INTRODUCTION

Food as Friend or Foe?

An Ayurvedic Perspective

 

 

MY DEAR READERS,

When I was growing up in Jamshedpur, India, we lived a life based on Ayurveda, an ancient system for understanding disease and health that considers food that is grown, cooked, and eaten with reverence as both nutrition and medicine. My parents explained the meaning and purpose of our household rituals and traditions in such a way that we children, six of us, could embrace and carry them forward into our own future. One of my most vivid recollections from my years at my childhood home is the set of rituals my family followed around food, which I now try to emulate. Our parents taught us to talk to the plants that grew year-round in abundance in our front and back kitchen gardens as well as on our rooftop and ask for the plants’ forgiveness before cutting, plucking, pruning, or necessarily uprooting them. We were trained to thank the plants for providing us with fruits, vegetables, and flowers and to take only as much as we needed at any given time; thus harvesting was a daily process.

Dhanvantari, the physician to the gods, gave instructions to the rishis and wise sages of ancient India on how to provide a well-balanced and complete medical system for taking care of humans. These details were written down in Sanskrit by the physician Charaka in his Charaka Samhita treatise and are taught in Ayurvedic medical schools in India. Ayurvedic knowledge for taking care of health has also permeated the culture and has been passed down in familial traditions, and the daily life routines and food habits of many Indians are based on the concepts that have been laid out in Charaka’s treatise.

Before we started cooking, my mother would bathe while chanting about the river Ganga. She’d then clean the stove, pots and pans, and kitchen thoroughly and decorate the stovetop and the floor around it with a simple kolam, a floral or geometric design made with rice flour. She’d say a prayer to Ganesh, asking him to help the cooking to progress without obstacles, and another to Agni asking him to infuse the food with vital warmth, life, and energy. Because the food would be offered first to God, she never sampled tidbits to ascertain taste, yet she seasoned the food to perfection.

When the food was ready, Mother would carry all the finished dishes to the prayer room and, after lighting the prayer lamp, our parents would chant a prayer to the goddess Annapurna and meditate for a few moments. Then Mother would take out portions for our two cows and their calves, for the birds who visited our garden, and for any person who might come by asking for food. Prior to mealtime, my eldest sister Meenakshi would ensure that all six of us children had taken baths, combed our hair, brushed our teeth, put on fresh, clean clothes, and had a tilak (third-eye dot) and vibhuti (holy ash) on our foreheads.

After prayers, we would sit on the floor in a semicircle around Mother. Anyone who came by at mealtime was offered food and sent home afterward with a pack of goodies. Picking, criticizing, choosing, or rudely demanding food was not allowed. Our parents explained to us that the food on our plate was made possible by all the plants in our garden working around the clock to produce it, that Mother had cooked the food with devotion because she loved us, that the food had acquired its specific taste and texture because of the grace of Agni, and, finally, that the relationship between food, hunger, and the body remained healthy and normal because of the extreme grace of Ma Annapurna, the universal mother who nurtures all of creation. Thus, they explained, all food is a priceless gift of love from nature and Mother and a symbol of the infinite grace of gods and goddesses. It is Prasad, food offered to God, and it would be a sin to humiliate, neglect, waste, or disrespect food or to express greed, lust, or aggressiveness when eating. It would also be a sin not to share food with other human beings, animals, and birds.

My mother was also a great storyteller, and most of her mealtime stories revolved around concepts like thankfulness, expressing gratitude toward nature and the gods whose grace keeps us in good, physical, mental, and emotional health, and partaking of and enjoying food and benefitting from its life-nurturing qualities. We also saw our parents fast on all religious occasions and for several days every month and donate their share of food to needy people.

My pursuit of academic milestones like master’s and doctorate degrees in clinical microbiology took me away from my home in my late teens, and I spent twelve years at two universities, living in dormitories where huge industrial-sized kitchens manufactured food for up to two thousand students at a time. All requirements for a wholesome and pure vegetarian menu were treated with utter disregard. Even in India, the ancient land of pure vegetarianism, the food service believed that providing a vegetarian dish meant removing pieces of meat and serving the leftover potatoes from the same dish.

