Viswanathan Mohan Part 5, What Do You Teach Patients to Eat?

In part 5 of this Exclusive Interview, Viswanathan Mohan talks with Diabetes in Control Publisher Steve Freed about his recommendations to patients regarding food choices that will still allow for rice consumption.

Viswanathan Mohan, PhD, MD, DSc is the chairman of Dr. Mohan’s Diabetes Specialties Centre and president and director of the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation in Chennai, India.

Transcript of this video segment:

Freed:  So, I know that you’re obviously when you see so many carbohydrates, you’re in the bout with diabetes. You put the two together, it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. So, what do you teach your other doctors in how to train people, and what do you teach them? Soon, as you say low carb people get all upset, so.

Mohan: So, we can’t tell people to go off carbs completely because then that will be completely different from what they eat.

Freed:  Right.

Mohan:  So, we teach them the plate concept. So, we tell them, “Okay. This is your plate. Half your plate, you’ll fill with vegetables, veggies, okay, which is very good for you. It’s going to give you vitamins, minerals, and all that stuff from a very low calories. So, whatever green leafy vegetables you like and that gives you B12 and so on. Quarter of the plate, you take some protein.” There are a lot of vegetarians in India, so you have to the lentils and the beans, and the dals, and stuff like that. If they do eat meat and so on, then we say, “Okay. You can have fish. You can have chicken. You can have red meat, cut down. But then take — the rest, you can have eggs and so on,” so the protein part. And then you have a quarter of plate, there you take your rice. Now, normally the way they eat in India is to take the plate, the first thing to go is the rice, and we call it the mountain of rice. And then around that, a little bit of the side dishes. So, the whole thing is going to come from carbohydrate. So, we teach people this way of eating. And so, they are happy they get their rice but then they have so much of other things to fill up and so they don’t feel hungry. And then, we tell them they can have yogurt and buttermilk and stuff like that, to low calorie soups and stuff. So, we make it interesting for them. And then, the other thing we tell them is of course physical activity. We teach them half an hour, minimum exercise everyday, 150 minutes a week, and then slowly build it up. The more, the better. So, that’s the other thing that we do. And then, of course the medicines part and the monitoring part. And so, we kind of  split that into education modules.

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