Small Millets Makes Glucose our Friend & Life-Giver: Dr. Khadar Vali
By CHHAVI CHAWLA
Dr. Khadar Vali is an eminent, independent food and health scientist based in Karnataka. As the world gets ready to celebrate the International Year of the Millets in 2023 at the behest of India, he is considered the person who has single-handedly worked towards the resurgence of this ancient grain and is rightly known as ‘The Millet Miracle Man.’
Those familiar with Khadar are also familiar with his disease reversing protocols which are a package of recommendations of specific types of Small Millets to eat, and herbal decoctions to drink, for almost every health condition. He currently has over 120 conditions listed including fourteen types of cancers. His scientifically tested protocols have traveled far and wide and people that have not met him write back to him from different parts of the world, recounting the success of his recommendations.
On the eve of his visit to Tustin, CA on July 4, at Chinmaya Mission (for more info: saveragirl2020@gmail.com) where he will be giving a talk, he spoke with India-West.
Q: How did you chance upon these grains?
A: As I searched for solutions to the rapid rise in diseases, I thought of how our ancestors hardly suffered from them the way we do today and at very young ages. I started looking at what they ate and that’s how I discovered Small Millets about thirty years ago. Small Millets are not unique to India. People across the world in many cultures have been eating these grains for several thousand years. These are C4 grains meaning they put no burden on natural resources for growth. Unlike wheat and rice fields that are flooded with water, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers, Small Millets require only one rainfall of 20 cm or merely 20 liters of water to make 1 kilo of the grain and need no pesticides or fertilizers. In fact by growing Small Millets, soil fertility gets restored naturally.
Question: All this is unheard of.
A: It is indiscriminate use of these three – excess use of water, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, all in the name of flawed science and (green) revolution that is responsible for the serious loss in soil fertility. In Punjab, the ground water is depleting at the rate of 3 feet every year. The flood irrigation system used across the Indo-Gangetic plain to grow wheat and rice is leading to water wastage, washing away of topsoil, and ever rising utilization of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Our choice of wheat and rice is keeping the sickness cycles growing endlessly. In fact, if we do not break the wheat and rice mono-cropping cycles we will not be able to grow any food in seventeen years. Plus we will be stuck with rising disease in humans. It is time we started connecting the dots. What we are choosing to grow and eat as food is causing problems in the environment and it is causing problems in us.
Q: How is it that Small Millets help to get rid of so many different types of diseases?
A: We are consuming wheat or/and rice from morning to evening. Just keep a food diary for a day if not a week and note what you eat through the day. Then do the math. We need 35-40 gms of glucose daily to perform all kinds of functions- walking, talking, and all our other normal chores. But how much glucose are we actually putting in our body? It’s close to 150 grams. It takes 15 mins of walking to get rid of 1 gram of sugar so it will take close to 40 hours of walking to get rid of the 150 grams of sugar. We don’t and cannot spend that much time on physical activity. So clearly the body has to take care of it. It starts pumping out insulin and when it has to do this frequently we end up with diabetes. This is the simplest expression of sugar imbalance. But diabetes is not the only consequence. Glucose imbalance leads to rheumatic, arthritic, and other factors as well and becomes heart diseases, hypertension, skin disorders, lung conditions, liver and kidney problems, and so on. They are all an effort by the body to get rid of the extra glucose. Glucose has become our enemy though it is in fact a life-giver.
We need to stop eating wheat and rice because have they been genetically modified to make them high yielding varieties with no corresponding tests to see their effects on human health. Wheat and rice also break down fast in the body causing sugar spikes. Small Millets at no point after their consumption cause any glucose spikes or imbalance. We have done extensive renal tolerance tests to prove this. In layperson’s terms, there is so much fiber present in Small Millets that it stops the breakdown of the carbohydrate at a fast pace. So we get energy – the essential glucose we all need- at the rate we should- slowly and steadily. Eating Small Millets a carbohydrate, therefore reverses diabetes. It is not glucose that we must blame. This is our basic need. It is the form we are eating it in that can be problematic. In addition the fiber of all of the five small millets together between them have tremendous cleansing powers. They clean out the entire body leading to renewed cells in every organ, tissue, and blood. Thus we have observed in our experiments the disappearance of disease by switching entirely to Small Millets. They turn off all the disease switches that pumping excessive glucose in the blood turns on, simultaneously affecting a whole gamut of bio-chemical reactions.
Q: If Small Millets are so good and have been around for so long, it seems strange that they have gone into obscurity.
A: It is not so strange if one can see that in the last hundred or so years many of our choices have been driven by economics and not ecology. Local food cultures have disappeared. Add to that rapidly growing packaged food culture. Punjab, the center of Green Revolution has the largest number of IVF Centers in India. Other cities are fast catching up. The hijacked food system run by corporations is controlling food and taking it away from native farmers and nature. That is the cause of fertility issues facing men and women today. Sperm count in men has fallen across the world and women are having gynecological issues. Altering food and polluting three out of the five elements – air, water and soil – has resulted in morbidity in our own bodies. We are connected to our environment and cannot live in isolation from it.
Q: Can Small Millets be grown anywhere and eaten by anyone?
A: Absolutely. They are already grown everywhere. All we need to do is start asking for them. In the United States one of the Small Millets varieties – Browntop- is grown for birds when it is excellent for human gut issues. The fiber of all Small Millets- foxtail, barnyard, little, kodo and browntop- is a rich source of phytochemicals, minerals and many other nutrients. If eaten in fermented form, they also provide Vitamin B-12 which is falsely assumed to be obtained mostly from animal protein. Six weeks of regular use of fermented millets restores the much depleted human microbiome or gut flora. We now know our gut flora is responsible for many biochemical and physiological functions. Therefore hormonal imbalances, glucose imbalances, and microbial imbalances all are naturally and powerfully corrected with regular consumption of Small Millets.
I have done the calculation. With the resources we have, we can grow as much Small Millets today to meet the human population numbers as they will be in the year 3000. That too with zero strain on Earth’s resources and no negative environmental impact. If there is a will to attain homeostasis, a health renaissance for the planet and the human race, it will come from use of Small Millets.
