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Millet, a safe bet in your daily meal

Adaptable to various soils and temperatures, foxtail millet is pretty accessible in India

Include foxtail millet as an essential item in your regular shopping bag. For it has been a favourite with traditional Indian cuisine for long. With organic and locally-grown foods becoming more popular in certain countries, it’s time that we take a look at our own backyards for some healthy crops. Foxtail millet as the name suggests, belongs to the millet family and is a whole grain. As a matter of fact, millets are supposed to be one of the oldest cultivated foods known to the human race. Those who are fond of growing a kitchen-garden can actually lend a thought to sowing in millets as part of their organic farm harvests. These coarse drought-resistant grasses which are often called ‘little rice’, have been really popular in Africa, China and India for many centuries now. Due to lack of awareness, they are however not that widely consumed.

Nutritionally speaking, the calorie-value of foxtail millet is similar to other millets as well as cereals. The biggest advantage with this millet is that it contains almost three times more fibre than rice and wheat. So ideally, this could be a great food on the meal plan of weight-watchers and diabetics. It also offers more minerals than any other common grain you may think of. Besides, foxtail millet does not consist of gluten and can therefore be eaten by persons with celiac disease.

Incidentally, the millet can be cooked along with rice or all by itself. In fact, food-bloggers frequently write about using this ingredient as an integral salad to prepare a line of home-cooked recipes like khichdi, idli, dosa and upma in large quantities. So friends, are you still dilly-dallying over millets? Please don’t. Just make this one-in-a-million health-agent indispensible to your everyday diet.

The writer is a nutritionist

( Source : dc )
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