Being a strict vegetarian, I lived on chapatti (unleavened flatbread) and fruit jams during this time. Nevertheless, every time I sat at the dining table with hundreds of other hungry, angry, complaining, disinterested, hurried, loud, and abusive youngsters, I tried to shut out the noise and visualize the sacred atmosphere around food preparation at our home. I would recall my mother’s face that always expressed devotion and love, and then whatever good was in front of me took on special meaning. It became Prasad. My attitude was soon noted by the cooks and servers, and they became quite committed to taking personal care of my vegetarian needs.

When I married a United States–based book publisher and moved to Vermont to begin a family with him, I saw for the first time elaborate nutritional labels printed on the packaging of both raw and prepared food. I saw many people counting calories and fearing some food ingredients as if they were poisons as lethal as cyanide. They appeared to be looking at food with trepidation, suspicion, and fear, as if it were their enemy and would destroy them if they consumed it. They fasted with missionary zeal, but their focus was just on losing weight and flattening abdominal flab. I also read about the various illnesses people got and about how corrective nutritional measures could improve the long-term outcome of these various illnesses regardless of the highly stressed, TV-addicted, and intoxicated state of the population.

Since my childhood in the 1960s, science has reached great milestones by discovering more and more information about food, including its farming, harvesting, storage, transportation, and biochemical nature. Scientists can predict how many calories and how many grams of any particular nutrient consumed might result in greater longevity or a certain amount of muscle mass or bone density and perhaps even predict the perfect diet that would result in that elusive goal: immortality.

But this wealth of information on every material aspect of food seems to have stripped off the reverential, devotional, prayerful, and thankful attitude toward food and ignores the manner in which it is prepared and eaten. It seems that food is seen as a commodity to be consumed daily, and it is often thought to be more of a curse than a blessing. Seeing my parents remain youthful and vigorous into their eighties and nineties and recalling my childhood years at home, it is apparent to me that food’s effect on one’s body, mind, and soul is connected to one’s individual attitude toward growing, harvesting, cooking, sharing, and eating that food.

We are and we become what we eat. This is a well-known Ayurvedic concept that I learned at home from my parents. Ayurveda recognizes that food sustains life by nourishing all five of the known interconnected koshas, or sheaths, in the body, which include the annamaya kosha (physical body), the pranamaya kosha (vital life force), the manomaya kosha (mind), the vijnanamaya kosha (intellect), and the anandamaya kosha (the inner blissful self).¹

These koshas are like layers in the body, and the annamaya kosha is the outermost, gross, material, physical body that is created, maintained, and destroyed by food. If food is taken as a medicine, wisely, judiciously, mindfully, and with an attitude of “eat to live,” it can create and maintain a healthy body. However, if food is taken with greed, lust, and a self-indulgent “live to eat” attitude without awareness, knowledge, and refinement, then it destroys the body instead of nurturing and maintaining it.

The annamaya kosha is the vessel that carries the other four koshas, and all five koshas are interrelated and affect each other. If one kosha is out of balance, it affects the balance and well-being of the other four koshas. For instance, if the annamaya kosha is made sick with faulty food, it negatively affects the mind, emotions, feelings, and intellect and also throws a dark veil over the anandamaya kosha that is supposed be a source of bliss and light in our lives. Since food can impact our entire being, we truly are, in fact, what we eat, and if we have the desire to become healthier and more energetic, we can do so by changing our interaction with food and by becoming more mindful of what we ingest.

From my childhood background in Ayurveda, I know that the prevention and management of many maladies as well as a cure for some diseases can be accomplished by altering a person’s interaction with food and changing what, why, where, when, and how they eat—and sometimes with whom they eat. The latest research in food and nutrition and the insights gained from it suggests that diseases can be prevented and even cured by modification of our eating pattern and the quality of our food.² “Food is medicine” is a well-known proverb.

An example from my childhood comes to mind. During Deepavali, the festival of light that is celebrated all over India, we indulged for days at a stretch in very rich, sweet, fried, and to-die-for-delicious festival foods. This festive, overindulgent eating occasionally led to loose stools and vomiting. I recall my mother quoting from the Charaka Samhita, Langhanam parama aushadham, which means “Reduction is the ultimate medicine.” She explained that overindulgence in rich food causes digestive upset, and that the cure for this malady is simply to reduce the intake of this food.

