Health

صحت

Sehat

Health has been at the forefront of this project and the main reason why I started this blog. I have seen many close family members and friends in the South Asian community suffer from diseases like diabetes, heart disease and in some cases, cancer. Just to give you an idea, people in the UK from South Asian communities are about twice as likely to develop diabetes compared with people from white European backgrounds. South Asian people are also more likely to develop diabetes at a younger age. Coronary heart disease (CHD) is also more common in South Asian people, as is the risk of dying early from CHD.

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Experts have linked the higher likelihood of these diseases in South Asians to diet, lifestyle and ways of storing fat in the body (tendency to store fat around the belly area). As a South Asian person, it's difficult and heartbreaking to see and know of so much illness in my community. It also frightened me that’s where I was headed too. Although I can't change certain aspects of my body that I've inherited because of my ethnicity, it reassured me that I could prevent these diseases with dietary and lifestyle changes. I have so much love for my culture and its food, but there are aspects of our diet, like deep fried snacks and sweets and excessive meat consumption in Pakistani culture, and attitude around food we need to seriously reevaluate.

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Through Sabzi Khor I want to explore and present a possible alternative, where we can still enjoy our food and our culture without it being detrimental to our health. A sustainable solution.

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There is plenty of information on the health benefits of having a vegan diet which you can research for yourself, but the main health benefits are that vegans suffer less from heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers. If going plant based or mostly plant based is one way to prevent the illnesses South Asians suffer from, then I’m all here for it and will sing it from the rooftops! And so this blog has allowed me to present my own and existing plant based recipes from South Asia as well as experiment with alternative ingredients and cooking methods to make these much loved dishes more loving to our bodies and the environment.