Fighting Fat at India Inc., One Dosa at a Time

Courtesy of HealthifyMe A screenshot of the “HealthifyMe” application.

Six-footer Sanjay Jain is at least 15 kilograms (33 pounds) overweight at 95 kilograms. Typical of many of his Bangalore peers, Mr. Jain puts on weight, loses weight and then starts the whole cycle anew.

Like many professionals in Bangalore and urban Indians everywhere, Mr. Jain, 46, works late hours, trains in stops and bursts, and, until recently, paid scant attention to what, when and how much he ate.

But a few months ago Mr. Jain, a software industry professional and a budding entrepreneur at the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Labs n Bangalore, decided to lose weight and signed up as a tester for an app called HealthifyMe. For the first time, the vegetarian began measuring what he ate, not just in calories but also in nutritional content.

Mr. Jain, who said he considered himself well educated about dietary choices, was jolted when he found out that his carbohydrate-laden diet contained barely any proteins. “I was stunned to see that 70 percent or more of my intake consisted of carbs, and it was a high-fat and low-protein diet,” he said.

Mr. Jain’s struggle parallels that of HealthifyMe’s co-founder Tushar Vashisht, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and former investment banker who gained 18 kilograms within a year of returning to India to work for the country’s Unique Identity project.

“Corporate India happened to me,” said Mr. Vashisht, who confessed that he used to unthinkingly order entire vegetarian menus at fast food restaurants.

Courtesy of Tushar Vashisht Two of the co-founders of HealthifyMe, Tushar Vashisht, left, and Mathew Cherian.

Starting on a fitness regimen was hard enough, but when it came to his diet, Mr. Vashisht said he was flummoxed. In a country of a billion-plus people and a food heritage of thousands of years, there was no easy way to track nutrition and calories in common Indian dishes. Calorie counters developed in the West could not tally the calories of Mr. Vashisht’s beloved Indian food.

Around him in Bangalore, entrepreneurs were starting to tackle uniquely Indian problems by devising their own innovative technology solutions. So Mr. Vashisht, 28, and Mathew Cherian, also 28 a computer science graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set to work creating an application for the Indian diet. (Mr. Vashisht and Mr. Cherian once conducted a month-long experiment on the diet of poor Indians by living on 100 rupees a day.)

The two were joined later by a third co-founder, Sachin Shenoy, a holder of five patents who helped build many consumer products at Google.

“India Inc. is a one-way ticket to being obese, diabetic and hypertensive,” said Mr. Vashisht, who cited a study by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations that suggested that half of white-collar India is prone to lifestyle diseases and that 71 percent of the workforce and 82 percent of chief executives were overweight.

“Living on salads is unworkable in India, so we need solutions that can work for our own food and eating culture,” he said.

Mr. Vashisht and Mr. ! Cherian f! irst digitized hundreds of pieces of data on Indian raw ingredients, with their micro- and macro-nutrient counts, from dusty files at the National Institute of Nutrition in Hyderabad. They integrated them with records from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration database of 10,000 raw ingredients.

After stitching the two together, they built a comprehensive database of nutritional values for thousands of standardized Indian recipes. With expert help from endocrinologists, dieticians and gym trainers, HealthifyMe is set to become the country’s first comprehensive calorie tracker for everything from thepla (a western Indian flatbread with greens) to bisibele bath (a rice and lentil dish from the south) to sabudana khichdi (a savory pudding made from sago pearls and peanuts).

In India, even diet experts, fitness professionals and hospitals struggle to provide their clients accurate calorific counts and nutritional data, said Sheela Krishnaswamy, a clinical dietician based in Bangalore.

“Maing a database of all Indian foods across cuisines and regions and enumerating their key nutrients and calories is a humongous task,” said Ms. Krishnaswamy.

Experts like her have come up with their own approximations with the years of practice. But the average person still had to rely on advice doled out by friends, relatives and co-workers, she said.

In a country where diabetes and cardiovascular disease rates are alarming, any technology that can hold a mirror to the Indian diet is a dire need, said V. Bharathwaj, who runs Myndgenie, a counseling company that promises to reduce stress for professionals, athletes and students in Bangalore.

Mr. Bharathwaj, 40, himself found out the hard way when he was tested with very high levels of triglycerides during a routine blood test five years ago. He put himself through a weight-loss regimen and started looking closely at his diet. The three calorie counter apps on his smartphone were useless when it came to Indian cuisine.

“I ha! d no clue! that the six dosas and six dates I consumed daily at breakfast pumped in 900 calories,” he said.

Each calorie-counter Internet site provided a different figure for popular Indian foods, and Mr. Bharathwaj worked out a range from the more reliable ones. He eventually taught himself to gauge calorific values of Indian foods over time.

But the general awareness about diet is poor among the average educated Indian. “Plus we are not a data-driven culture like the United States,” he said.

The creators of HealthifyMe, which will be officially released March 1, hope to right this very information asymmetry. “Older relatives will keep telling you that desi ghee is good, paneer is great and that dal is entirely protein, all of which is so wrong,” said Mr. Cherian.

The app accommodates transliterations in a dozen Indian languages, and the database provides up to 100 micronutrients for each recipe. It makes thousands of standard Indian dishes customizable.

“Every family has it own khichdi (lentils & rice) recipe, for instance, and the app can calorie-track regional variations and tweaked recipes,” Mr. Vashisht said.

The app’s basic Android version is available free, but customers must pay for a premium version that can be customized and shared.

India’s “global workforce,” as it is often described, is increasingly tethered to the work desk. Compounding the situation is the fact that crowded, uneven pavements discourage walking and there are no jogging tracks or public-access playgrounds.

“It is really a lethal combination of what we eat and what we can’t or don’t do,” said Mr. Cherian. He said his company hoped to begin articulating India’s dietary expectations and eventually set off a process that would influence the health of its billion-plus citizens.

Saritha Rai sometimes feels she is the only person living in Bangalore who was actually raised here. There’s never a dull moment in her mercurial metropolis. Reach her on Twitter @SarithaRai.