Abhijit: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Rationable Interviews one more time. Today I have a very special guest, somebody I've been following for quite a while.

This is becoming a trend. I'm doing a lot of these interviews, but of course, the people I get on to interview here are people I admire, whose content I follow, and who I think are doing some fantastic work. So today, it's Krish Ashok, and he is quite the Renaissance man. He's written a book called Masala Lab. He's got an Instagram channel called Masala Lab. He has been debunking food myths and knows the science, history, and geography behind pretty much every form of Indian food there is; at least, I'm sure it goes beyond that. The thing I'm focused most on is on the pseudoscience, but of course, Krish does this all alongside his day job where he works at TCS. Krish, welcome to the Rationable interview, and let's get this show on the road.

Krish Ashok: Thank you for having me.

Abhijit: It's going to be a spicy conversation, I'm sure. Puns are allowed all. So, first of all, just give me a little background. Like, I'm sure I missed a whole bunch of stuff there. I'm including, of course, your musicianship, and we'll get back into that so that people can download your music on streaming platforms, et cetera. I've already added you on Apple Music, so yeah, tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Krish Ashok: So, I'm an engineer by training, I've been in electronic engineering and so on, and essentially, at that point of time, I was also a semi-professional violinist, a Carnatic violinist, at the time when I was graduating from engineering. And so, the choice was either trying to do a full-time career in music or engineering, and so on.

In a weird way, my father was smart about this. He said, look, the problem with music is that very few people become very successful. Most of the rest of them get nowhere, so you might want to consider that and so on.

So, I ultimately ended up picking, essentially, software, which, again, in the context of 1999, it was sort of like an interesting thing that you had to do. This is the early phase when the software was sort of becoming the thing that a lot of engineers were doing? Not necessarily just building houses or bridges or cars and so on. But software was a thing that everybody was getting into. And I picked it at that time because it was the most amount of money for the least amount of work, which therefore allowed me to figure out what I want to do, meaning that I had, which again, by the way, in 1999, getting Saturday and Sunday off was a big thing. Every other company worked six days a week. Yeah. Software worked five days a week was a big thing then. And so I said, look, I could do music on the weekends; that would gimme a lot of time. And again, software is one of those things where if you get very good at it, you can do a lot in very little time and get yourself a lot of free time to do other things. And it's not; it's not true of mechanical engineering. No matter what you do, you can't build a car any faster.

Abhijit: Yeah, that's true.

Krish Ashok: But if you are really productive and if you're really good at it and you can write source code like really, really fast?

But then, over time, I began to like software and over time, I just ended up being lucky because software ended up eating the world? I mean, everything is now software. So, car companies now hire more software engineers than mechanical engineers.

So, so that's where we are now. So, so that, that's my work side. And I've been, I've been with TCS for about 24 years now. And I head one of the business units called Digital Workplace and so on. So that's been that journey. And then that journey has also taken me to, well, practically all of the major, big countries in the world, we do business everywhere.

And there is also meant that opportunity to, to explore food everywhere else, so, sort of became a foodie. But I've been cooking since I was 13 or 14 years old. My mother had a transferable sort of job. And so I ended up cooking from when I was very young. And, when I went to the US, I had to sort of, I did the usual thing. I said, let me talk to all of these old ladies and get recipes. And then it struck me that they didn't think in terms of recipes. They just said, "Oh, you just add these things." "How do you know? Is it quarter teaspoon or half teaspoon?" I said. "No, till it smells right, or until it feels right."

And it struck me that somehow this practical heuristic knowledge of how our grandmothers did cooking was not captured. I mean, all the cookbooks really just focused on recipes and forced people to think in terms of absolute ratios.

And so that's just really not how people actually cooked. It's a series of heuristics that I began to realize that, well, each one of those heuristics was backed by science, at least most of them. Some pseudoscience seem to have crept in. It's really quite interesting. 90% of the pseudoscience in the world of food comes from men, okay?'

Abhijit: Really?

Krish Ashok: Who don't cook, who just pass judgment, who say, "Oh, this is good. That is good. And so ayurveda that this and all that…" So grandmothers, mothers, they're basically dealing with practical knowledge in the kitchen. It's got to work. It's got to be tasty. And so, therefore, when they say that this is how much water you need to add because, et cetera, et cetera, they may not know it's to, say, account for evaporation loss and so on. They may not know that, but they know it works. So there's that sort of practical knowledge that I said, look, we need to take this practical knowledge and encode it and explain it with science because that's how we'll make sure we don't lose it.

Abhijit: Exactly!

Krish Ashok: because what happens is that, sometimes, like, a few things obviously crept in over the time. Like for example, this belief that you can cut a cucumber and then rub it and then it'll reduce its bitterness and so on…

Abhijit: Yeah. I've had that in the house quite a bit.

Krish Ashok: Clearly doesn't work. But at the end of the day, the idea of considering science to be merely just a way to ask questions down to its first principles, till you understand it, till you get to a point where I can derive all the rest from those first principles.

So that was the goal of Masala lab. And I was pleasantly surprised that nobody had written a book on the science of Indian cooking. And so the book did well. And then my publisher said, you need to be on Instagram, because all the food people are on Instagram.

And so I said, okay, fine. Let me create an Instagram handle, I did about a year and a half ago. And then in the first one year or so, I would post a lot of, like, these algorithms of saying that, "Oh, here's how you can make 20 varieties of dal by just using one algorithm. Here's how you can make yogurt based gravies, there's a kadi in Punjab, there's a kadi in Sindh, there's a kadi in Gujarat, there's a pullisery in Kerala, and there's a morkuzhambu in Tamil Nadu, they're all approximately, roughly the same template. So there's a yogurt reduced with some sort of a starch binder, and then you add spices or vegetables and that's it. That's basically what a yogurt based gravy is. And again, what ended up happening is that lots of people would find it useful and say, oh, this is really useful, because that way, I can truly make like hundreds of variations as opposed to being tethered to one recipe. That was nice.

