Before we talk about Ayurveda and its food philosophy, let us travel twenty years back and a few thousand miles away to an apartment complex in New Delhi, where the stars are still shining, the air is crisp, and the streets are quiet. In this predawn hour, my mother rises from bed.
Fifteen minutes later, she is kneading the dough to make bread. Meanwhile, lightly spiced fresh green peas sizzle in the wok. The school bus arrives in twenty minutes, but that is enough time for Mom’s practiced hands to cook and pack a complete meal for both my brother and me.
By the time the first ray of sunlight peeks into our living room, our mother has bathed and said her morning prayers. Soon a familiar sing-song voice floats across the street into her waiting ears:
“Lo aa gayi taazi subah ki mirchi, gobhi, palak.” (Hindi for “Here’s your morning supply of fresh peppers, cauliflower, and spinach leaves.”)
Mom sprints down the stairs armed with an empty basket, a few rupee notes, and vocal cords ready for exercise (this last being essential for haggling with the vegetable vendor over the prices). Many energetic exchanges later, she waltzes back up, her basket brimming with vegetables and fruits in all shades of red, orange, yellow, and green.
Domestic help is readily available in India, but my mother prefers to do the cooking herself. “I like to connect with my food,” she smiles. “When I examine a bunch of cilantro for freshness, inhale the citrusy burst from an orange, or cut green-pepper juliennes, I am not only taking pleasure from it, but also enriching it with my love.” Who can argue with that?
Chhhannnggg!
Tiny mustard seeds descend into a pool of hot clarified butter, making a sound like raindrops pelting a tin roof. While they pop and crackle in the pan, a pinch of asafetida, a strongly aromatic spice, joins them. The air fills with fragrance. Moments later, the cumin seeds dive in, followed by dried fenugreek leaves, turmeric, coriander, cayenne, salt, and finally a cup of diced fresh vegetables.
A few hours later upon returning from school, I fling my satchel on a chair and bend over the sizzling wok to inhale the incredible aroma. How inviting they look — those potatoes, cauliflower florets, and peas — wrapped in their glistening coat of bright red pepper flakes, sun-yellow turmeric, and black mustard seeds! When they’re done, Mom sprinkles them with freshly chopped cilantro leaves.
We settle eagerly on the chatai (straw mat) on the kitchen floor. One by one, whole wheat chapatis (Indian bread) are lifted hot off the griddle, smeared with ghee, and delivered to our waiting plates. Accompanied by sweet-and-sour mango chutney and tall glasses of cool homemade lassi (yogurt drink), such spicy veggies and ladelfuls of lentils are featured on our lunch menu all summer.
It’s time to tell you why I am rhapsodizing about my eating routine. My family’s food tradition epitomizes the Ayurvedic philosophy of nutrition. That is:
1. Eat a wholesome vegetarian meal. According to Ayurvedic beliefs, food should be a pure, positive input. If it is derived by taking a life, it loses its enlivening qualities. The Ayurvedic belief is that meat is tamasic — carrying the negative emotions of terror, panic, and helplessness that an animal experiences while being slaughtered. Thus, such tamasic foods can give rise to feelings of dullness, depression, and aggression. But if you cannot give up meat, read the next chapter for recommendations on when and how to eat it.
2. When you set out to balance your meals, look to harmonize flavors — not balance nutrients. The reason? Ayurvedic living means listening to your body, and the body does not understand the language of carbohydrates and proteins. It responds to the scent of lemon, the sight of green peppers, the taste of curry.
Does this mean that a vaidya will encourage you to eat chips, desserts, and whatever else you like with abandon? Of course not. The Ayurvedic encouragement to “give your body foods it likes” assumes that your body will ask for foods that nourish it. If your physiology is in balance, this will happen naturally. But more about that in a moment.
How vital a role does food play in the Ayurvedic system? The clue lies in a recent remark one of my friends made. I coaxed her to consult a vaidya for a long-standing problem of insomnia. Upon her return she phoned me, sounding a little doubtful: “Well, I’ve come back with a grocery list!” I told her she had hit the nail right on the head. To the vaidya, food is medicine!
Ayurvedic healers follow this elementary logic: food and drink are substances that you physically, consciously put inside your body. Your body’s most minute channels — its tissues and every one of its trillions of cells — assimilate this intake, proving in a very basic sense that “you are what you eat.” If what you eat is not healthy, you cannot be healthy. That is why food should form the foundation of the healing process. Ancient Ayurvedic texts go so far as to say “Anna Bramha,” or “food is a form of God.”
To a first-timer, a vaidya’s food guidelines can be somewhat puzzling. The vaidya doesn’t say “eat more protein” or “avoid sodium,” but instead reels off a seemingly random list of foods to choose and those to avoid. To a person suffering skin inflammation, for example, the vaidya may say “eat more fresh cheese, broccoli, and pears, but avoid garlic, mayonnaise, vinegar, and ketchup.”
What is the reasoning here?
By making changes in the contents of your platter, the vaidya is trying to restore harmony among your doshas. The dietary recommendations might initially seem tough — even impossible — to follow. But the vaidya knows that, if followed for some time, these “tough” changes will receive support from your body’s own intelligence.
I know of a fifteen-year-old who, when asked by a vaidya to eat brussels sprouts, shot back with “What’s that?” But thanks to a mother who was willing to place her trust in the vaidya’s methods, the boy had to follow the recommended diet. One month later, he reported a surprising change in his eating habits: “I find myself wanting more brussels sprouts — and I can’t imagine how I ever ate ketchup!” To the vaidya, this was no surprise. It was a corroboration of a truth that our wise ancestors discovered over centuries of observation.
That truth is simple: your current health problem or “disorder” is a result of your body’s innate intelligence being compromised. In Ayurveda, there is an interesting term for this: pragya aparadh (pragya means “intellect,” and aparadh means “mistake” — thus, “a mistake of the intellect”). When the intellect commits a mistake, the taste buds that should naturally want sweet foods, for example, start craving pungent ones.
To understand this concept fully, let us begin with the basics of Ayurvedic nutrition by talking about the six tastes. According to Ayurveda, every grain, fruit, vegetable, or beverage on earth — whether natural or manufactured — has one or more of six basic tastes. The Sanskrit term for taste is rasa, and these six rasas are:
1. madhura: sweet
2. lavana: salty
3. amla: sour
4. katu: bitter
5. tikta: pungent
6. kashaya: astringent
Further, each taste represents the qualities of one or more elements of nature, and hence has the power to increase or decrease the presence of the corresponding dosha in your system. In the beginning, this can seem confusing. But let me remind you that every single Ayurvedic theory is based on direct observation of life — and that is far easier to understand than some of today’s complex scientific findings!
So think about it for a moment, and the picture will start to clear. Let’s take the sweet taste. In Ayurveda, the sweet taste is believed to build those tissues that are composed of the earth and water elements. Therefore, sweet foods increase the kapha dosha. Now, if you have an irrepressible sweet tooth the kapha dosha can be aggravated, causing toxic buildup. When that happens, you would be advised to increase your intake of bitter, pungent, and astringent foods — all of which decrease kapha. Foods that contain carbohydrates, sugars, fats, and amino acids belong to the “sweet” category.
Similarly, salty, sour (acidic), and pungent foods are seen to have the “heating” qualities of fire. Therefore, they speed up the metabolic process, thus increasing pitta. Take the pungent taste, for instance. Peppers are pungent — and fiery. Therefore, peppers are likely to increase pitta. And we already know that pitta-dominated people need fewer heat-producing and more cooling elements in their life. Aggravated pitta is countered by eating more sweet foods with cooling properties.
Finally, pungent, bitter, and astringent foods send the vata dosha spiraling upward. Besides foods like bitter greens and certain gourds, the bitter taste is also found in certain herbs, such as aloe vera and goldenseal. A cooling taste, it is particularly healing to those who are dominated by the pitta dosha. In moderate amounts, bitter foods are said to detoxify and cleanse the body and mind. All hot and spicy foods belong to the “pungent” category. Ayurvedic healers believe such foods stimulate the digestion, improve appetite, and help flush out toxins. Astringent foods have a drying and firming quality. Their dry nature counteracts the phlegmatic quality of kapha, therefore, such foods are said to have a decongesting, diuretic, and analgesic effect. Volatile oils, alkaloids, and tannins in foods such as lemon oil, tomatoes, peppers, and tea belong to these categories. They penetrate the body’s tiniest channels with ease, increasing movement of waste and nutrients across your system. While this can be a good thing, too much activity in the body also creates imbalance. A disturbed vata, therefore, benefits by eating warm, salty, sweet, and sour foods.
When the doshas are perfectly balanced in your physiology, you naturally lean toward the taste groups that are beneficial to you. For example, a kapha-dominated person with doshas in balance will prefer spicy curry to rich chocolate pastry. But if that person’s kapha dosha is aggravated, the intellect will commit a mistake, causing a craving for pastry and further aggravating the kapha dosha. The result is lethargy — and obesity. In the case of the fifteen-year-old boy, the vaidya prescribed a diet that led his system to ask for pitta-reducing flavors.
Whatever your dosha type, if you consider yourself to be in fairly good health, all you need to do is try to get all six tastes on your plate every time you eat. “What?” I can hear you protest, “six tastes? When I barely manage to get one taste in each meal?! And when I have no clue what ‘astringent’ really means?”
Relax. Here are three facts about the six tastes that are sure to make you happy:
1. There is a wide variety of foods and drinks in each category. If the vaidya has told to you get more “sweet” flavors in your food, for example, you need not tear your hair out trying to think of daily dessert ideas. In Ayurveda, foods like milk, wheat, rice, bread, and potatoes are also included in the “sweet” category. Similarly, astringent foods are not exotic wild berries. They are easily found on your supermarket shelves; beans, legumes, and leafy vegetables all have the astringent taste.
Here is a more complete list of basic foods for each category:
• Sweet: rice, milk, wheat, butter, barley, pasta, potatoes, and sweet potatoes; most legumes, such as beans, lentils, and peas; sweet fruits such as dates, figs, pears, and mangoes; sugar in any form — except honey, which is also astringent.
• Salty: any foods that contain salt, especially salt-heavy foods like pickles and chips.
• Sour: citrus fruits such as oranges, limes, and lemons; also cheese, yogurt, tomatoes, sour cream, whey, vinegar, soy sauce, sour cabbage, and wine.
• Bitter: turmeric, eggplant, zucchini, fenugreek, and leafy greens.
• Pungent: spices such as black pepper, mustard, cumin, garlic, ginger, cayenne, and other chilies; radishes.
• Astringent: beans, lentils, walnuts, hazelnuts, honey, sprouts, lettuce, rhubarb, most raw vegetables, pomegranates, apples, berries, persimmons, cashews, and unripe fruits.
2. Often, a single dish will supply you with more than one taste. Easy-to-make condiments like chutneys can sometimes give you all six. For some simple multi-flavored ideas, see the recipes in chapter 9.
3. Getting all six tastes does not mean having to make sure you get equal amounts of each flavor. Just a hint of the less common tastes (astringent or bitter) should suffice at any given meal. The quantities, of course, will also depend on what doshas you are trying to balance — and the vaidya is your best guide on these proportions.
Getting the six rasas on your plate is only a small part of the Ayurvedic recommendations. The ancient texts list a wide range of foods to avoid — whatever your dosha type and whatever your state of health. Here are some basic no-nos:
• Fermented, canned, and frozen foods. These are devoid of natural life force, or prana.
• Microwaved foods. Cooking in the microwave oven does not involve conventional heat — and food cooked without agni is, to the Ayurvedic way of thinking, lacking in prana. Microwave cooking is also believed to confuse the chemistry of foods, changing their innate qualities. If you cannot do without the microwave, remember that the longer you cook food in there the more goodness it is going to lose.
• Leftovers. These are heavy, hard to digest, and ama-causing. Leftover food gradually changes in chemistry, losing its prana, or life force.
• Processed foods. This category includes yeast-based foods, like most yeast-based breads and pizza dough, that are not natural and hence cause ama buildup. If you cannot give up yeast-fermented bread, the next best thing is to also eat plenty of freshly kneaded and cooked bread.
• Mushrooms. These are not really a vegetable but a fungus, and Ayurvedic teaching advises against eating fungus of any kind.
• Genetically engineered foods. Interference with the basic structure of foods saps them of their natural intelligence, rendering them undesirable — even unsafe.
Another interesting aspect of Ayurvedic nutrition is that it weighs the benefits of food from several angles. You might not generally think about these things, but there are several factors that determine the way a food will affect you. Here are some basic questions to ask:
1. Is the food suited to you? Ayurveda attributes specific qualities to each vegetable, fruit, spice, and herb grown on the planet. These qualities are called gunas. Cinnamon, for instance, is considered a “hot” spice, while cardamom is “cool.” Again, peas are sweet and broccoli is bitter. Though you can slowly develop an understanding of the various spices and their properties on your own, it can admittedly be confusing in the beginning. The best way to start is to refer to the dosha-wise food charts in the appendix. If you are a kapha personality, the chart will suggest some hot and pungent foods, while for pitta there is a list of sweet and mild flavors.
2. Is the combination of foods right? According to Ayurvedic wisdom, while some food substances may be beneficial on their own, they can be toxin producing if combined in a single meal. This is because each food has a unique energy, taste, quality, and aftereffect — and hence requires a different amount of digestive fire, or agni, to digest. Therefore, combining raw and cooked foods can tax the agni. Similarly, eating fruits and proteins in the same meal interferes with sugar metabolism; fruit sugar is digested with ease, while starch takes longer — thus resulting in the formation of toxic ama. Drinking milk soon after having a glass of juice or a bowl of yogurt can curdle the milk in the stomach, forcing the digestive system to work harder.
3. How does the food change when processed? Take the example of milk. