How to Make Indian Favourites Diabetes-Friendly

Making Indian food diabetes-friendly is mostly a matter of how a dish is built and what goes on the plate beside it, not of giving the dish up.

The most useful finding from Indian glycaemic index research is that form matters as much as ingredient. The study's authors concluded that merely being a whole grain-based food does not qualify for a lower GI — processing and structure change the result. The same jowar measured 84.1 as a roti and 61.3 as an idli.

So the changes that work are small and structural:

• Add a protein to the dish, not after it. Curd with biryani, an egg with poha, extra dal in the khichdi.
• Put vegetables in, not on the side. Beans, carrot and peas cooked into the pulao rather than served as a token salad.
• Shrink the grain, not the meal. Half the rice, twice the sabzi, and the plate still looks full.
• Eat the vegetables and protein first, then the rice or roti.
• Leave the deep-frying for occasions, not weeknights.

None of this asks you to cook different food. It asks you to change the ratio inside food you already make — which is the same idea as the plate method, applied to a single dish rather than a whole thali.