Dr. Dante Ruskin, diabetologist & intensivist Dr. Dante Ruskin Diabetes & Critical Care Specialist
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Is Murukku Good for Diabetes? Thattai, Mixture and the Savoury Diwali Plate

IN MODERATION

Murukku, thattai and mixture are moderation foods for diabetes — a better choice than the sweets on the same Deepavali plate, but not a free one. They contain almost no sugar. What they do carry is refined rice and urad flour, deep-frying oil and a great deal of salt. Two small pieces is the honest portion.

Answered by Dr. Dante Ruskin · Diabetologist & Intensivist

The problem is rarely one murukku; it is the open tin. A savoury snack does not announce itself the way a laddu does, so the hand keeps returning all evening. One hundred grams of packaged rice murukku runs about 464 kcal, 50 g of refined carbohydrate and 857 mg of sodium. Serve it on a plate, then close the tin.

What murukku actually is, under the crunch

Strip the shape away and murukku is a short list: rice flour, a little urad or gram flour, sesame, cumin, salt, and hot oil. Thattai is the same dough pressed flat; kai murukku is the same dough piped by hand for show; mixture is murukku broken up and tossed with fried gram, peanuts, poha and curry leaves. There is no sugar anywhere in that list, which is exactly why the snack has a reputation as the safe half of the Deepavali plate. The reputation is half right. A packaged rice murukku runs about 464 kcal, 50 g of carbohydrate and 25 g of fat per 100 g, with 8.9 g of that fat saturated (USDA FoodData Central, Branded Foods). Refined rice flour, milled fine and fried, is a fast carbohydrate. It simply arrives without a sweet taste to warn you.

Better than the sweet — and still counted

Set murukku beside the sweets it shares a tin with and it wins clearly. Adhirasam and laddu are sugar or jaggery plus flour plus ghee; murukku is flour plus oil plus salt. For a person watching glucose, removing the sugar layer removes the sharpest spike, and choosing the savoury item is a genuinely good decision at a festival table. What it is not is permission. Two small pieces — about the 28 g the packets themselves call a serving — is roughly 14 g of carbohydrate, which is a third of a cup of rice. Counted against the day, that is easy. Uncounted, repeated at four houses across Deepavali week, it becomes the reason a three-month HbA1c moves.

The salt nobody counts

This is the part of the murukku question that gets missed, and for most of my patients it matters more than the starch. That same USDA-listed rice murukku label carries 857 mg of sodium per 100 g; a branded Bombay-style mixture entry in the same database gives 457 mg per 100 g alongside 514 kcal and 25.7 g of fat. ICMR-NIN’s 2024 Dietary Guidelines for Indians ask Indians to keep total salt under 5 g a day — roughly 2,000 mg of sodium — and most households here are already past that before any snack is opened. Diabetes and blood pressure travel together, and it is the pair, not the sugar alone, that damages kidneys, eyes and arteries. If you are on treatment for hypertension or have any kidney involvement, the salt in a festival tin is the number to respect. That thread runs through cholesterol and Indian hearts as well.

Mixture is the harder one to control

Murukku has a natural brake: a piece is a piece, and you can see how many have gone. Mixture has none. It is engineered for the hand — small, salty, varied enough that the mouth does not get bored — and a bowl left on the table beside the television empties without a decision ever being made. The ingredients inside it are not the villains; fried gram and peanuts are respectable food, and peanuts and nuts in their plain roasted form are among the better snacks a diabetic can keep. The frying, the salt and the format are what change them. There is a second issue with shop mixture: the oil. ICMR-NIN’s 2024 guidelines are explicit about avoiding deep-fried foods and about not reusing frying oil, and bakery oil in a busy Deepavali week is doing long service. If you are buying, buy small and buy fresh.

Keeping Deepavali intact

Deepavali falls on Sunday 8 November 2026, and the tins start arriving a week before. None of this is an argument for sitting out the festival. It is an argument for three habits. First, plate it: take two murukku or a small katori of mixture onto a plate and put the tin back, because the plate is the portion and the tin never is. Second, eat it after food, not instead of food — a snack landing on an empty stomach in the middle of the afternoon does more to the reading than the same snack after a meal that had dal, curd or curry in it. Third, choose your one: murukku or the sweet, at each house, not both with coffee. Visiting relatives, prasadam offered with both hands, and the walk between houses are the parts of the day worth keeping — and that walk, if you take it, is doing real work on the same reading. If you are on insulin or sulfonylureas and the festival week has changed your eating completely, tell your doctor; dose decisions belong in the consulting room, never on a snack page. Our wider festival snack guidance works the same way all year.

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Frequently asked questions

Yes, and that is a real advantage worth using. Murukku and thattai carry almost no sugar, so they do not deliver the sharp load that adhirasam, laddu or halwa do. But they are still refined flour fried in oil and salted, so they belong on the plate in twos — not as the food you graze on because the sweets were refused.

Two small pieces, roughly 28 grams, is the portion that fits an ordinary day — about 14 g of carbohydrate and 7 g of fat. Eat them after a meal rather than on an empty stomach, count them against that day's rice or chapati, and take them from a plate so the number is visible.

Usually, and for a behavioural reason rather than a chemical one. Mixture is designed to be eaten by the handful, so portions disappear from view, and the salt is higher because it is the flavour carrier. The fried gram and peanuts in it are genuinely better ingredients; the bowl they arrive in is the problem.

Because refined rice flour becomes glucose whether or not it tastes sweet, and finely milled flour that has been fried is absorbed quickly. Added to that, the oil and salt push blood pressure and lipids, which is where most of the real risk in diabetes sits. Sugar is one input among several.

Somewhat, if the oil is fresh and the salt is measured — home frying usually beats bakery oil that has been standing all week. It changes the quality of the fat, not the arithmetic of the flour. Treat a home murukku as the same portion you would take from a packet.

If you have a glucometer, a reading two hours after your festival plate is the most useful thing you will do all week. It tells you what your own combination of murukku, sweet and coffee actually did, which no general page can. Bring the numbers to your next review appointment.