Cheat meal of Olympic medallists: Humble churma in spotlight after Neeraj Chopra, Bajrang Punia’s Tokyo 2020 triumph-Sports News , Firstpost

Prime Minister Narendra Modi shares a light moment with Olympic gold medallist Neeraj Chopra over a bowl of churma during the PM’s breakfast with India’s Tokyo 2020 contingent on Monday. Image courtesy: NaMo App

On Monday, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted India’s Olympic contingent for breakfast at his residence at 7, Lok Kalyan Marg, on the menu was churma, humble Haryanvi fare.

PM Modi served the simple but rich dish, made out of crushed roti with a generous amount of sugar and ghee, to javelin star Neeraj Chopra, who became the first individual Olympic gold medallist from India since 2008. Having heaved the javelin to a distance of 87.58m at the Tokyo Olympic Stadium earlier this month, Neeraj entered an exclusive club of individual Olympic gold medallists from India, with a previous occupancy of just one (rifle shooter Abhinav Bindra who won at Beijing 2008).

After Neeraj’s gold, he told CNN-News18 in an interview that one of the first things he wanted to eat in India after coming home was his homemade churma.

“Now I’m used to eating outside food, whichever country I am in. So, I don’t miss homemade food when I am abroad for training or competitions. But I’m from a small village in Haryana. We have a desi dish there called churma, which is made with ample amounts of ghee. That’s what I want to have when I get back home,” he had said from Tokyo.

#NeerajChopra tells @shreyadhoundial why he wanted a podium finish for Arshad Nadeem too.
Plus, the one dish he wants to come home from Tokyo and eat. https://t.co/k09UvPcBXt

— Sayoni Aiyar (@sayoniaiyar) August 9, 2021

Ever since Neeraj and other Indian athletes landed in India after playing a part in the country’s most successful Olympics campaign, where they won seven medals, there have been a string of felicitation events lined up for them. The javelin thrower finally got his wish of having churma at Monday’s breakfast event with the nation’s prime minister.

Not just Neeraj, churma is a dish many of India’s top athletes — such as wrestlers Bajrang Punia, bronze medallist in 65kg weight class, and Ravi Dahiya, silver medallist in 57kg category — have grown up loving.

In fact, when Bajrang got home with his bronze medal, his mother and sister-in-law welcomed him with a bowl of homemade churma.

Given the nature of their pursuit of a medal at the Olympics, and the sacrifices it requires, the sugar and ghee-rich fare was something athletes had to abstain from eating. This is all the more true for wrestlers, whose daily weight is usually a few kilograms over the cut-off needed to compete in their weight categories, and therefore very careful about their weight.

Cheat meal fit enough only for gold medallist

“It is a cheat meal for gold medallists… but only after they have won a medal. But for the aam aadmi like us, I would recommend just one teaspoon of churma. Eat it like prasad at a temple,” said sports nutritionist Ryan Fernando of Qua Nutrition, who has worked with two-time Olympic medallist wrestler Sushil Kumar besides a host of other athletes like Virat Kohli, Harbhajan Singh and Sathiyan Gnanasekaran. “It’s too unhealthy because it’s heavy in ghee, heavy in sugar. When you have endurance-based athletes, or athletes who train more than seven to eight hours a day, this dish is worthy of their training schedule. But there too, it should always be consumed post-training.”

He went on to add: “The caution that I would exert to this dish I that I would not recommend it to anyone who’s not an athlete. The ghee that goes into this is high in saturated fats. This makes it the right recipe for heart blockage if you’re not physically exerting yourself as much as Neeraj Chopra. The sugar content is a recipe for you to get diabetes very quickly if you’re not working out like any other athlete.”

He added that the wheat which is used in churma has the highest glycemic index among grains. The Glycemic index is the amount of sugar something releases. So when you make churma with wheat flour and semolina (rava or sooji), the amount of sugar released is very high.

Reward for success

Fernando points out that in the course of a day’s training, athletes like Neeraj and Bajrang expend anywhere between 3000 or 4000 calories a day. “When you work out so hard, the one thing the brain craves is relaxation. So this food, churma, is rich in ghee. There’s a research paper which says that when people are extremely stressed out, they gravitate towards foods that have high-fat and high-sugar contents. So when athletes work out so intensely, it’s natural they would gravitate toward this one food from a biological and evolutionary point of view.”

He added that he often has to negotiate with the athletes he consults for when it comes to comfort food like churma.

“I’m certain that even Neeraj probably wouldn’t have had churma for the past three-four months, because he needs the right muscle to fat ratio to throw. If has too much fat in his body, that much more weight in his body which is dead mass which will hinder his throwing.”

“As a high-performance athlete, you cannot eat anything that’s too heavy. You cannot eat anything that’s too sweet, because of the calories. And you definitely are not allowed to eat the much amount of ghee which goes into churma,” Commonwealth Games gold medallist boxer Manoj Kumar told Firstpost. “But in Haryanvi households, the churma is not a dish that’s prepared daily. It’s something that’s prepared for special occasions.”

Now that the medal has been won, the humble churma is a simplistic yet comforting reward for athletes like Neeraj and Bajrang.