But nine out of 10 people would then say, you're not supposed to heat yogurt according to Ayurveda. It'll become poison or so on some to some effect. Or they would watch my videos where I'm using a non-stick and say, oh, a non-stick will cause cancer. Or they'd watch me put something in the microwave and say, "oh, microwave! Why are you nuking your food with radiation?" And so it kind of struck me over the last, say, four or five months, that it seemed like before we get down to making people's life easy by bringing in shortcuts and so on. So there's a certain, there's a certain gender angle to that as well. A lot of conveniences have historically been opposed by men. If you've seen the movie Great Indian Kitchen, it's the guys in the house were like no, no pressure cooker. I want all the woodfired stuff, I want the rice to be cooked, I, I want everything to be freshly cooked and so on.

So leave that aside. The social media is just simply amplified such a ton of basic scare mongering about food. So more specifically in food, it's misinformation and it's also scare mongering. And it's like, this is dangerous. That is bad, this is bad, don't use the fridge, don't freeze anything.

I was surprised to find out how scared people are about

Abhijit: what are the major things that are on the top of your mind about things that scare people about cooking?

Krish Ashok: Yeah, so, so the things that, so one is obviously fresh versus like, refrigerated food. Something as basic as that. You'd be surprised by the number of people who are like, "oh, but for food should not be consumed four hours after it's cooked". I said, "what world are you living in?" Many of these are young women who are cooking for their parents or cooking for their in-laws and their husbands, and this is what they've been told, that you're supposed to cook everything fresh because the fridge is very bad. So, high school science will tell you that biological activity slows down with temperature. And, as long as you don't have a power cut, at two or three Celsius very little activities going on, and you can actually store food for days. Several days! Any NRI grad student who's been in the US will absolutely know this to be true.

Abhijit: Their survival depends on it. Around the office lunch table when people would say that, they're like, "wait, you got the same thing that you got yesterday for lunch?" I'm like, "yeah". "But how, why?" I'm like, "I put it in the fridge. I took out another bowl of it. Yeah. got it to work. Like, what's the problem?" And they like, "whoa, how can you do that? How can you eat refrigerated food?" I'm like, "what kind posh life do you live, man?"

Krish Ashok: We all don't have like servants who can cook fresh food for us or a permanent cook or a mother or a wife we can exploit –

Abhijit: Who wakes up at five in the morning to start cooking for you –

Krish Ashok: Exactly. Fresh for you. What world are you living in? And then there is this complete irrational fear, but interesting fear of sugar, which is fair enough. I mean, again, lot of our metabolic diseases are because of overconsumption of sugar and carbohydrates. Fair enough. But it's very, it's very interesting. You'd be surprised by the number of people who believe that their diabetic parents can eat jaggery, but not sugar because it's natural. It is filled with minerals. I said, okay let's debunk that. And that's the one that really got several million views but made such a lot of people, a lot of these Ayurvedic types, very angry saying that, how can you promote a processed chemical product? And so on. And which kind of brings me to the third thing. This whole irrational fear of chemicals.

Abhijit: Yes. Everything is chemicals

Krish Ashok: Your food is chemical too. It's just that, it's all chemicals at the end of the day. So if you're saying that I will not eat chemicals, I mean, you have to starve,

Abhijit: you wouldn't be able to breathe either. Breathe as chemicals as well,

Krish Ashok: But it comes down to this sort of feeling that somehow natural is better than artificial is one. That's one level of the problem. The second level of the problem is that processed is not as good as unprocessed, which is another part of the illusion.

The third thing is that, somehow, the same molecule, if it came from jaggery, is different than if it came from white sugar. This also people believe that sucrose is different. It came from a natural source. So again, it's almost a very basic failure of, I guess, high school chemistry teaching.

To say that a molecule's a molecule, it doesn't matter where it came from, and once it gets inside your body, as far as your small intestine is concerned, it doesn't matter whether it's jaggery or this, it's all being broken down to glucose and fructose. And you're getting more or less the same amount, you're getting a tiny bit more minerals from jaggery. Clearly not enough for your daily allowances and all that, but you're getting it with a ton of sugar.

Abhijit: Absolutely. I think that the education system is a very big part of this because people just don't understand. I had a very deep conversation with a colleague of mine when I was in office and she said that, is I'm having my tea with honey.

I'm like, "great, that's really nice". But she's like, "it's better than sugar".

I'm like, "how come?" So she's like, "it is, look it up." So I did look it up. So in her defence, honey is sweeter than sugar so therefore you might need to use less of it, slightly. And it has a few other minerals, et cetera. So on the whole, overall it has slightly more nutritional value as compared to sugar, but not enough to really have a trade-off there.

Krish Ashok: Yeah. How much honey are you actually adding? So therefore, as a proportion 99% of that is still sugars. I mean, in that percent of all the other things, antioxidants and minerals. Yeah. I think, you know why common this thing is that, if somehow we could convince people to think in terms of denominators at their sizes, it's very simple. For example, people say white sugar is filled with chemicals. I said, okay let's assume for a moment that it is indeed filled with chemicals and I'm also not doubting the fact that in the making of sugar, it has to be bleached. A lot of chemicals have to be added to get it to the shape that it finally is. Understood. So the first question is, do you know what chemicals go in? Many people simply don't just know it's chemicals.

What chemicals? Second thing is, let's assume that you know what those chemicals are. How much of those residues are left in your actual sugar, should be the actual question.

Abhijit: Exactly.

Krish Ashok: It's not whether what is used in a factory that matters. See, by the way, to make fertilizers, to make pesticides, to make literally anything, a lot of the ingredients in a factory will all be toxic.

Many will be okay. That's just how chemical engineering works. So the point is that, you can't go by what actually went in. By that logic, sodium is explosive, chlorine is literally a bio weapon, but sodium chloride is salt. You don't go on calling salt poisonous because it's ingredients were actually dangerous.

So like that, I think that's number one. The next thing that happens is the fact that how much of the chemicals actually are in sugar. So, you ask that question and then you point people to say that look according to the FSSAI, which is the Food Standards Authority of India, if you're selling a packaged sugar product, by law, it is required to be 99.5% sucrose. And FSSAI also means, if you just do a little bit of reading, you'd know that, if I have a factory and if I'm making a packaged product with a ISI symbol and all this, FSSAI symbol and all that – yes, I know this is India; yes, of course, theoretically, you could say you could bribe and all that. Boss, I mean, come on. This is 2022. Surely there has to be some quality checks in the factory. Somebody's checking something, somebody's verifying. Some reports have to go. There has to be some framework of some kind of testing happening.

