When we started AMMAGENOMICS in 2021, people asked us again: "Can you supply those foods?" That is how MA Omics and our food certification came into the picture.

People also asked, "Can you cook for us?" One or two visitors from the US stayed in a hotel near our home, and three times a day we shared whatever my wife cooked. This went on and on.

With our busy schedule we did not want to do this permanently, but the requests kept coming.

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This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

All over the world, medical practice is moving towards a more comprehensive view of health.

Twenty years ago, a diabetes specialist mainly prescribed medicine to lower blood sugar. Today many also encourage people to walk, relax, meditate and practise yoga, to choose foods that help keep blood sugar steady and to avoid processed food. Gastroenterologists and other doctors are bringing these ideas in as well.

This is a welcome change. 010FEET Wellness is built on the same integrated view, alongside your doctor's care, never instead of it.

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

From childhood, I was very fortunate. My mother had been to school only until third grade, yet she was remarkably knowledgeable. She was observant and deeply concerned about the health of our family: my mother, my father, my sister and myself. She was a very unusual mother.

Every time we came back from the toilet, she would notice if there was a bad smell. If there was, she would give us a gut cleansing. This was the 1970s, when hardly anyone talked about such things, yet she was very keen about it. If she found sores or blisters in our mouths, she would cook special herbs and fibre-rich food for us.

I am still amazed that she knew all this. The reason, I now understand, is that she was born and brought up in Kerala, with the rich heritage of Ayurveda and Siddha in the culture. She followed the tradition of eating according to the season.

Every day she made sure fruit was included: in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening. Even my lunchbox carried an apple or, more often, an orange. She wove all of this into daily life as one integrated system.

She also kept careful hygiene. On the rare occasions when one of us had a cold or cough, she washed that person's utensils separately, and the sick person slept separately, with a bedsheet she washed and dried in the sun. She told relatives and friends, with pride, that in our family when one person is sick, not everyone falls sick, because the chain stops with one person.

These are what we now call modern practices. I was very fortunate to learn them from her.

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

In 1997 I finished my PhD in Cancer Biology and published my first book, Putrunoyum Unavum, meaning Diet and Cancer, in Tamil. Though the title says cancer, the book is about food for everyday good health, not only about cancer.

For the recipes, I went back to my mother. Because of her habit of learning from everybody, she had a rich collection. Wherever I went, if I met a Gujarati, Andhra, Bengali, Maharashtrian or Punjabi friend, I asked for their recipes. My friend Mahadevan and my mother asked around for me too. That is how it all came into the book.

Many readers asked how these foods could be prepared at home, and I shared all the recipes with them.

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

At the end of 1997 I went to the USA and joined Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, to work on paediatric oncology research. I was surprised to find, in a hospital where chemotherapy and radiation were given, a notice telling patients that yoga and meditation were taught every evening at 4 o'clock. These practices were only just being introduced there, through the Himalayan Institute.

I understood then that five things I had been learning since childhood are essential for health. I wrote about them in Diet and Cancer, and I have written about them ever since.

These five essentials are the five levels of 010FEET Wellness today: Food, Cleansing, Physical Activity, Breath and BMA (Body Mind Awareness). They are also the five steps of our Naturogenomics programme offered through MA Omics, and they sit within the traditional Ayurvedic understanding of Vata, Pitta and Kapha.

See the five levels today

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

The culture my mother cultivated continued in the US. I learned about American food, and wherever I travelled, from Mexico to Europe and the Middle East, I asked about traditional food and food practices and brought them into our lifestyle.

In the US I cooked in traditional vessels: Kerala vessels, clay pots and traditional Kerala alloy vessels.

For our son, born and brought up in the US, I made home-made pizzas, noodles, burgers and sandwiches: any cultural dish, cooked at home, just as my mother cooked everything at home rather than going out.

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

Back in the US, I met many people living with health concerns, from kidney stones to cancer, who asked whether I could cook for them.

My wife, our newborn son and I were living in Iowa. In June 2000, as word spread about our food, many people requested it. We cooked in a small home-café style, guided by traditional Indian knowledge and by what science was beginning to show about the gut microbiome, polyphenols and antioxidants, at a time when almost nobody talked about them. With my background in biochemistry, molecular biology and cancer biology, I looked at the science behind every choice.

Every day my wife cooked for our family and a little extra. People came, bought the food, and it was a big hit.

As our son grew, it became difficult and we stopped. A few people pleaded with us to continue and even offered to pay more. To discourage them we raised the price, yet one person kept coming, and over the years many others did too. They always loved the food.

At our own gatherings, everyone knew we cooked with tested organic food. Wherever we hosted, we served organic food.

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

One of the turning points came when I was in sixth grade. My mother asked me to come with her to buy groceries. Like any child, I bargained: if I came, she must buy me an Amar Chitra Katha storybook. She agreed, and I read many stories while she carried the groceries home.

One day a stall was selling snacks. I said, "Today I don't want the book. I want the laddu." My mother said, "Home-cooked food is the best. Don't take this." But I was adamant. The next day, when I came back from school, she had already made laddu at home.

