The Nawab got it Right!

My cardiologist friends, who look me in my belly and enquire how regular my tennis is going in the monsoon months, are at a loss to explain why the last king of Oudh, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah lived till the age of 64 without  needing their expensive services of coronary angioplasty or a bypass surgery.

The nawab had quite a few patently conspicuous “risk factors”. Pictures show him as being grotesquely obese, and tales of his “nawabi” laziness abound.  He is said to have been so dependent on his servants to help him wear his shoes that he could not waddle out of his palace before the British soldiers arrived, as his servants had fled, and he was shoeless.

Plump lazy people are usually fond of food, as his royal highness was. He is said to have instructed his cooks to change the cooking medium (probably ghee) to fry each side of his royal “parathas” separately.

On hearing this tale, I got the uncanny feeling that his cardiologists had intuitively tipped the nawab that reheating of cooking medium could be harmful to his heart. How else could he, in the 18^th century, possibly know that oils and fats which exist in their cis- chemical form in natural states change to trans- fats when heated repeatedly? Modern cardiologists swear by their dangling stethoscopes, that these trans- fats, regardless of their sources and backgrounds, arise from reheating of oils and are most notorious in clogging arteries of our heart.

This vital health tip somehow got obscured in the next two hundred years till the coronary arteries of Bill Clinton, the smart-figured, energetic American president clogged necessitating two surgeries in 2004 to restore blood flow to the crying muscles of his choking heart. Mind you, he was neither fat nor lazy as the nawab had been.

Mr Clinton’s fondness for food was as legendary as that of the nawab. He admits to gourging passionately on fast food and ham-burgers for most of his pre heart surgery life. Once on an arial survey of a disaster-hit region, he is belived to have seen the Big Mac’s “M” and cheered, “Hey, We will get burgers here!”.

What possibly made all the difference to their hearts was the amount of cis- fats in the ‘parathas’ that the nawab ate and the trans- fats in the chips and burgers the American president consumed. If samosas and jilebees are something you can’t do without, get them from your halwai in the morning when he has started the day with a fresh supply of oil. Come evening, and after several sessions of frying and reheating, the trans- fat content shoots up enormously making them toxic to our hearts.

Home makers who pray for their husbands’ health and logevity would do well to use less quantities of oil, fry shallow rather than deep, and change the oil frequently when frying puris or samosas for their beloved husbands.

As published in HT City(Hindustan Times) dated 14 August, 2011.