So even if you assume it's not hundred percent, do you really believe that a Tata or a Godrej or an ITC is going to leave behind tons of chemical residue in your sugar  – ask yourself that basic question – and poison you. So, therefore, let even assume they did. But it is legally required to be tested to be 99.5% sucrose, which leaves 0.5% for all of your dangerous chemical impurities to remain.

So now consider in a teaspoon of sugar, what is 0.5% of that? And also remember that there is no such thing as a poison. The dose makes the poison. That's the rule zero of pharmacology. So, for example, every spice that you eat, technically, is a poison because a plant literally produce those molecules to kill insects. That's what a spice is.

Abhijit: literally blew my mind. Boom.

Krish Ashok: Yeah. So why do spices exist? It's because, what we consider flavour molecules are actually antibacterial, antifungal, insecticide molecules that the plants produce to prevent animals from eating them. That's exactly what –

Abhijit: I did not know. This is amazing!

Krish Ashok: Yeah. So, different plants do it in different ways. How does an onion do it? The moment you damage or cut an onion cell, what happens is that there's an enzyme that leaks out. And then it mixes with oxygen. And it's a chain reaction that takes about 30 seconds to happen. And everyone in the world who's ever been in the kitchen knows what happens after that. 30 seconds later, this enzymatic reaction produces a volatile sulphurous molecule called syn-propanethial-S-oxide, whose name is not important, but it's volatile.

So it floats up. And then, when it hits your eyes, it breaks down into dilute sulfuric acid. So, why do people cry? An onion is literally doing an acid attack on your eyes! It's very mild because you're big. But imagine this on a small insect. That's why insects don't go anywhere near onions.

And so, the point is that people sometimes forget that plants are living things that don't want to die. So, they have their own defence mechanisms. Except that humans are smart and we figured out ways in which we can use even what is ultimately a poison to our own good.

And so what happens is that particular molecule is super aromatic. And so we like the smell of it. We don't mind that it makes us tear up, but we like the smell of it. And what we also know is that when you heat it up, it changes into another thing that's not as teary, which is why cooked onion does not take you cry. So you take something like clove. Clove has a molecule called Eugenol, which is one of the strongest anti-bacterial, antifungal compounds out there. A hundred percent pure eugenol is toxic to human beings as well.

Abhijit: Oh really?

Krish Ashok: Yeah. So, another example is nutmeg. Nutmeg is nutmeg actually has an aromatic molecule, which again, the nutmeg plant uses to kill insects and pests and bacteria and so on. That molecule is a precursor molecule for ecstasy.

Abhijit: Whoa!

Krish Ashok: So, what happens? You could literally get high if you overdose on nutmeg. And not only that, it'll also make you sick because it's actually pretty toxic. Your liver will want to throw it out. The other interesting thing is that, in India – and grandmothers knew this – not that they knew it was a methamphetamine analogue and all of that, but what they did know is that they would actually add it to milk a little bit to milk, makes babies slightly high and puts them to sleep easier. India has a tradition of giving babies , mild ecstasy highs!

Abhijit: (Laughing) that is amazing!

Krish Ashok: So that was the point that I wanted to make, which kind of brings me to this other point, which is the other video that I made about jaggery. So, FSSAI standard is that, one, sugar has to be 99.5% sucrose. Jaggery has to be 90% sugars. That's the rule. It usually is anywhere from 80 to 85% sucrose, 5% fructose, and the remaining 10% is moisture, molasses, and all those other minerals and so on. That's because it's relatively less processed and so on. Now here's the interesting thing. If you've seen how jaggery is made, it's not made in a factory. It's made by like a bunch of villagers in an open pit is how it's made, by the way.

Abhijit: Yes, exactly. I've seen that happen.

Krish Ashok: And so, it turns out that pure unprocessed jaggery is utterly terrible. It is dark brown in colour. It's messy, it's sticky. Nobody wants that. So what do our entrepreneurs jaggery entrepreneurs do? They bleach it.

Abhijit: Oh!

Krish Ashok: They bleach it with sodium hypochlorite. They use anhydrous powder to reduce the moisture. And they also use a couple of other chemicals to increase the pH because jaggery is pretty high pH, it's very acidic.

Abhijit: Is that so?

Krish Ashok: If you add raw, unprocessed jaggery to milk, it'll curdle the milk. That's how acidic it is. You can, like, make paneer with it. So acid will curdle milk. People need that jaggery to be not as acidic. They do all of this and people are still under the illusion that jaggery is unprocessed.

The only difference is that sugar is processed in a factory where there is regulation, where there are people with engineering degrees and quality controls and the government looking over you. And jaggery is made by people with absolutely no knowledge of this at all. And they just know, by sleight of hand, that I need to dump one sack of sodium hypochlorite, one sack of this chemical. It's completely unregulated.

Abhijit: I'm not having jaggery again,

Krish Ashok: that's the problem.

Abhijit: It's not "gud" for you.

Krish Ashok: So, my point is that, you are privileged enough, you may know a jaggery maker who you absolutely trust, who perhaps makes it in the best possible way. Maybe he even gets an FSSAI stamp – fantastic go for it.

Jaggery's actually delicious in many Indian dishes, it tastes better than sugar. But if you want to say bake with it at all, it's terrible. Not great for baking at all. It won't really work well with baking situations at all. The point is, I'm not asking people to, say, prefer sugar over jaggery. That's not the point. I'm saying that all the scepticism that you healthily exhibited to sugar – what are the chemicals that are going in, how are these factories treating this, how is the quality check happening – et cetera. All that scepticism that all of you just showed. That's fantastic. All I'm saying is, please show it for jaggery. Don't be choosy about it. Show it for anything. And again, don't have this naturalist fallacy. In many cases it can be dangerous. There's a reason why there is modernity, and we have 8 billion people now because people didn't die from eating unpasteurized milk and die from tetanus and tuberculosis. We built a modern healthcare system where we know what food safety is and so on. Nobody's doubting the problems of over consumption of calories and all that diabetes. Yes, all of that is there. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that I will eat raw milk, which is one of the most deadly, dangerous things you can do.

