Are there health food stores in India?
Health food stores where you can find organic foods or pure supplements
like vitamin D and C. If there are health food stores, what are they like, what type of health foods are they geared towards….do they they offer herbs and whole foods? Thanks you so much! I am possibly moving to India in a year or so and I m trying to find out how difficult it will be to maintain my healthy lifestyle habits. I’ll be asking all sorts of questions about India so I may reduce culture shock! Knowledge is power, yeah? Things will be easier and better ad more relaxing if I know what it will be like (even the small stuff) so look out for some pretty silly sounding questions…hehehe…..
Tagged with: Food • Health • INDIA • Stores • there
Filed under: Organic Food news
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Hi there Arti…well you are asking the question I’ve spent years myself trying to answer.
I also live in India as a ‘foreigner’.
I live near Delhi so most of my searching for Health food shops has been in Delhi.
What I am noticing after 12 years since I first came here is that India is either getting educated about organics more now or else one could say, going back to their roots.
By that I mean that things are really simple in India and always were, the foods were organic and so forth, there are herbs from which Ayurvedic doctors make their medicines, but India followed the west. They got tractors instead of bullock driven ploughs (well some still use them of course because they can’t afford tractors.) And they got pesticides and herbicides etc
The first health food shop I came in contact with was …can’t remember its name right now, something like ‘Good foods’ or ‘Good earth”
They are not really our western style of health food shop. Not strictly vegetarian even cause they bake cakes and breads with eggs in them. Basically they just have a few good things. (You can write to me personally if you want to discuss more)
Then I found one in Kolkatta with organic grains from the Himalayas and a few organic veges, and a few healthy things. They also have ‘meat’ in the freezer, “shock horror”.
Hey Hindus are supposed to be vegetarians!
Then I heard about some better ones in Bangalore and surely there would be something in Mumbai though maybe not much worth writing home about.
But then ….enter “Fabindia”… well I’m impressed by this shop. They have beautiful everything. Organic grains and some other stuff and beautiful cloth- clothes, linen etc. They have a nice muesli and cashew butter too. And they have branches in about 20 cities in India.
They have a website too.
Then there are import stores that have many ‘overseas’ things like olive oil and pasta and a few herb tea bags. They also import fruit and veges. They are expensive though.
There are now many more organic growers in India and ‘Fabindia’ is sponsoring them and encouraging them.
I can get Avacados where I live, don’t know if they are organic, but I’m not in a big city where they are usually found in select shops only.our
Vitamins here arn’t as good as in the west. Bring your own and have others mailed to you.
Hope I’m helping and not discouraging you.
Where are you moving to in India?
Come and visit us!
IMHO, trying to find organic food in India would be like trying to find fool’s gold. It’s bad enough here in the US where there is no clear cut guidlenes or monitoring as to which can and are labeled as “organic”. I’ll fathom to guess that in India it is even less regulated. All you will be doing is paying more for the same stuff with an “organic” label on them.Ofcourse, you could try to find an organic farm and buy directly from it.