — alcohol’s evil-genius brother. This master-of-disguise that hides there in plain sight, is as harmful (if not more) as alcohol, and yet acts all innocent.

For now, be happy in the knowledge that you don’t need to abstain to lose weight. But alcohol consumption is quite bad for your diet and hence must be had in moderation, without mixers, and with a lot of water. And remember, eat before you tip over.

Oh, and everything I said assumes that your calorie quota allows for it. Cheers.

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Welcome to Truth Be Told, the weekly food and fitness newsletter published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Hi there, Samarth Bansal here, your Editor. Pollution is back in the news as the air in North India has visibly turned toxic. So I’m republishing a story I wrote last year—where I learned how even the basic questions about pollution sources remain surprisingly contested.

In principle, this story is about scientific uncertainty. But it’s also about who gets to escape responsibility for the air you breathe. When no two studies agree on what’s polluting Delhi, it creates perfect cover for inaction—and as you’ll see, that ambiguity isn’t always accidental.

Six years, multiple cancelled studies, and crores spent later, India’s capital still claims it doesn’t know what’s in its air. Which should make us think: What if ‘facts’ are not neutral? What if they are political?

— samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com

This is about who gets to escape responsibility for the air you breathe.

These scientific investigations (called source apportionment studies) to measure pollution sources can become political weapons. When no two studies agree on numbers, it creates perfect cover for inaction.

Every winter, Delhi’s air becomes a toxic haze, and headlines scream numbers: “40% of pollution is from stubble burning!” or “20% is from vehicles!”

These figures sound definitive.

But what if no one really knows the truth behind them? What if these numbers, rather than clarifying the problem, are just adding to the confusion?

If your goal is to really understand what’s going on, the best thing you can do is this: don’t get hung up on these percentages. Possibly, ignore them.

There are fundamental gaps in our understanding of the pollution problem—gaps so big that even the experts are still piecing together the puzzle.

I had no idea how contested this science was—and how deeply political this question is—until Anushka Mukherjee (my colleague) and I dug into the studies behind these numbers and talked to the scientists doing the actual work.

I’m sharing what we’ve learned here, hoping either someone can pick up the unresolved bits and explore further, or someone who knows can help us understand, so we can write about it.

I. The Science of Uncertainty

What makes air pollution such a fascinating puzzle is how it forces us to think differently about causation and measurement. We’re trying to understand a system where the very thing we’re measuring—particles in the air—has already lost some of the clues about where it came from.

Think about the complexity of the problem. Delhi is huge. What pollutes in Khan Market won’t be the same as what pollutes elsewhere.

Highways have different pollution signatures than quieter neighbourhoods. Sources shift with seasons, time of day, and weather—and as the city evolves over the years, so do the contributors. Some solutions might reduce certain sources, while new ones emerge.

This is why air pollution remains a complex puzzle to solve. It isn’t like tallying the number of cars on a highway, where you can eventually arrive at a precise count. With pollution, the ‘truth’ isn’t hiding behind better measurements or more data. Reality itself resists being pinned down to precise numbers.

But that’s okay. Science has ways of dealing with uncertainty. We have established methods which are used around the world on how to know what’s in our air. India is also using them—it’s just that the way we are doing it is creating more confusion than clarity.

Look at Delhi, our most studied city. You’d see polarised fights about the causes of the toxic winter haze: is it the farmers burning stubble or rich people buying more cars? Or is it just too much construction?

These debates are signs of uncertainty. Scientists resolve this in two main ways. One is like detective work with air samples—they capture the air and analyse its chemical fingerprints to trace it back to cars, factories, or dust. The other is more like accounting—they try to count everything that could cause pollution and calculate how much each might pollute.

The best studies factor in both. (I am skipping the technical details, but if you’re interested, look for receptor modelling and emission inventories.)

These are called “source apportionment” studies. There is a big push (and rightly so) to have these studies for hundreds of Indian cities so we can know where our pollution comes from.

This question is important from a prioritisation and resource allocation lens: if we know which source is hurting us the most, perhaps we can direct more energy there.

But how you study shapes what results you get.

II. When Different Methods Tell Different Stories

I think what I am talking about here will make more sense if you look at the process itself. Between 2010 and 2018, Delhi had five major studies trying to figure this out. The Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) conducted an excellent review comparing these studies and explaining the differences.

Their analysis revealed the complexity of this counting. Take a look. Say you want to figure the contribution of vehicles in Delhi’s polluted air. How would you do that?

How do you estimate all vehicles of different types, their fuel usage, their age—across the entire city?