Abhijit: The whole raw milk thing went crazy in the west for quite a while.

Krish Ashok: Insane. Insane. They had to literally ban it. And you literally had to ban the sale and transportation of raw milk.

Abhijit: I've seen that. And then next thing they've got raw water happening, which is unfiltered water from some random stream.

Krish Ashok: You know, the interesting thing we have in the last 20 years, we've had the switch where more people in the world died from lifestyle diseases than from infectious diseases for the first time. This is progress. In the sense that, for most of the last thousand years, people either died from smallpox, malaria, cholera, dysentery, and every one of these is an infectious disease –airborne and waterborne. Cities like London and Bombay and Chennai and Delhi have had cholera outbreaks that killed hundreds of thousands, if not billions. So you should actually see the fact that more people are dying from cancer, heart disease and diabetes and so on, than all of the other things as a positive.

People sometimes forget that. So, all of these newer things or diseases of age. You didn't see them in the past because people didn't live that long. They died before they could get cancer or heart disease and so on. And now you have a world where, you could like insert any number of stents to keep your arteries from blocking till you're like 80, 85, happily.

I think people sometimes forget that the past wasn't great. There's a rosy whole illusion, fallacy, of believing that this past was amazing, everybody lived very long and so on. No, life was nasty, brutish, and short. People had eight kids out of which five survived. One died from smallpox and two probably died from measles or cholera and so on. And then young men died in wars. And then if they got the slightest infection, they died from tetanus and so on. So I think, we sometimes forget that what could be fixed with a vaccine today, people would just simply died from. People would die if you have a tooth infection because there was no anaesthesia to pull your tooth out. Unless you want to do it without anaesthesia, which by the way, many people did.

Abhijit: Oh, that's horrible, the thought there. But speaking of infectious diseases, onions in particular, the evolutionary skill of onions of protecting themselves and having a very long shelf life has also led to a lot of pseudoscientific ideas about onions, which I encountered during the Covid pandemic where there was this lady whose video on TikTok went viral. This is before TikTok got banned, of course. And she basically said, all you need to do to cure Covid – and I'm not kidding – is to eat chopped onions with salt sprinkled on them every day. That was like a hundred percent cure. I was like, in that case then, 90% of people in Northern India would never get covid in the first place because they do that every day for every meal.

Krish Ashok: That if they actually have that much of onion, you could also make this argument that their breath would be so bad, that social distancing won't be a problem. And thus, that could actually have cured or prevented covid if you did that. So on a lighter note, that way.

Abhijit: Exactly. And there was, actually, I'm not even kidding, there was a WhatsApp forward where they spoke about actually putting raw cloves of garlic and letting them dissolve in your mouth to prevent yourself from getting covid, which does exactly the same job of social distancing.

Plus of course, there's been this long there's been a very age old home remedy of keeping onions under your bed, which apparently absorb all bacteria from nearby. So if you have a fever, you're supposed to put a chopped onion under your bed and that is supposed to cure you for some reason.

Krish Ashok: Yeah. The onion's actually good at keeping bacteria away from itself.

Abhijit: From itself. Not anybody else. It's not going to just suck

Krish Ashok: absorb. It has no evolutionary interest in absorbing other people's bacteria.

Abhijit: exactly. So these kinds of things led to a lot of these kind of folklore-y, pseudoscientific ideas, and turmeric, which is even more recent, which has now gained so much attention abroad that it's come back to India.

Krish Ashok: Yeah. Once something gets Western validation, we are obviously happy to say, "oh, we did it first".

Abhijit: Exactly. Ayurveda's True! Yay! But have you seen anything about turmeric? Like, I mean, is it genuinely beneficial? Because I wrote something about this a few years ago, and at that point of time, the jury was kind of out, has anything–

Krish Ashok: So here's the thing. So, one of the complicated things about nutrition is that the whole concept of a single ingredient super food is bullshit. And the reason it's bullshit is because it's nearly impossible to prove because this is too for you to truly prove something like this, you would've to feed someone just that thing over an extended period of time.

And that would generally be called a human rights abuse. You can't really experiment on a human being. So you'd to do this on rats and so on. And unfortunately, we are not rats. And so it doesn't really transfer. So a lot of nutritional studies around single ingredients are almost always to be taken with a pinch of salt. Because you could literally prove anything.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Krish Ashok: And that you could do studies in such a way to show that, "oh, I did this in this population, and this population that was not given turmeric showed this and this population was given turmeric showed some slight improvement in some factor and so on," and you'd find that, out of ten studies, maybe five of them showed something else.

Because the problem is that it depends on who you pick, what their genetics are, and what their lifestyle is and so on. So, in general, stop believing in the idea of super foods. There is no doubt that turmeric, per se, is a fantastically healthy vegetable. There is no doubt about it.

Abhijit: Absolutely.

Krish Ashok: As much as a carrot is, as much as a spinach is, or a kale or broccoli or anything. Each one of these vegetables being a vegetable, they bring a lot of good things to the mix. They bring antioxidants to the mix, they bring fibre to the mix, for the most part. And therefore, they're not too many calories for the, unless it's a potato or starchy vegetable, they're not too many calories.

So, they're generally fantastic things to eat. And so, a diet that includes turmeric is good. It's not bad at all. But also consider that the way in which we tend to eat turmeric on a daily basis is not the fresh root.

Abhijit: Yeah.

Krish Ashok: it's the dehydrated powder. And the process of dehydration largely will destroy some of the really more volatile antioxidants and things like that. That's just the way it is. So, you are only getting that dehydrated part. And not only that in one dish, any good cook will tell you don't add more than a quarter teaspoon. So therefore, effectively, a four member household is getting one quarter of a one quarter teaspoon.

Abhijit: Yeah, exactly.

Krish Ashok: So, whatever benefits you think you're going to get you, you're not eating enough turmeric for it to even register in that. Of course there are people who will mix it to milk and drink.

At that point, another question has to be asked. Normally, when the people do surgeries there's a protocol. They have to have a protocol of asking the patient questions before they come for surgery. And if they answer yes to any one of them, surgery cancelled. Sorry. Please don't do that and come back. For example, before certain surgeries are not supposed to eat certain things if, especially if your surgery is happening in your stomach and so on.

So, for every surgery, there's a protocol. Things you cannot do. Like if you're undergoing some surgery, you can't take certain kinds of say BP medication because that could mess with your heart and they don't want to deal with that.

So, they'll have some protocols like that in place. And they said that, well, as of now, this silly habit of drinking turmeric mixed with water to cure covid has become such a huge menace. It became such a common thing during the early wave of the pandemic, that people were coming into surgeries after drinking, like, turmeric water for weeks on end. And what people don't realize is that turmeric also has a molecule that's a blood thinner. And imagine what happens when a surgeon cuts you and you're on a blood thinner and your blood won't clot, it's a nightmare.

Abhijit: Oh, that is nasty. But they won't divulge that kind of information.

Krish Ashok: So, surgeons actually to say, no, we need to add this to a checklist. Ask the patient, are you drinking turmeric is not a question they've had to ask before coming to surgery. So, I think people sometimes forget that the thing is that these are not, there are no single magic pills.

Abhijit: Indeed.

Krish Ashok: You want the benefits of turmeric, fantastic. Generally, eat very healthy food, and then include fresh turmeric when you get an opportunity to in your diet. That's great. That's all you can do. You can't like just bite into turmeric three times a day and expect that it'll somehow prevent Alzheimer's for 10 years down the line and so on. That's just not how it works.

Abhijit: And it has some serious side effects as well. In fact, I interviewed Dr Abby Phillips about a year ago, and he's an absolute powerhouse when it comes to this.

Krish Ashok: And he deals with most of the nonsense that people then end up consuming these things. The first organ that gets damaged in your body is the liver, and that's what he specializes in.

Abhijit: So, he's been dealing with so many cases when it comes to liver failure due to, and liver toxicity when it comes to turmeric, when it comes to ashwagandha, when it comes to giloy, because people have been chugging this by the litre throughout the entire covid period.

Krish Ashok: You were never meant to eat that much. That is just not meant to eat that much. Again, let's always remember, here's something else that, that people just simply don't realize. Very, let's do go at it step by step so even as a person who's not a science graduate can understand this.

Safe to say we are not plants. We are animals. Human beings are animals. So point number two, animals largely tend to share lot of similar things when it comes to muscle structures, bones, and at least mammals, let's just say. Put it that way. And that so on. In the sense, that the chicken works the same way in terms of how it moves around and in terms of how it metabolizes and so on the same way as human beings.

Yeah. It's also safe to say plants are an entirely different alien kingdom of life? So on the one hand, animals move, plants don't move. So, because plants cannot move they have to use biochemistry to defend themselves. Animals, on the other hand, can run away. Or hunt and do all these things.

So, plants have to use purely only chemistry. So many other, there are many other differences. Like for example, salt, even in cooking, salt will dehydrate plant matter. And hydrate meat. So you, you add salt, marinade, et cetera, meat, it makes it juicier. It's because of the salt.

It's not because of all of the other things. It's the salt actually prevents muscles from losing water, which we all know because when you exercise and run a marathon, the first thing you drink is water, sugar, and salt.

Abhijit: Indeed.

Krish Ashok: Why do we eat the salt? The salt, as an electrolyte, will prevent your muscles from losing further water, from getting dehydrated. So, salt has the exact opposite effect on meat as it does on plants. So there are all these fundamental differences. So here's the other interesting thing, though. As hunter gatherers, there was no one diet that human beings had, it's fair to say, depending on where human beings lived. In some places, they were there to hunt a large animal and then they would eat it. And then eat a lot of it in one shot and then not eat for next three, four days. That's one form of life. The other form of life in closer to the tropics, they would dig up roots they would eat berries occasionally, et cetera, in addition to insects and fish if you were close to the coast and so on. Now, a question I often ask is that if you got lost in a forest, and you had no device with you, and you had to survive as long as you can till some rescuers find you – I don't know who that discovery channel guy is…Bear Grylls – how would you go about surviving? One, water. People have some smart ideas. They'll drink off dew drops and all that is fine. Fair enough. Water looks clean enough if your immune system is strong enough. Maybe you can deal clear water, and a pond that may have some bacteria and all that. But, food. What are you going to do for food?

Abhijit: Other than eat bugs

Krish Ashok: so, you'd be surprised by the number of people will say, I'll find, like, fruits. I'll find some tree that has some fruit, and I will attempt to eat that.

That's the most idiotic thing you can do, because other than the hundred or so species of plants that human beings have domesticated, (the meaning of domestication of a plant means prevent it from being a poison and killing you. That's literally what it is.) other than these hundred species of grasses, which are corn, maize, wheat, rice, millets and so on; the root vegetables, like all from the nightshade family, the tomato, brinjals; all of that is from the same nightshade family. Then you have your Cucurbitaceae, the pumpkin family, the mustard family, which everything from to mustard to kale, to cauliflower, is just one family and so on.

Barring these finite set of plants and the few trees that have decided that apes or primates and humans are good candidates for you to eat and poop out your seeds somewhere else so that the tree can grow, so that the tree has a vested interest in making it very attractive, like mangoes and a few other things and so on, literally every other plant on earth is toxic to you.

Abhijit: Wow.

Krish Ashok: So you cannot go to a forest and say, “iska palak banaunga”. I'll just cut some leaf and make palak from it. Please, talk Dr Abby Phillips and find out what will happen. Every single one of them will screw your liver because your liver will be like, "sorry, I was not built for this shit. It's literally that you are not supposed to eat this thing because it has a bunch of these molecules that I've never encountered". Done. That's it. Your liver and kidney cannot deal with it. So you will literally die. Therefore, if you want to survive in a jungle, you want to either kill small animals and eat them raw. Because raw animals are the safest thing to eat. No bacteria, freshly killed. Because an animal has a vested interest in being alive. So it won't have bacteria. But the moment you leave it for half an hour, yes, bacteria will start to come. It's so freshly killed animals. That's why lions don't get, like, food poisoning. They eat fresh kill. And hyenas, on the other hand, have insanely strong digestive and immune systems because they're eating rotten meat. The other thing you can also do is you can literally pick most insects. If you leave out the wings and all of that, you can eat every insect. It'll keep you alive because it's all protein.

