Enjoy festive deep-fried snacks healthily by using ghee, a nutritious alternative that enhances flavor and offers numerous health benefits.

With the festive season coming, everyone wants to devour deep-fried snacks more often than usual and much earlier. That said, these foods can be enjoyed with the best of health if proper choices are made. Amongst these, cooking with ghee or clarified butter is shown to be advantageous for frying snacks during Diwali due to bestowing a number of health benefits into snacks and giving food a richer and enhanced flavor (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Health benefits of ghee: Review of Ayurveda and modern science perspectives

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Health Risks of Deep-Fried Snacks

The holiday time is the time for tasty treats, especially such tasty and crunchy snacks as chips. As these treats are tasty, they are dangerous as they cause high cholesterol levels, heart diseases, diabetes and obesity. To minimize these risks the introduction of better cooking techniques and healthier content is compulsory.

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Ghee: A Cultural and Nutritional Staple

The ghee is free from the trans fats and good for health and it also contains vitamins namely A, D, E, and K, as well as some fundamental fatty acids. It is especially high in butyrate; a short chain fatty acid, that is known to impact digestion and inflammation positively. As for many refined oils which do not contain these nutrients, ghee appears to be much healthier for those who are concerned with the quality of the foods they consume.

Ghee does not degrade when heated at high temperatures- thus safer to use while frying. Ghee makes snacks tasty as it brings a peculiar taste in the foods it is used to prepare.

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Health Benefits from a Glimpse in Ayurveda

Clarified butter which is affirmed to be ghee has been a critical constituent of Indian food for many hundreds of years due to its essential role in the food recipes, its taste qualities, and health benefits too. Ayurveda emphasizes ghee’s role in several key health areas:

Cognitive Health: Ghee is said to maximize memory, increase intelligence and boost understanding and focus. The food is, however helpful when taken to nourish the brain because of the following composition.

Nourishment and Rejuvenation: According to the traditional medical system of India, Ayurveda ghee is believed to contain important nutrients which if provided to the body help to maintain good healthy state of the physical system. It is believed to bring back the vigor of tissues and back up body processes.

Immunity: Substances like Ghee are known to improve body immunity so that diseases and infections have no hold on the body.

Gastrointestinal Health: Ghee rich in butyric acid is easy for digestion and enhances digestion and assimilation of various nutrients.

Wound Healing and Dermatological Applications: Other more instances of ghee, according to Ayurveda, includes use in the form application in wound healing as an antiseptic as well as in the traditional Indian skin brightening property that is in the nature of skin moisturizing creams.

Eye Health: Originally in Ayurveda it has been used for amplifying the faculty of sight and for therapeutics of the eye diseases.

Moderation is Key

Nutritionists are quick to stress that a moderate intake of ghee is actually not unhealthy at all. However, it has properties that make it a superfood that can heal the lining of the gut; the same cannot be said for everyone. As per nutritionists, approximately 3-4 spoons of ghee or other fats should be consumed depending on individual digestion.

Saturated fats do not raise cholesterol and heart health can improve on consumption of ghee in moderation. For instance, when people replace processed oils with ghee, they are able to dodge different diseases that come with consumption of refined oils such as obesity and heart disease.

Cooking Recommendations

Fry: For deep frying traditional snacks like samosas, pakoras and chaklis use ghee.
Enhance Flavor: Add a little drizzle of ghee over baked snacks to make it taste even better.
Sauté: Cook vegetables for students in ghee to prepare healthy vegetable side dishes.
Snack on Nuts: You can take ghee roasted nuts in your snack, or popped popcorns with extra addition of ghee.

To add more healthy fats in this Diwali festive snack, try to go for ghee instead of other oils. To add on its healthy benefits, the versatility of ghee as a flavor enhancer makes it a powerhouse for your holiday dietary plan. Thus it is possible to have all the pleasurable moments out in festivals served with ghee-fried snacks in moderation without compromising the health.

Reference:

1. Health benefits of ghee: Review of Ayurveda and modern science perspectives – (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10789628/)

Source-Medindia