Naan being less healthy is a bit confusing to me as it is a fermented wheat bread, unlike the rotis/chapatis. The fermentation breaks down the gluten and other carbohydrates, making the wheat more digestible...
I think those saying so must mean it because it has less fiber (naan is from maida, refined wheat flour, while rotis/chapatis are from atta, which is whole-wheat flour).
Ahhh I was unaware of this distinction. I make something very "naan-like" with unbleached bread flour and sourdough yeasts that is apparently less "traditional" than I had thought?
Yes, that would make it more like an Indian roti, except for the yeast, which is not used in roti.
But atta - the whole-wheat flour used to make roti and chapati and also puri - is not just unbleached - in fact I don't know if it bleached or not - hope not - it is also unrefined wheat flour - meaning they do not remove the bran, or they remove the bran (or outer layers of the wheat grain) but remove less of it than for maida, which I've read is similar to US all-purpose flour. So atta has more dietary fiber and a more noticeable taste.
In fact for Indian grain / flour products made from wheat, there is a sort of gradation - we have:
- daliya - a very coarsely broken wheat grain product - cannot call it a flour, it is too coarse for that - pretty tasty when used to make upma / uppit, even without much spices added. I think couscous may be somewhere between daliya and rava or the same as daliya in granularity - never had it, so not sure. Daliya is so coarsely broken (not finely, I mean) that you can see individual pieces of it, and it looks medium brown and you can tell that it is from wheat, which you cannot for atta just by looking at it - atta just looks like a light brown (near white) flour which could be from any of a number of grains.
- rava - I think this is like or the same as semolina - less coarse than daliya but still coarse, you can see the small individual pieces - used to make upma, also to make rava dosa (mentioned in the OP)
- atta - the whole-wheat flour used to make chapati, roti, puri - finer [1] than rava, this one is a flour
- maida - the refined wheat flour, finer than atta - this is used to make naan.
[1] finer - meaning in diameter, not in taste or quality.