Abhijit: So Bear Grylls' was onto something there

Krish Ashok: Yeah, absolutely. So that's the point. And I think people forget that plants are not your friends. They are completely alien kingdom of life that have to survive on this planet without being able to move. But they have the other superpowers like being able to turn sunlight into energy, into sugars. So that's their superpower. So, we've built this relationship with a small set of plants that we use in agriculture. And by the way, those set of plants, they cannot survive in the wild.

Abhijit: Yeah. And even a smaller subset of those are plants or fruits that that you can actually eat raw, because, with most of them, the cellulose will not allow you to break anything down.

Krish Ashok: That's why we distinguish between a vegetable and a fruit. They're all fruits. Except that edible fruits are called fruits. The inedible fruits are called vegetables.

Abhijit: You've blown my mind multiple times in that one stretch. And in this conversation but it is actually fascinating! You had spoken about something in your Google talk that you had given about the differences between animals and plants – essentially they're opposites. So, what are the misconceptions that you've heard about when it comes to animals, especially flesh, when eating meat? Because I've heard a couple of really wild ones, especially from the hardcore vegetarians who say that, meat doesn't get digested. It just sits in your intestines and rots and it stays there and it clogs things up, which is abjectly insane. Like it's, I mean, protein is one of the quickest things to get digested. And it starts straight in the stomach. All the vegetables have to get help from bacteria. But I mean, anything else in that scope of things?

Krish Ashok: I think India has a sort of a very unique love hate relationship with meat. I mean, in the sense that it's bizarre. I mean, if you take South and East India, 98% of the population is meat eating. Only 2% is vegetarian. And in the north it's more like 70% meat eating and 30% vegetarian. So, this geography plays a role in that. So the north and west of India is what historically the dairy built, meaning that very closely tied to diary. And once you have a large dairy culture , don't need to do large scale animal husbandry for meat. Clearly animal husbandry is much harder and more higher effort to do. Rearing sheep and goats and cows and all of that. But once you have a large dairy culture, people can get all their essential amino acids from milk. So, milk is an animal source of protein. Not a plant source of protein, although vegetarians do eat it.

Abhijit: Soy milk.

Krish Ashok: And so once you eat eggs and milk, you create an ecosystem where you don't have to kill.

But even then, there is this very tricky issue that you can get milk, unfortunately, only from 50% of the cow population. Because other 50% is male. Unfortunately, you can't get –

Abhijit: If you try and milk those guys, you're going to get something else.

Krish Ashok: You don't want to do that. So, unfortunately, it's always been a very uncomfortable relationship: "well, I have all these dairy cows, what am I going to do with a males?"

Historically, we didn't have tractors, so we'll use at least some of the males in like, bullock carts and use them for ploughing the land and all of that. You can't necessarily use all of them, but yeah, you still do. The uncomfortable fact was that you ended up having the lower-most segment of Hindu society, the Dalits, would often, they would be the ones who, once the bulls became old, they would take them away and they would consume them. They would make leather goods with them and so on. So that was the untold this thing: I don't want to know what's happening, but, hey, these people, we would treat them like outcasts and so on. So that's been the case with North India. In South India, it's different. The people would just directly consume the beef, which is why in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, or many of these places and North East, beef is just naturally consumed. If you have excess cattle, you could, of course, eat them. That aside, there's always been this sort of notion that the rich and privileged ended up being vegetarian. So, we ended up putting this idea that meat is impure.

India's the only place where the food preferences of the majority are described in terms of what the minority does not eat. You know what I mean? Because nowhere else in the world do people use the term no-veg. That's a very uniquely Indian term.

Abhijit: Is that so?

Krish Ashok: Nowhere in the world, I mean, I've travelled everywhere in the world. Nobody uses the term non-veg. That's a very uniquely Indian term. Majority are non-veg, but they have to describe their eating habits as in terms of what the minority does not eat.

Imagine your basic food preferences identity being based on what some upper caste fellow does not eat.

Abhijit: Wow. Everywhere else is… "just food" and "vegetarian"?

Krish Ashok: Yeah. So, I was at a wedding reception in Kerala. There's this small growing movement amongst the young people that, we've got to change all of these things. A wedding reception would normally have a veg counter and a non-veg counter. This one, basically said "veg" and "regular".

Abhijit: I love it! If I was to get married again, I would definitely do that.

Krish Ashok: you do that! On the one hand, there is that notion of impurity that's always been associated with this. And, over time, that's begun to give rise to a whole bunch of myths about meat being hard to digest. See, on the one hand, of course, yes. Of carbohydrates, fats and proteins, proteins are the hardest to digest because proteins are, I mean, just purely physically the largest, most complicated molecules that you eat. Because sugars are like just glucose that you can directly use. Sucrose is just glucose fructose, split it. You can use starch, which is just polymerized glucose. You can just break it, you can use it. Fats, nothing. You just have to break the glycerol down to fatty acids and you can use it.

So, in terms of the digestive effort that you need to put, proteins are generally the hardest to digest. But again, as I said, none of this business about sitting in your small intestine and rotting happens. Proteins are all completely done by your small intestine.

Nothing is wasted, by the way. See, the thing is that when you actually eat plants most of the stuff you can't digest.

Abhijit: Yeah, very true.

Krish Ashok: That's fibre, that's cellulose. And your body takes everything. And then all the rest that it cannot digest goes into the large intestine, where trillions of bacteria are waiting, "Chalo, aa gaya buffet" (Here comes the buffet!), and then they eat. So, your gut health is based on how much plants you eat because you're feeding them with plants. So it's a very interesting symbiotic relationship. The interesting thing is that I still need to read papers on what happens if you're on one of these ultra-carnivorous diets what happens to your gut microbiome. Will it be now a different kind of gut microbiome that is able to live off whatever you can't digest in meat? But in general you can pretty much digest everything in meat.

Abhijit: That would be very interesting.

Krish Ashok: So this is one sort of common idea that meat takes longer is complicated. It's very hard to digest. Yes, of course all proteins are hard to digest. That's true of dal, it's true of it's true of eggs, it's true of anything. So that's just how proteins are.

The other common misconception also is that this idea that meat will rouse your passions.

