India’s nutritional crisis is a paradox. Producing enough food for everyone is a given, yet a large section of the Indian population remains malnourished. That is the Great Grain Puzzle: India’s problem is not that there is nothing to eat, but that no one agrees on what to eat. One doctor bans rice; another recommends red rice. The gym trainer swears by oats, grandmother by barley. Millets are the new messiah: the government even hosted a millet dinner in Washington. A colleague talks about quinoa as though it were a transformative mantra, while another insists on gluten-free flour. Somewhere amid the noise about low-GI foods, ancient grains and “good carbs”, the humble roti and pulao have acquired an identity crisis. Ordinary people feel it. Radhika Mehra, a 42-year-old Delhi entrepreneur, dropped wheat after reading online that it was “inflammatory” and now rotates jowar, bajra, and ragi. “My kitchen looks like a grain museum,” she laughs. “The only thing that’s lighter is my wallet.”
In Bengaluru, software engineer Sandeep Rao, 36, swapped white rice for quinoa to lose weight, then doubled his portions. “Apparently quinoa can’t outrun my appetite,” he says.
Leela Nair from Mumbai, a 67-year-old retired teacher raised on rice and dal, was told to add oats for cholesterol and barley for blood sugar. “I’ll need a spreadsheet just to plan my breakfast,” she jokes. Chef Ashutosh Awasthi hears it at his tables. Diners used to ask for the signature dish. Now they ask whether the roti is khapli wheat and which grain is healthiest. “Somewhere along the way, we’ve begun to believe that every food needs a healthier replacement,” he says. “It doesn’t. The goal is not to find the perfect grain. It’s to build a balanced plate.” That effort is visible in supermarkets as well as restaurants. Rice and wheat still occupy much of the shelf space, but they now share it with pearl, finger, foxtail, and little millets, rolled oats, barley, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, red and black rice, sorghum, and heritage wheats such as khapli. Their ritzy packaging promises better digestion, lower glycaemic impact and a range of other benefits, sometimes with more confidence than the evidence warrants. Grains are described as “ancient”, “heritage”, “whole”, “low GI”, “gut-friendly”, “high-fibre”, and “low carb.” Shivani Unakar, a food-systems researcher, sees the renewed interest in grains as more than a nutrition story. “Health awareness is certainly one reason,” she says. “But farmer-producer organisations, chefs, food brands, researchers, and storytellers are all trying to rebuild demand for a wider diversity of grains. Alongside nutrition, discussions centre around biodiversity, climate resilience, culinary heritage, and supporting local food systems.” The evidence from the hype and what each grain really offers, who is selling the story, and what to actually put on your plate is often lost in the cooking confusion.
The Wellness Industry’s Best Harvest
Grains are the perfect wellness product. People already eat them every day, so swapping one flour for another feels like an easy fix. The industry sells that feeling in five main ways. The health-halo label is the most in vogue. A label like “multigrain” says nothing about how much whole grain is inside; refined flour (maida) can still be the main ingredient. Millets now appear in cookies, chips, crackers, instant noodles, and breakfast mixes.
“A biscuit doesn’t become healthy just because it contains millet,” says dietitian, holistic health consultant, and author Kavita Devgan. “Don’t read the front of the pack, turn it around. The ingredient list tells the real story.”
Grains once bought loose and cheap at local markets are now sold in designer packaging at several times the price. “If the farmer hasn’t benefited from this renewed interest, we’ve simply turned another everyday grain into an expensive lifestyle product,” says Pearl Sandhu, food anthropologist and Senior Communications Consultant with the Coalition for Food Systems Transformation in India (CoFTI), supported by GIZ India. Heritage is the most milked product in everything from fashion to hospitality to foods. “Every colourful label on a packet is a brand’s positioning, not the whole truth about the grain,” Sandhu says. Government promotion has helped big time to create the market. India proposed the UN International Year of Millets in 2023, rebranded millets as “Shree Anna” in the 2023 Union Budget, and has offered production-linked incentives to companies making millet-based products. That support is valuable for farmers, but it also gives brands an official-sounding halo to borrow.