Some teams counted vehicles at 87 locations, others at 72, and one at just 10. Some counted in parking lots, others at fuel stations, others on roads. Some included tourist vehicles and mall traffic, others didn’t. Some worried about old vehicles polluting more, while others just used averages.

The geography makes it even more jumbled. Some studies just looked at Delhi, but one team looked at the whole region—Delhi plus Gurgaon, Faridabad, and Ghaziabad.

Even questions that seem simple get tricky fast. If a car kicks up dust from the road, should we count that as vehicle pollution or road dust? When vehicles are stuck in traffic jams, do they pollute more? Do better roads mean less pollution?

This is why we can’t get a simple, clear answer about how much vehicles pollute Delhi’s air. When these studies tried to figure it out, one said around 20%, and another said 40%.

What this leaves us with is a bunch of options to choose from. Any news story, activist, or government official can pick any of these studies to quote. Two people can argue fiercely about numbers, both certain they’re right, both with studies to back them up.

Think about how bizarre this is: I went looking for the one study everyone agrees we should use, the gold standard, with solid scientific reasons why it’s the best. It doesn’t exist.

Many researchers we spoke to said the same thing: everyone’s using different methods. We should have standardised protocols, they said, so there is a common base on which different research groups can build on. This exists in the US and EU. In the absence of that, we get stuck arguing about basics.

Until this gets fixed, we’re left with multiple versions of the truth about Delhi’s pollution. Each version makes sense on its own, but put them all together and you get a confusing picture.

And that’s exactly where the issue becomes political.

III. When Science Meets Politics

If you’re a politician tasked with cleaning your city’s air, studies showing that the problem originates elsewhere—or is driven by weather patterns—offer the perfect excuse to avoid responsibility. The lack of clarity creates a loophole for inaction.

These challenges aren’t just theoretical—they play out dramatically in Delhi. Take this sequence of events, for example.

In 2015, the Delhi government commissioned IIT Kanpur to identify major air pollution sources. This study shaped many of Delhi’s pollution policies. It came out in 2016.

But the government said they needed more: a real-time study that could tell us what exactly causes pollution at any given moment—not just from when data was collected. In 2018, Arvind Kejriwal announced plans for a “round-the-year” study. Officials talked about making this permanent if it worked.

In 2019, the government commissioned Washington University. The Environmental Minister emphasised in Feb 2020: “Without real-time data about pollution sources, we can’t create mechanisms to reduce them.”

Then a pattern began to emerge.

Washington University submitted its study in May 2020. The government had paid ₹90 lakh. But by September, a government committee raised mysterious red flags. We don’t know what: the study is public, but their objections aren’t.

In December, Deputy CM Manish Sisodia terminated the study. But the idea lived on. Officials were told to find a new agency for real-time source apportionment.

Enter IIT Kanpur again in 2021. Their study was costlier: ₹12.72 crore. They got ₹10.72 crore upfront for equipment. The study began.

Then, in late 2023, plot twist: DPCC chairperson Ashwini Kumar—a BJP appointee—cancelled this study too, saying IIT Kanpur failed to justify their conclusions.

Again, the exact objections aren’t public. From what we can piece together through press reports, the core conflict was this: IIT Kanpur’s study pointed to pollution sources outside Delhi, but the DPCC chairperson saw this as AAP trying to deflect responsibility. It again became a BJP-AAP tussle, and the study was halted.

In late 2024, DPCC was hunting for yet another organisation to do this study.

This is six years of India’s capital city “trying” to figure out what’s polluting its air: crores spent, two studies cancelled.

Note: We couldn’t find details of the cancelled IIT Kanpur study. Did it get completed? Is a copy accessible? Did the AAP government used any of its findings to shape its action plan?

IV. The Price of Uncertainty

This sequence doesn’t just seem to be about bureaucratic inefficiency—it suggests something troubling about how scientific uncertainty can be weaponised.

But I hesitate. Because it’s a strong claim. What if the studies were genuinely flawed? Officials might have valid concerns. It’s just that the repeated cancellations and lack of transparency make it hard to trust the process.

With this disclaimer, I will take the liberty to say what this pattern is telling me: The problem isn’t just that we can’t get exact numbers — it’s that this very uncertainty becomes a tool for avoiding action and escaping accountability.

This brings us back to where we started: When you read news reports quoting specific percentages about pollution sources, remember this story. Behind every confident statistic lies a messy reality: conflicting methods, hidden objections, and (possibly) political convenience.

PS: If you want to dive deeper, check this comprehensive review, which puts together data from different studies to get ranges for the top sources: vehicle exhaust, road dust, construction dust, cooking and heating, open waste burning, and industries.