We were living in Coimbatore, where my father ran a car business. She had never even eaten a laddu in her own childhood, but she asked around, learned how to make it, and made it with pure ingredients. I did not understand it then. Now I understand how health-conscious she was.

In eighth grade I wanted cake. A Christian family, so close to us they were like family, had brought Christmas cake, and I wanted more. Again my mother learned how to make it. We had no oven, so she baked it in a pressure cooker with an absorbent layer to stop it burning. It was an intelligent solution.

Freedom, with gentle control

She discouraged hotel and outside food, yet she never restricted us completely. Every day there were home-made snacks, but always in measured portions. If we asked for more, she said, "No. You should know how to control yourself."

Because of this, when we visited other homes we were never greedy. People said, "Your children are so satisfied." My mother would reply that when children are satisfied at home, they don't chase food elsewhere.

We got a TV only when I was in tenth grade, and even then we slept early and watched for a limited time. Movies were allowed, always in a controlled way. It was a parenting lifestyle combined with food, and it is part of the story behind everything we do.

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

I finished my studies at PSG College in 1990. From 1992 to 1997 I was at university in Madurai for my PhD, and for the first time I lived away from home and ate hostel food. It did not suit me. My mother was practical. She did not ask me to come home. She said, "You should know how to cope with this," and gave me a herbal remedy that helped.

She also told me never to be stingy about spending on health: "Spend a hundred rupees on your health every month." So every month I bought carrots and lemons, and every day I ate three almonds, one carrot and drank one lemon juice. She often made sesame laddu for me too. Looking back, the vitamins were all there: vitamin C from lemon, vitamin E from sesame and almonds, vitamin A from carrots.

Even breakfast was not only idli and dosa. She rotated barley, wheat, green gram and ragi. Nobody talked about millets in those days, yet she made everything delicious.

Her enquiring nature rubbed off on me. In Madurai I read many books, and in one I found the story of a man in Delhi who stayed fit by drinking plenty of water. From 1993 onwards I began water therapy. I also learned yoga and meditation in Madurai.

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

The name

010FEET stands for Five Elemental Energy Transformation. The numbers come from the zero-one scale on which everything begins: nothing or something, no or yes.

The model grew from a five-part pattern that Dr. Chhalliyil observed through school, college, cancer biology research and teaching between 1976 and 1994. It was formalised as Uni5 in 2003 and has guided the Uni5 Schools, health coaching and the Sakthi Foundations.

From five essentials to five levels

In 1997, at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, the habits learned at home became the five essentials of health. They are the five levels of 010FEET Wellness today.

These five sit within the traditional Ayurvedic understanding of Vata, Pitta and Kapha, and are also the five steps of the Naturogenomics programme offered through MA Omics.

The wider 010FEET principles

Beyond the body, the 010FEET framework holds that lasting wellbeing comes from caring for every part of life together:

The five levels of 010FEET Wellness focus on the physical foundation, with BMA opening the door to the rest. For the complete framework, visit 010FEET.com ↗.

Our working principles

In 2015 many friends asked, "You eat tested food for your family's health. Why don't you share it with us?" That is how we started Shopawareness.com.

It did not grow as we had hoped. People were not yet ready to pay a premium to support farmers who practised excellent traditional farming and whose food was high in polyphenols and antioxidants. Shop Awareness eventually passed into other hands, but the logistics never worked well.

The lesson stayed with us, and it shapes how we work today.

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

From 2010 onwards I began testing our food, because I understood that organic food is not always tested comprehensively. Organic certification has its own rules, which is correct, and we cannot blame anybody for that.

From 2012 I started testing for polyphenols and antioxidants. No laboratories in India were doing this then, so I engaged one or two laboratories to do it. My family ate only food that had been tested.

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

From 1999, because so many people asked me to share this knowledge, I published it on my website.

Today the website holds about 2,000 pages and has recorded more than 30 million visits on uni5.co. Had we kept a counter from the very beginning, I am sure the count would have crossed 100 million. At any time, thousands of people are reading.

It is heartening that so many people have used this knowledge over the past 25 to 30 years. Now we are carrying it forward as a wellness programme.

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

Requests continue from people who want tested food and trusted food products. Many wellness centres do good work, but these people wanted something more, so we started this programme again.

We give people many choices, and we hope this helps individuals, children, families, companies and workplaces everywhere to eat well and live well through an integrated approach. It is not only about diet. It is a complete approach.

Honest about our limits

We cannot guarantee everything one hundred percent, because we rely on farmers and food manufacturers. We test as much as we can, but things can still go wrong. We work to keep the quality as high as possible.

Choose your levels

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.

The name comes from the zero-one scale. The universe began on a scale of 0 and 1: either there is nothing, or there is something. Like a computer, it is either zero or one, no or yes.

That yes-or-no flow is how our system works too.

Read about the 010FEET philosophy →

This is a personal story shared for inspiration. It is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making changes to your diet, cleansing or exercise routine.