BENGALURU: Written by celebrity nutritionist Pooja Makhija, N for Nourish is the author’s attempt to inform the relationship of young children with food. After Eat Delete, her first book, and several years of practice, Makhija concluded that “either people fear it or love it, they don’t trust it. They eat it because of the taste or don’t eat to lose weight.
There is a love or hate relationship.” In that journey of helping her clients develop a better relationship with food, she also became a mother to two daughters. “In teaching my daughters about food and nutrition, I realised that it is much easier for children to learn because they don’t have to unlearn bad habits like adults,” she said.
Makhija’s children did not limit themselves to learning about food at home, they would often share tips and tricks with their friends in school, “I would get calls from mothers saying—’Hey your daughter taught mine to eat green chilli when she has a cold, thank you so much’, and so on,” she said.
Such experiences led the nutritionist to write ‘Eat delete junior’ which was a guide for parents to get their children to start eating healthy foods. “Later, I started getting demands to write a book that children could read. Today’s children don’t like to be told what to eat from adults, they are a do-it-yourself generation after all,” she said adding that is how N for Nourish was born.
N for Nourish is written in a language that would appeal to children aged above 10 years. “I’ve made sure to not talk down to them, today’s children are smart. My daughters were very helpful, so a lot of the lingo that I use in the book is what they taught me,” she says with a laugh. It was very important for Makhija to make her book accessible, given that many children hit puberty with a wrong idea about food and body resulting in hormonal fluctuations. “If they learn how to eat right, they can avoid disorders like PCOS, which is common among women today,” she said.
Pooja recalls that her journey as a nutritionist began when she was a child. “My mother always said that I was a curious eater. I always asked questions like- ‘who told you orange has vitamin C?’…from the very beginning. My mom said, I was intrigued by food,” she said. She had so many questions that her mother did not have answers to and N for Nourish is an attempt to equip children with the answers to many such questions, and getting them on a journey to loving their food and bodies.