In 2011, Guires opened the Centre for Food, Mood & Exercise (CFME) in Mylapore, Chennai, with a simple but ambitious idea: that preventive healthcare should meet people where they make everyday decisions about their health. Under the banner "Guidance through research", the centre brought nutrition, physical activity and mental wellbeing together under one roof, a first-of-its-kind integrated, evidence-based preventive healthcare model in India.
The centre was founded by Dr Radhika Ganesan in response to a growing public health challenge. Obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle diseases were rising rapidly in urban India, driven by changing diets and sedentary lifestyles, and compounded by the particular risk profile of Asian Indian populations. Awareness campaigns alone were not enough; people needed practical, trustworthy guidance at the point of choice.
At its heart was the Guires Healthy Supermarket, a fully functioning retail store designed as a live nutrition-education intervention. Every product was placed according to a colour-coded system based on its level of processing: green for least-processed foods to be consumed as per recommended allowances, blue for semi-processed foods to be chosen appropriately as healthier alternatives, and orange for highly processed foods to be limited to a dietitian's recommendation.
Aisles were organised by food group, from wheat and millets, lentils, pulses and legumes to herbs and spices, healthy nuts, oilseeds and healthy fats, with dedicated sections for sugar alternatives, sugar-free substitutes, non-alcoholic beverages and foods for special dietary needs. Ingredient disclosure and additional nutrition labelling helped shoppers understand what they were buying, and in-store nutritionists were on hand to answer questions and guide choices.
Healthy choices should be the easy choices. We built a place where evidence meets everyday life, on the supermarket shelf.
Beyond the shelves, CFME offered dietitian-led counselling and a demonstration kitchen where healthy cooking was taught, not just talked about. An exercise physiology unit, equipped with treadmills, cross-trainers and strength equipment, provided supervised, individualised activity programmes, while a psychology unit addressed the mood, motivation and behaviour that underpin lasting lifestyle change.
Operating from 2011 to 2013 as a live, two-year intervention in a real retail setting, CFME generated valuable insight into what it takes to translate nutrition science into everyday behaviour. Dr Radhika Ganesan documented the model, its outcomes and the barriers it faced, from supplier and product constraints to consumer perceptions and the economics of sustaining such a store, in a peer-reviewed paper published as sole author in Nutrition and Food Technology: Open Access in 2016.
The findings pointed the way forward: models like this need support from public health authorities, specialist recognition of obesity within dietetic practice, and sustainable social-enterprise business models, and should be replicated across regions under the concept of "the food pharmacy".
CFME reflects the values that continue to guide Guires today: evidence before assumption, honesty with the public, and a passion for research that improves lives. The lessons learned in that Mylapore store still shape our work in food and nutrition research, product development and public health.
