Traditional Rice: A Mental Health Perspective

Brown rice or unpolished rice also called traditional handpound rice is gaining popularlity in Europe and India's health concious section of our society due to its nutritional aspect.

A Research done by Clinical Psychologist Dr.Julia, University of Carlgary, says that Mental health is directly related to nutritional intake. Her research shows increase in nutritional intake not only helps to cure mental illness like depression, ADHD(Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), autism, bipolar disorder but also act as a prevention measure for many mental health disorders. It has been proven that high nutritional intake was very effective in treating ADHD children who were failed by ordinary Psychiatric medication.

India's rice seed diversity is so large that there was more than 2 lakh varieties of rice seeds grown throughout the country.That is, if one tastes, one rice for a day, it would take more than 200 years to taste all different types of rices of India.

Our research shows that our indigenous traditional rices varieties are found to be nutrition rich with many essential micro-nutrition needed for our human body. There are a lot to research in this field to support this. Now, its obvious that, if we want a mental healthy society, then we need to switch to indigenous traditional nutrition rich foods and reject hybrid and GM foods.

Almost all food we eat today are produced from hybrid seeds that were introduced during Green revolution in 1960s. Foods of hybrid seeds have high toxic pesticide residue that are proven to be carcinogens. Also, these foods don't have adequate nutrition in them. But anyways, they were peddled successfully by Indian Government as a part of commercializing Indian agriculture for the corporate welfare.

Now, we have only 1% of indigenous traditional rice seeds out of 2 lakh traditional rice seeds. Remaining, 99% seeds are extinct from the farmers. But, Bill Gates's agri-business Corporate Empire, Bayer, has all extinct indigenous rice seeds stored in their laboratory. They are waiting for us to fall, so that they can capture the food supply chain by controlling seeds.

Its high time we understand the importance of traditional seeds and politics behind it, for achieving food sovereignity.

The Author, Karthik is an indigenous traditional rice seed conserver and an organic farmer

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