In her sweet and musical voice, Mother also reminded us of a saying in Tamil:

In English this simply means, “One who eats once a day is a yogi, one who eats twice a day is a bhogi (a person who likes to enjoy), and one who eats three times a day is rogi (a sick individual).”

Never one to worry or suffer from lack of ideas, Mother made us fast for a day after the festival and gave us plenty of warm water to drink. Thereafter, we were offered a small amount of only one type of fruit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If we were oversaturated with the sweet taste of the festival foods and declined to eat fruits, then she withheld them and instead made us kanji by slow roasting unpolished brown rice containing germ and bran, grinding it into a coarse powder, and then cooking it with sufficient water to give it a soupy texture. For the next two to three days, she served us kanji for all three meals.

Mother’s back-to-basics Ayurvedic intervention was very simple and consisted of the following three steps:

1. Withholding or eliminating the problematic food
2. Fasting on water only to flush and cleanse the digestive system
3. Simplifying food intake to one extremely simple, light, and easy-to-digest food

With these three steps, we were able to give the digestive system the much-needed rest from the heavy-duty festival foods and were soon over our upset stomach without any medicine and without having to run to a doctor. Fasting to remove the obstacle to recovery—in this case, rich festival food—allowed the digestive system to automatically correct itself and become healthy again.

This childhood experience of seeing the Ayurvedic principle work like a charm, along with a scientific understanding of industrial foods and modern eating habits and what they do to our health, helped me to see the impact of these practices on our psychosomatic well-being and inspired me to explore the Ayurvedic concept of fasting, isolating foods, and then sensibly combining foods that would work in a modern-day home environment.

Ayurveda is holistic in the sense that it honors and acknowledges the fact that our health as well as our disease states are intrinsically connected to our thoughts, emotions, environment, living conditions, exercise level, and food intake. At the time Ayurveda was developed as a system of medicine thousands of years ago, human beings were still hunting and gathering or conducting small-scale subsistence farming for their basic food needs. Because they depended completely on nature for food, shelter, and medicine, people knew that nature and her rhythms and seasons must be honored.

But times have changed, and people’s connection to nature has changed too. We now live in an industrialized world where quantity and profit-driven commerce are valued much more than quality and a benevolent worldview. We have abandoned the peaceful, earth-honoring lifestyle of our ancestors that caused the least amount of harm to the environment and are now paying the price by way of a general decline in our overall health and well-being.

Needless to say, my personal familial background with Ayurveda has helped me see food—its cultivation, preparation, and consumption—from a completely different perspective than the one I hear about from the clients I meet in my Homeopathy practice and what I observe in the modern industrial, commercial methods of cultivating, handling, cooking, and eating food.

Since 2008, I have been engaged in a family practice of Homeopathy. I see many clients with a variety of illnesses. After all, a family practice is an open door for any and all complaints experienced by people. As part of my inquiry into the wellness of my clients, I routinely ask them about their food intake. Finding out about what people eat, how they view their relationship to food, and how they experience food cravings and aversions is part of a general inquiry into the totality of the individual. Some of the food issues people bring to my attention include not being hungry or thirsty, being hungry or thirsty all the time, struggling to lose weight, or losing too much weight too quickly. They eat too much sugar or lick salt off the spoon. They crave chocolate, ice cream, or bread and can easily eat a full bar of chocolate, a pint of ice cream, or a loaf of bread in one sitting. They are into drinking ten or more bottles of soft drinks a day, or they refuse to eat any vegetable that is not white and creamy (i.e., they only eat mashed potatoes).

By inquiring about the client’s food habits, it oftentimes becomes as apparent as daylight that at least a part of their wellness concern is connected with faulty food intake. Faulty food and overconsumption of faulty food is helping them to maintain an environment in their body that makes it possible for them to experience varying degrees of sickness.³ As Thiruvalluvar, a well-known poet-saint from south India, said a few millennia ago, “The pleasures of health abide in the man who eats moderately. The pains of disease dwell with him who eats excessively.” Intake of faulty food causes a marked reduction in vitality and bad food habits become an obstacle on the path of recovery and total wellness.