Abhijit: I haven't heard that one

Krish Ashok: People who eat non-veg tend to get angry. So, the historical ideas that Kshatriyas ate non-veg, that's why they were warriors. There is also that idea amongst the people that meat rouses passions and make you angry, which, again, is silly. But what's interesting, so that list, that tamasic list, which includes meat, also includes onion and garlic, by the way. So there's a classification of sattvic foods, which are healthy, can be eaten all the time; rajasic, which is largely meat-based and is meant for kings and warriors because they need physical strength. So, that's more protein heavy, but that would only include certain cuts of meat and certain animals; and tamasic, which includes organ meats, onion, garlic.

Amazingly, if you really see the list of things that are tamasic, those are like the most nutritious, healthy things as per modern science.

Abhijit: And probably the tastiest as well.

Krish Ashok: Yeah. Organ meats can be a bit of an acquired taste, but, in general, yeah. So, it is super nutritious, at the very least. Onion, garlic and organ meats and all of these other smaller birds and lizards and things like that. Somehow, because the Indian ecosystem is largely controlled by people who have historically been, at least for the last 2,000 years, vegetarian, and so there's a bunch of these random bits that have been perpetrated about meat and it's quite fascinating. So, you think about government schools and public schools almost by the 1920s, the south realized that one way to get poor people to send their kids to school is to give them food in school. So that's one less mouth to feed, and so they'll send the kids to school, and this has been going on for the last hundred years. And over time that meal has also gotten better. It now includes eggs. And so, you'd be surprised that many of the North Indian states do not give eggs in their midday meals in schools. Why? Because I think, the preference for it is to be vegetarian. It's this idea that somehow the poor are less likely to be vegetarian. Because vegetarian sources of protein are expensive.

Abhijit: Indeed. And you have to have large quantities of,

Krish Ashok: I mean, as I pointed out in one video, that for a villager, say, who's a agricultural labourer, living in a shack of some kind, a kilogram of Toor dal, is like some 140 rupees or something. But a goat or a chicken is free. Because they've they just eat wherever and they reproduce. They give you eggs. As long as you know how to maintain that ecosystem, you get protein for free. As long as you inherited like one or two goats and two chickens you can manage a small household and their protein needs. Again, it's still not enough, but you won't starve. And the cost to you is zero. A lot of people got very angry saying that, how can you say that animal husbandry is not sustainable? Again, people are going around throwing words without understanding what it means. Animal husbandry is a giant commercial farm, caged hens, huge cattle farms in the US. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the 70% of Indian farmers who basically have like small holdings and like a couple of animals.

Abhijit: Yeah, very true. So, in India, what do you think is the ecological impact of all the animals that we are using commercially, like primarily consuming goats and chickens? And fish with a little bit of pork thrown in –

Krish Ashok: And beef, the south and the east consumed a fair amount of beef, actually. There are no political restrictions on beef consumption. Beef of course, is still not consumed by the upper caste Hindus, but it is definitely consumed by Christians and Muslims and also the Dalits. And then in Kerala, everyone eats beef, and in the northeast as well. So, in a sense, I think it's quite interesting. It is, on the one hand, large scale animal husbandry is unsustainable for the planet. It is the second largest producer of carbon, after the automobile, fossil fuel industry, after fossil fuels, it's food. It's basically animal husbandry, which is the largest producer of greenhouse gases. And the bulk of that is actually the beef industry in Brazil and in the US, Canada and China. The biggies. Now, India is a very weird place in that sense. We have one third of the world's cattle. But our beef consumption is largely low, but we are the largest exporter of beef in the world.

Abhijit: Exactly. We are the largest.

Krish Ashok: What are you going to do with all of those male cattle? Of course, they have to be exported. So, for all the hypocrisy about saving cows, we are the largest exporter of beef. That's number one. And the second thing is that we are now to supply the growing demand as we are becoming wealthier and wealthier. There are poultry farms that are using caged chickens that, again, as it continues to increase, it is going to become unsustainable at some point. Chicken is still not as much of a problem. If you look at the carbon cost, the ratio of the calories that you need to feed to how many calories you get back, beef is super inefficient compared to poultry. That said, there are no industrial mutton farms, there are no industrial cattle farms, but we still have one third of the world's cattle. And, speaking to an environmentalist who gave me this –  it might either make your audience very angry or it might blow their mind, or it might do both – which is that he said that grain fed cattle, specifically, tend to produce a lot more of that methane which is our problem, because they're not grass fed. Their stomachs were designed for grass, but you're feeding them grains because you want them to grow fat fast. And so they end up producing… farting a lot more methane. In India, it's largely grass fed, but are not just grass fed cows in cities as they are largely eating garbage. It's not like they're eating like pristine pastures and all that. They're largely eating garbage for the most part. And that other uncomfortable fact is that a cow, as long as it's living, it's generating greenhouse gases. So, I say that, technically speaking, India would reduce net emissions if it started consuming more beef. Because you'd kill those animals rather than let them live 40 years. But if beef becomes so popular that you then end up increasing the population of cattle that you have, then you're going to increase emissions.

So it's sort of like this curve. So that's the part I wanted to say. There's an argument to consume beef up to a point.

Abhijit: Exactly. We don't want to get too fond of it.

Krish Ashok: Exactly.

Abhijit: There's one more thing which I've been trying to figure out for years actually. I've asked everybody I can think of: I asked my barber, I've asked my wife, I've asked my parents-in-law, what is garam food and thanda food; Tahseer or tehseer, however it's pronounced. Have you figured out what that is?

Krish Ashok: No. This is something that actually me and Dr Abby Phillips collaborated a while back and we did a post on Instagram, a joint post, on why this is bullshit. And it obviously got a lot of angry comments. It's never a great way to communicate science to someone by first invalidating their traditional belief systems. It doesn't work that way.

Abhijit: No, fair enough.

Krish Ashok: So, I'm more interested in understanding where this classification came from and why. If you look at every traditional medical system in the world, be it European, the pre-modern era, pre Renaissance era medicine, Greek medicine, Unani, which is sort of more Arabic medicine and so on,

Abhijit: it's become Arabic.