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the weekly food and fitness newsletter published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: Today’s piece from Akshat Kharbanda asks a simple question: if obesity is rising everywhere, why does every country treat it so differently? Drawing from living in five countries and analysing obesity perception at Novo Nordisk’s Denmark headquarters, Akshat maps five radically different cultural scripts about the same biology.

— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)

“Beta,” the aunty smiled, spooning biryani onto my plate until it spilled over. An hour later, the same aunty pointed the same spoon across the room “God, she’s gained so much weight!”

I laughed at that contradiction, until I realised it wasn’t hers alone. We’re all walking contradictions when it comes to bodies.

Obesity has doubled globally since 1990. One in eight adults worldwide now lives with obesity. We like to think of it as a universal problem with a scientific solution.

Allow me to raise my spoon.

The biology might be consistent, but what obesity means—morally, socially, economically—changes the moment you cross a border. And meaning determines everything: who gets care and who gets blamed, which bodies are celebrated and which are controlled, whether obesity is a crisis or a goal.

Here’s the thing: Biology gives us the body. Culture gives it meaning. And culture, unlike biology, is something we’ve built, not something we’re born with.

Which means if we want to understand why obesity rates keep rising everywhere despite completely different approaches, we can’t just look at the science. We have to look at the cultural scripts that decide what obesity even means before the first policy is written or the first diet is prescribed.

There are 196 countries in the world. Today, we look at five: the United States, Denmark, Singapore, India, and Mauritania, with radically different cultural scripts about the same biology.

But first, we need a map.

Mapping the Contradictions

How do we make sense of a world where the same body means completely different things depending on where you stand?

We need a framework that can hold contradiction without flattening it. Something that lets us see patterns.

I borrowed a method from Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map. Meyer is a business professor who maps how cultures differ on spectrums. It’s meant to help managers navigate cross-cultural teams: why your German colleague gets straight to criticism while your American colleague starts with compliments.

If culture shapes how we work together, it definitely shapes how we see bodies.

So I took her mapping method and applied it to obesity. Instead of plotting communication styles, I mapped how cultures think about obesity across four dimensions. Four questions every culture answers differently:

Dimension 1: Is something wrong?
Acceptance ←→ Denial
Does the culture acknowledge obesity as an issue or deny it exists/matters?

Dimension 2: Why is it wrong?
Health ←→ Aesthetics
Is obesity framed as a medical problem or an aesthetic/social one?

Dimension 3: Whose fault is it?
Individual ←→ Institutional
Does responsibility fall on the person or on systems, policies, and environments?

Dimension 4: How do we fix it?
Supportive ←→ Punitive
Are interventions compassionate (treatment, access, policy) or punitive (stigma, surveillance, shame)?

Each culture sits somewhere on these four spectrums. Plot them, and you start to see something: there’s no “right” approach. Just different combinations of care and control, each with the stories it tells to justify itself.

Let me show you what I mean.

Five Cultural Scripts

I. United States

Acceptance + Health + Individual + Punitive

In America, everyone knows obesity is a problem. You can walk into any grocery store, any gym, any doctor’s office, and feel the country negotiating its relationship with its own body. The culture has decided this is both a disease (medicalization, GLP-1 boom, “obesity is a chronic condition”) and a moral failure (poor discipline, bad choices, weakness).

That contradiction is everywhere. More than four in ten American adults now live with obesity, according to the CDC. The percentage of US adults experiencing weight-related stigma? Nearly identical.

Oh, and it’s all on you. In all my surveys, the pattern was clear: Americans overwhelmingly believe obesity is the individual’s fault. Personal responsibility. Your choices. Your discipline.

This is the American Dream in action—the story that success comes from hard work and failure from laziness. For that mythology to survive, obesity must stay personal. Because if it’s systemic, if it’s about the environment you’re born into rather than the choices you make, the narrative collapses.

So we ignore the systems. Like the fact that around 60% of supermarket staples in the US are ultra-processed foods, compared to 15% in Europe. Or that American portion sizes dwarf those elsewhere—a McDonald’s large drink is 89% bigger in the US than in the UK.

These aren’t personal failures. They’re designed environments. But acknowledging that threatens the dream. So the story stays: your body, your fault.

Entire industries depend on this contradiction. The diet industry, the wellness industry, the pharmaceutical industry—all profit from treating obesity as both a disease and a personal failure. Cure it completely, or remove the stigma entirely, and the business model breaks.

The paradox is the product.

II. Denmark

Acceptance + Health + Institutional + Supportive

Walk into a Danish health clinic and you won’t hear lectures about willpower or discipline. Obesity is viewed as a public health issue shaped by environments, policies, and infrastructure. And that is society’s responsibility to fix, not just yours.

The approach is supportive. No one’s shouting “no excuses” here. Everyone’s cycling to work, eating rye bread, and talking about balance. On paper, this sounds enlightened.

And yet.

Obesity in Denmark has tripled since 1987, from 6.1% to 18.4% by 2021. Despite all that systemic thinking and supportive infrastructure, rates keep climbing.

Here’s where the logic breaks: If obesity is society’s problem, society should act. In 2011, the government tried. They introduced a “fat tax” on foods high in saturated fat—a real policy intervention to shift behaviour at scale.

Within a year, the fat tax was gone. Public backlash was instant. Politicians feared losing elections. Consumers crossed borders for cheaper butter. The one policy that could have actually changed behaviour was rejected by culture.

Because it turns out Denmark values something more than preventing obesity: Livskvalitet—life quality. The culture that cycles everywhere also serves cake at every meeting. Balance is the ideal, and balance means nobody gets to tell you what to eat.

So while Denmark frames obesity as society’s responsibility, solving it would require society to give something up. And Denmark has shown signs that it won’t.

The paradox is the choice.

III. Singapore

Acceptance + Aesthetics + Individual + Punitive

Singapore acknowledges obesity openly. But the concern isn’t really health. It’s aesthetics. K-pop beauty standards, Instagram influencers, cosmetic surgery ads… and it starts early.

In a nation built on optimisation, the body is just another KPI to perfect.

That instinct gave rise to the (in)famous Trim and Fit program, launched in 1992 to make students “fit for the nation.”

The idea was to identify overweight kids, put them through extra workouts, and monitor their diets. But this led to humiliation: public weigh-ins became rituals of shame and playground teasing was enabled by policy.

By 2007, after years of criticism for promoting stigma and eating disorders, the program was scrapped.

But its logic never left. The state may have softened its tone, but society didn’t. The expectation remains: your body reflects your discipline.

And yet, obesity keeps rising. Using Asian BMI cutoffs—which account for higher health risks at lower weights—58% of Singaporean adults now have an unhealthy weight. Youth obesity has climbed even as the aesthetic bar rises higher.

Optimise harder, get worse results.

The paradox is the optimisation.

IV. India

Denial + Aesthetics + Individual + Punitive

India has the highest share of underweight adults globally. India is also the third most obese country in the world.

Both things are true. Welcome to the double burden of malnutrition.

On one side: rapid urbanisation, sedentary lifestyles, and the flood of processed foods into cities have driven obesity rates up. On the other: India still has the world’s largest population of undernourished people.

Different populations, same country. One eating too little, the other eating too much of the wrong things.

Here’s the paradox: Public health policy still fights the old war. Malnutrition gets national programs, subsidised grains, policy attention. But obesity… that’s your problem. An individual failure, not a public health crisis.

And when obesity gets acknowledged, it becomes a matter of aesthetics, marriage markets, and social acceptability. According to a 2023 obesity survey, 70% of respondents said people face bullying or teasing due to their weight in workplaces and social settings.

The state subsidises staples to fight undernutrition. Private markets flood the same cities with cheap processed foods. India chases one crisis while creating the other.

The paradox is the duality.

V. Mauritania

Denial + Aesthetics + Institutional + Supportive

In Mauritania, the story flips completely. Here, obesity isn’t a problem to be fixed but a beauty to be maintained. Larger bodies symbolize wealth, fertility, and marriageability. Abundance signals success.

A bigger body means a better marriage, and therefore, security. In a world where marriage defines survival, parents fatten their daughters out of love.

That belief takes physical form in a practice called leblouh. Girls, some as young as six, are made to consume up to 14,000-16,000 calories a day—almost four times what an adult male bodybuilder eats.

Refusal isn’t an option. In some cases, toes are crushed between sticks or skin pinched to force them to eat.

Mauritania has one of the highest female obesity rates in Africa while male obesity sits among the lowest quartile in the world.

Entire families participate. Communities celebrate it. The government doesn’t intervene—why would it? Culturally, there’s nothing wrong. Obesity here is institutional, supportive, desired.

And yet the health consequences are identical to countries fighting obesity. Same disease, opposite meaning. The same act that causes harm is called care.

How do you solve a problem that isn’t seen as a problem? You can’t. A culture so committed to protecting its daughters ends up harming them instead.

The paradox is the care

Why This Matters

So what? Why does any of this matter beyond cultural trivia?

Because how we define a body decides how we treat it.

Obesity may begin in biology, but it unfolds in culture. And culture decides everything that follows: who gets care and who gets blamed, which bodies are celebrated and which are controlled, whether the problem is you or the world you live in.

Science may diagnose disease, but culture decides which ones deserve care.

Right now, obesity rises everywhere—across all five countries, across all approaches. The meanings just distribute the suffering differently. America profits from it. Denmark preserves comfort despite it. Singapore optimises around it. India denies half of it. Mauritania celebrates it.

None of these stories are really about obesity. They’re about what each culture refuses to give up.

Look, every culture thinks its approach makes sense. None do.

But here’s the thing: if meaning is cultural, it isn’t fixed. It shifts with time, with voices, with who gets heard. And if meaning is cultural, it’s also ours to redefine.

Maybe that’s where the real work begins. Not in finding the right policy or the right program, but in changing the stories we tell about bodies.

Because right now, every culture’s story serves its values first and its people second.

Here is a short feedback form to help us understand how we’re doing. Would you please share your thoughts? Link here. Thank you!

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the weekly food and fitness newsletter published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Editor’s note: It’s October 19th! Our birthday! The Whole Truth Foods has turned 6. And since our birthday falls right in the middle of Diwali festivities, we wanted to chill a bit and skip the chatter on macros or VO2 max. Just happiness max—with family, friends, and food! So today, we’re republishing a reassuring note from Shashank Mehta, co-founder and CEO of The Whole Truth, on Diwali indulgence. :)

— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)

I have a feeling that you have a feeling that we TBT folks are no fun! That we’re those boring know-it-alls talking calorie-counting and body-hacking when everyone else is eyeing that piece of cake. I also have a feeling you might be right, but only partially.

I mean, c’mon. It’s Diwali weekend. There’s a slight nip in the air. The fairy lights and diyas are out. So are the Jalebis and the Gujiyas. Even the staunchest of us can’t resist giving in to that festive feeling. And I firmly believe we shouldn’t even try.

Why? Michael Pollan says it best:

We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

I wholeheartedly agree. I love food. And I love how it brings everyone together. These few days of Diwali (plus Christmas, for me, I admit) are like a warm hug at the end of a tiring year. A hug I sorely need to get ready for the next year.

So, I indulge. Black coffee with a decadent, choco-chip cookie. Aloo-puri for Sunday lunch (and then a long snooze). Some unabashed drinking on teen-patti nights. (I don’t play, I just drink and judge.)

I do it all.

You’ll be just fine

What I don’t do is give up on my hard-earned healthy habits. So I still make it to the gym three times a week (not five). I still do intermittent fasting (especially on days when I know dinner shall be heavy). And I still exercise portion control in my non-indulgent meals (which still are 80% of all meals).

I do all that and I indulge.

Because I’ve found that indulgence isn’t the problem. It’s the ‘complete switch’ that is. You know what I’m talking about. That tendency to write off November and December. That voice in the head that goes, ‘we’ll just start back properly in Jan.’ That liar. That’s the problem.

So don’t give in to that voice. Don’t make it an either-or. Make it and.

Indulge. Have that samosa and that barfi. Live. Laugh. Hug. Celebrate. A few days of fun and family won’t make you fat. In fact, it might be just what you need to refresh that fast-depleting reserve of willpower. That well you’ve been dipping into for the whole year. Have a blast, and re-fill that well. It’s ok. Just don’t completely lose all those other hard-earned good habits. And you’ll be just fine.

PS: Okay, you were right. I’m no fun. Here are four hacks to make even your Diwali indulgences healthier.

1. Indian Sweets

If possible, try and avoid the ones with hydrogenated fats and the ones dipped in sugar syrup. A piece of barfi is better than a gulab jamun dipped in chashni.

2. Portion Control

If I’m being completely honest, I portion control sweets too. I find that the most joyous bites are the first few. After that, I’m just eating out of compulsion. Proof: if I take half a piece of cake on my plate, I feel the exact same happy feeling as when I finish a full piece (or two).

3. Dry Fruits

They are your best friends to nibble on. Especially on those drinking nights. Where the combination of savoury bhujia and sweet gujiya can reallllyyy get out of hand. (Okay, now you know too much about me.)

4. Intermittent Fasting

If you know dinner shall be at Nani’s, and Nani shall shower love, prep for it in the day. Fast. Then eat big. But eat slow. You’ll enjoy the food even more.

There. Done.

PPS: Maybe I need help. Or just cake. Yup, cake.