In other words, the uninterrupted overconsumption of bad and lifeless food three times every day with no significant physical activity can cause a myriad of health problems. Lots of faulty and undesirable foods—desserts, ice cream, pastries, baked goods, junk food, and processed foods, snacks, and soft drinks—that are included in many meals can bring in anywhere from 2,500 to 3,000 calories and can be quite unfit for human consumption as we will see in the upcoming chapters. And when these excess calories are not spent in vigorous physical activities, then people begin to see degenerative changes in their body, mind, and spirit—they become prime candidates for the illnesses of the modern times and a vast majority seek recourse for their problems from the medical-pharmaceutical industry instead of taking responsibility for their own health.

 

Homeopathy in India

In my upbringing my parents used Homeopathy as well as Ayurveda for taking care of their six children. Though Ayurveda has been in use in my country for thousands of years, Homeopathy was introduced in India only during early nineteenth century. Since then, Homeopathy has flourished in India and there are over 195 medical colleges that provide undergraduate education in Homeopathy and 43 that provide postgraduate education, adding over twelve thousand new graduates annually to the pool of practitioners. Over 62 percent of the population in India uses homeopathy exclusively for all its health needs. And the Indian Homeopathic practitioners encounter and treat almost any disease known to humankind.

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*For more on how Homeopathy is used to treat disease in India and elsewhere visit the Hpathy website.

 

Take for example hypertension, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. The medical community is recognizing now that a highly stressful sedentary life coupled with a diet full of saturated fats and excess salt, red meat, and refined carbohydrates creates an environment in the body that is suitable for the development and maintenance of these diseases. But all the medicines in the world, taken most diligently, do nothing more than keep symptoms suppressed and expose us to a multitude of side effects, some of them more horrible than the disease itself. They do not cure the problem from the inside out or remove the root cause. This is why people remain on medications for rest of their lives.

Now, I have nothing against doctors! These brilliant people have devoted decades of their lives to studying medical science and are doing their best to help sick people. They can say, “Take this prescription medication and your cholesterol will come down, your blood pressure will be controlled, your sugar will stabilize, your heart valve will work, and you will get longer, harder, better erections,” and generally, people will take their advice as word from a higher, more educated, well-meaning, and all-knowing authority. They want to get over their sickness and get on with their lives as quickly as possible, and they hope that if they do exactly what the doctor says and take all the prescribed medications, then their problems will go away. But the best pill prescribed by the very best and brightest doctor is not going to do for you what you must do for yourself.

Understanding the maintaining cause or the obstacle to recovery and removing it requires a sustained discipline on the part of the patient as well as the practitioner. The patient has to do something—besides swallowing pills, hopefully—and take charge of their wellness so that they can undo the damage they have inflicted upon themselves from decades of eating bad food and consuming calories over and above their capacity to spend. When the maintaining causes are addressed and removed, the illness either becomes a lot more manageable or goes away completely.

In their Global Burden of Disease study that spanned 195 countries and lasted from 1990 till 2017, researchers from the University of Washington discovered that unhealthy diets cause more deaths than smoking and high blood pressure.⁴ They also found that although the consumption of red meat, excess salt, sugary beverages, and other bad foods play a role in the death toll, the majority of deaths are due to people not eating enough of the foods that are good for them—fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and whole grains, for example. By tracking the intake of fifteen different dietary elements, the researchers found that poor diets accounted for 10.9 million deaths worldwide. This is a fifth of the total preventable fatalities. In comparison, tobacco consumption is linked to 8 million deaths and high blood pressure accounts for 10.4 million deaths.