This has happened before. When the UN declared 2013 the International Year of Quinoa, global demand soared, prices rose sharply, and quinoa became a premium health food far from its Andean origins. Gluten-free foods followed a similar path in the West, growing well beyond the small group of people who medically need them. Regulators are catching up. India’s food regulator, FSSAI, has moved to make sugar, salt, and saturated fat figures more prominent on packaged-food labels, which helps shoppers see past front-of-pack claims.
Rice and Wheat Are Not The Enemy
Rice and wheat fed India and the world. The Green Revolution of the 1960s ended famine-era shortages and dependence on food imports. “I don’t think rice or wheat are the villains here,” says Devgan. The real problem is how they are eaten: polished and refined, in large portions, several times a day, alongside packaged snacks and a sedentary life. “A simple meal of rice, dal, sabzi, and a little ghee is very different from a plate of refined snacks,” Devgan says. Official guidance agrees. The 2024 ICMR-NIN Dietary Guidelines for Indians do not ask anyone to give up rice or wheat. They advise keeping cereals and millets to about 45 per cent of daily energy, leaving room for pulses, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, and dairy. Most Indians eat too many cereals and too few pulses. Rice also has practical strengths. It is gentle on the stomach, which matters for people with digestive sensitivities. Parboiled rice tends to raise blood sugar more slowly than raw polished rice. Wheat is the simplest grain to turn into a soft, everyday roti, which is why it spread. “Making a jowar roti and even digesting it can be difficult,” says Rajat Kapoor, a former chef with Taj and ITC. Rice, too, is not one uniform food. Research on Indian rice varieties has found differences in glycaemic response. A study examining Sona Masuri, Ponni, and Surti Kolam found high GI values for all three, ranging from about 70 to 77. The point here is not to declare rice unhealthy, but to show why broad statements such as “rice is high GI” or “millets are low GI” are incomplete without considering variety, preparation and quantity. Ruby Balchandani, founder of Nurture, lifestyle nutritionist and medical counsellor, explains, “Rice eaten with dal, vegetables and curd behaves differently from a large serving of rice eaten alone. Portion size, processing and the protein and fibre accompanying the grain all influence the glycaemic response.” Her example is khichdi. “I recommend three parts dal to one part rice. It increases protein and fibre, improves satiety and lowers the overall glycaemic load.” The wider dietary pattern is particularly important in India, where cereals provide a large share of daily energy intake and pulses and several other nutrient-rich food groups remain inadequate in many diets.
Eat Global, Know Local
Around the world, the science points the same way: eat more whole grains and fibre, fewer refined grains, and look at the diet as a whole rather than any single food.
Whole grains and fibre lower disease risk. A large 2019 review in The Lancet found that people eating the most fibre and whole grains had roughly 15 to 30 per cent lower rates of death, heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and bowel cancer than those eating the least. Refined grains in excess raise it. The international PURE study, covering 21 countries including India, linked very high intake of refined grains with higher rates of heart disease and death (BMJ, 2021).
WHO sets a fibre target. The World Health Organization’s 2023 carbohydrate guideline recommends that adults get at least 25 g of fibre a day from whole grains, vegetables, fruit and pulses. Regulators back oats and barley. Food authorities in the US (FDA) and Europe (EFSA) allow cholesterol-lowering claims for oat and barley beta-glucan, at about 3 g a day.
The planet matters too. The 2019 EAT-Lancet “planetary health diet” puts whole grains, pulses, and vegetables at the centre of a diet that is good for both people and the environment.
Indian data fits the global picture. A 2025 analysis of 18,090 adults in the ICMR-INDIAB survey linked diets high in white rice, milled grains, and added sugar with low protein, to greater metabolic risk. Replacing some carbohydrate with protein from pulses, dairy, eggs or fish was linked to lower odds of diabetes. “The goal should not be to find one ‘super grain’ but to include a variety of fibre-rich grains regularly as part of a balanced diet,” says Dr Sharma. “Digestive health is highly individual, so there is no single grain that suits everyone.” On women’s health, Dr Bimalpreet Mohan, Director, Chief Radiologist and Women’s Health Expert at Capital Health Clinic, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, says there is no evidence that any one grain can treat PCOS, insulin resistance or thyroid disorders. “Whole grains with higher fibre content may help improve blood sugar control and increase satiety, but they work best alongside adequate protein, healthy fats, regular exercise and appropriate medical treatment.”
Not all claims about grains are marketing inventions. Some have a sound scientific basis, but they are often presented without the context needed to interpret them. Oats and barley contain beta-glucan, a soluble fibre studied for its role in cholesterol management. Whole grains generally contain more fibre and micronutrients than refined grains, while millets can provide substantial fibre and minerals depending on the variety. Even the phrase “low GI”, however, requires qualification. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 65 studies published in 2021 found a mean glycaemic index of 52.7 for millets, compared with 71.7 for milled rice and 74.2 for refined wheat. The researchers also found differences between millet varieties and preparations, with some showing lower GI values than others. These findings are encouraging for people considering millets as part of a diet intended to improve blood-sugar control, but they do not mean that every millet dish produces a low glycogenic response or that replacing rice with millet is enough to manage diabetes. Processing and cooking matter, as does the rest of the meal. Replacing a portion of carbohydrate intake with protein from plant, dairy, egg or fish sources was associated with lower odds of diabetes and pre-diabetes. These findings do not make carbohydrates the enemy; they underline the importance of the composition of the whole diet. Banchandani adds that cutting out rice or wheat entirely is not essential for healthy weight loss and may even make the diet harder to sustain.
The Trendscape Ahead
The grain revival is moving from the supermarket aisle into policy, restaurants and new products. Some of these shifts are already under way.
Millets in public food schemes: States such as Odisha, Karnataka, and Telangana have invested in millet procurement, processing, and seed conservation, and some now supply millets through the public distribution system and school meals. “They treated millets not as superfoods, but as crops that support livelihoods, biodiversity and climate resilience,” says Sandhu.
Old grains, new forms: Khapli sourdough, millet pasta, and millet pizza bases are on café menus. Pune’s Great State Aleworks now brews beer with jowar and bajra, raising millet’s share of its grain bill from 15 to 100 per cent. In 2024, it bought 2,500 kg of jowar from farmers in drought-prone Maan taluka, Maharashtra. “That can look like a khapli sourdough or a bajra craft beer,” says food systems researcher Shivani Unakar. “It can also look like reintroducing them into the PDS system.”
Then there are a flood of packaged millet products, encouraged by government incentives, from breakfast cereals to snacks.
These measures are followed by some more likely to take off soon:
Low-GI rice: Plant breeders are developing rice varieties that raise blood sugar more slowly, which could let rice-loving Indians keep their staple.
Personal glucose tracking: Wearable glucose monitors are letting people see how their own body reacts to rice, roti or millet, shifting the debate from “which grain” to “which grain for me”.
Fibre and protein over grain: Global food trends are moving the spotlight from the grain to what is around it, with fibre and protein becoming the new selling points.
Stricter labels: Clearer front-of-pack nutrition labelling is likely to make it harder for processed foods to hide behind a fashionable grain.
Climate-led farming: As water runs short, drought-tolerant crops like millets will matter more to farm policy, whatever the wellness trend.
The more useful question to ask is not which grain is healthiest, but what the rest of the plate looks like. A bowl of quinoa can be part of an unbalanced meal, just as a millet roti can accompany a calorie-heavy curry. Brown or red rice does not automatically make an otherwise poor diet healthy. A well-portioned serving of rice with vegetables, dal, fish, chicken or another source of protein can make a balanced meal. Quantity matters, as do preparation, accompaniments and the food a grain replaces. That’s the solution to the gain puzzle. The healthiest plate may not contain the trendiest grain. It may simply be one with enough variety that no single ingredient is expected to do the work of an entire diet.