Krish Ashok: Then you have, within India you have Ayurveda and Siddha, which are both different by the way. So the siddha more in the south and Ayurveda more the north. And then you have other tribal systems of medicine that you have traditional Chinese medicine, And Japanese, African and so on. So, obviously, every one of these societies had a vested interest in trying to understand the human body. And they would do different things. So they would observe, they would see what works, what kind of food works, what doesn't work, and so on. They would cut up cadavers to see what's happening when somebody died. There were ways in which they attempted to do these things. And again, I think what happens is that there is only so much you can understand about the body without having a microscope and looking at it at the cellular level. So, in the history of medicine, the microscope represents that pivotal shift because what the microscope essentially does is that, all of a sudden, it says, life is actually made up of smaller units. And, it turns out, it's not just us, but there are all these other things like bacteria and fungi. And by the way, almost all of the problems we know, we only understood when that happened, because of these other single cell things that upset our entire system. And it took like four or five hundred years to then figure out there's an immune system. So therefore, you could then design a vaccine to exactly do this and so on. Or that, by the way, this pathogen releases this particular chemical, and therefore I can give you something that neutralizes that. Or I can design a molecule that manages to get through the cell wall of this particular bacterium. So that's why you have antibiotics and so on. Every one of these things that required you to first understand that life is made up of cells. Cell is their single unit of life. That gave birth to the germ theory of disease, which is very central. So, before germ theory of disease, people had to just make intelligent guesses. And to be fair to them, they built models that worked for them. I mean, worked as well as it could. So the European model was that things are caused by bad air.

So in fact, literally malaria means bad air. Again, that's getting kind of close to maybe germs, but not quite, because they didn't really know what was, and they really couldn't justify what was good air versus bad air, which is why a lot of the older ideas of when people were sick, they would be sent to the countryside to get good air. The whole concept of sanatoriums and all of that came and hospitals were outside the city. Helped in some cases, but clearly didn't help in many other cases if the pathogen was inside. You eat certain foods, you are observing the human being go through their motions and so on, and you find certain things cause like say, acid reflux. And obviously I think, digestion of protein also is thermogenic, meaning that it generate heat. When you have to break down amino acids and it leads to urea and to prevent ammonia from building up in your blood, that reaction generates heat. Which is why if you eat like a full steak, you'll start sweating because your body temperature will rise and therefore your brain will make you sweat to bring that temperature down. It's all thermostasis to keep your temperature same. So it's just that you would observe things like that. You would observe the fact, for instance, like a ginger sort of burns your throat, for example. You would observe that pepper also burns your throat. You would observe chilies…you wouldn't observe chilies because chilies didn't come to India until the 18th, 17th century. So that's a separate thing, but pepper and ginger. You would also have made observations about what was seasonal, and what was not. And then things that were seasonal are far more likely to be fresher than things that were not seasonal. Over time, you ended up with this classification of your idea was that, this is hot and this is cold, and you retroactively observe phenomena and then you came up with a set of combinatorial ideas that explain those things. You don't mix fish with diary. You can say, fish is cold, that is hot, or whatever it is, but you don't therefore mix. But if you really look at it practically, both fish and dairy can spoil very easily if you didn't have refrigeration, which nobody had two thousand years ago.

And so the last thing you want to do is combine both of those things back in the day. So, basically many of these sorts of rules, like combining acidic things with milk will curdle it. You didn't have really ways to preserve it and many things like that. So therefore, that's how you came up with this sort of random classification. It's seemingly random. Because we now have refrigeration, you can throw out all of those rules literally, you can throw out all those combination rules. And now because we know the germ theory and we know cells, we also know thermostatic equilibrium and all that. We also know that what you eat cannot change the temperatures of your body. Absolutely cannot. Because if it could, you be dead.

Abhijit: Exactly. We have warm blooded creatures for reason.

Krish Ashok: So what you eat cannot change the pH of your blood, which is why alkaline diets are bullshit.

Abhijit: Absolutely.

Krish Ashok: Science is dope actually did a collaboration video on that, on his channel as well.

Abhijit: Ah, I've got a couple of videos on that.

Krish Ashok: So likewise, what you eat cannot change the temperature of your body. So therefore, what might have originally been a metaphorical classification of that, so that you have some combination tools, meaning that you can't combine this, you can't combine that. Now it's just become this absolute – that this is hot, this is cold. You must not mix hot and cold. People have lost the context for why people did those things in the past. They did not have refrigeration. They did not understand the germ theory of disease and so on. I would actually argue that the people who applied it back in the past, they were being sensible about it because that's the only knowledge they had, and they applied it consistently.

They're not useful any more. In the sense that you can eat anything you want at any point of time. You can combine anything you want at any point of time. It doesn't really matter. What obviously matters is how much you eat. And what is your macro mix you have in a fibre, getting enough protein, that's what matters more rather than these small, specific things, which by the way, back in the day might have been a life or death thing because it could have caused you food poisoning. Many other things that could have happened, which they didn't know why. And so they just said, oh, it's because of hot and cold.

Abhijit: Ah, okay, thanks for clearing that up. That was fantastic. I think this is a good place to kind of wrap things up for today. I'm sure I'll get back in touch with you for a lot more because there's I'm going to wait for our, people who are watching to kind send in a few questions if they have any.

Krish Ashok: Sure.

Abhijit: And then we can do this all over again. This was, this has been by far one of the most fascinating conversations I've had yet on this channel.

Krish Ashok: Super!

Abhijit: So, thank you so very much for coming on. This was absolutely fantastic. Where can people find you? Where can people get in touch with you, ask you questions, watch your content?

Krish Ashok: So, @_MasalaLab on Instagram, @KirshAshok on Twitter (X), and LinkedIn, if you want to ask me IT related questions.

Abhijit: Are you on YouTube by any chance?

Krish Ashok: YouTube. Yes. Just Krish Ashok on YouTube as well.

Abhijit: Alright, wonderful. And, of course, you have a book called Masala Lab.

Krish Ashok: Masala Lab, yes. Which is available on Amazon. Yes.

Abhijit: Wonderful.. And so guys, that's the end of the interview for now. Thank you so much for watching and thank you, Krish for joining us in Rationable interviews.

References and Links

• Krish on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_masalalab

• Krish on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krishashok

• Masala Lab by Krish Ashok: https://amzn.to/41lRWO3

  Krish's Music

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