The lead researcher of this study, Ashkan Afshin, has urged the health authorities to focus on promoting healthy eating comprising fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and whole grains and not to stress dropping sugars, fats, and salt. He bases his argument on the logic that when people begin to eat the right kind of food that is good for them, they will drop eating the food that is bad for them. “Generally, in real life people do substitution,” he says. “When they increase the consumption of something, they decrease the consumption of other things.”⁵

Ayurveda can help anyone to heal the present-day sufferings related to the destruction of humanity’s relationship to food and the manner in which it is grown, handled, cooked, and eaten. And you don’t have to be particularly spiritual, religious, or holy to reap the benefits of Ayurvedic techniques; they can be used by anyone who needs help, irrespective of their cultural, religious, or spiritual belief systems.

Before you read on about these principles, I want to tell you that Ayurveda has a very vast tool kit at its disposal. It has a system of surgery and a pharmacopoeia that address advanced disease states, and it also has a very strong specialty that deals with preventive measures. The ancient rishis who were scholars and practitioners of Ayurveda knew that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. To help with the prevention of maladies related to food, Ayurveda recommends a few very simple techniques that anyone can follow in the comfort of their own home and without great expense or any special professional training or intervention. The three simple steps in the time-tested Ayurvedic technique are as follows:

1. Fasting on water only or water and herb teas only to help flush out old remnants, impacted fecal matter, and germs that are harmful and also to rebalance the bacteria in our gut
2. Isolating food by eating only one type of food at a time to simplify digestion and allow the body to fully absorb all the nutrients in a particular food (also known as a mono-diet)
3. Mixing foods from various food groups in a sensible way

Growing up in a household that was based on Ayurveda, I saw firsthand the practicality, utility, simplicity, and intelligence of these three fundamental Ayurvedic principles and how they assist us in regaining vitality. This experience, coupled with the outcome of my inquiry into my client’s wellness status and their relationship to food, has motivated me to write this book and place it in your hands.

In the upcoming pages, I will give you a brief history of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and their relationship to seasonal and local foods and tell you about the realities of modern-day food and the problems that are unleashed from viruddha ahara, the faulty mixing/combination and intake of food. This information will help you make smart choices about what foods you want to eat. I will also tell you in a step-by-step manner about how to apply the three simple Ayurvedic techniques for taking responsibility for your wellness, because as you may know, self-help is the best help.

To enable you to succeed in your effort, I will explain the physiology of digestion for various food groups like carbohydrates, proteins, and fats so that you can understand the logic behind the Ayurvedic concept of viruddha ahara and why certain types of foods can be a problem when they are mixed/combined. I will also share with you how to shop for fruits, vegetables, and meats from the grocery store, health food store, or your local farmers market, because this is an important piece of the puzzle. You will see how you can completely revise and restructure your pantry, engage in a process of external and internal cleansing, and learn the Ayurvedic technique of eating with all five fingers so that you can satisfy all five of your sensory organs in the process of eating.

All this information will completely equip you to use the three simple Ayurvedic techniques mentioned above in your own day-to-day life and reap the benefits in terms of enhanced and improved wellness. An outstanding feature of these techniques is that while you are busy and fully, diligently, and consciously engaged in healing and rebooting yourself from the inside out, you are not suffering the hunger pangs, exhaustion, deprivation, or cravings that are usually associated with any change in the way we eat or the usual “diet” plans. Instead, you have lightness in the body and a satisfying feeling that finally you are doing something positive, sustainable, and logical to help yourself.

Before I sign off on this message to you, I must emphasize that the Ayurvedic reset diet will keep you supplied with enough abundant energy for your regular day-to-day life and more. So the question is, what do you do with all this energy? Is simply eating the right food at the right time and in right quantity sufficient to keep you healthy? My personal experience is that the energy has to be channeled in a positive direction, and physical exercise and a routine of regular body movement are essential for obtaining the greatest benefit from the Ayurvedic reset diet. Adding an exercise regimen to your day-to-day life will increase the oxygenation and flexibility of the muscles and joints, strengthen the musculoskeletal structures, enhance the blood circulation and waste elimination systems, positively impact moods and emotions, and provide an overall sense of well-being.

It is my earnest hope that this book will give you a fresh perspective on food and that, going forward, you will begin to see food as a friend that helps and supports your efforts to get better and stay better, and not a foe that threatens you and sucks out your vital energy.

HAPPY READING, VATSALA SPERLING, MS, PH.D., PDHOM, CCH, RSHOM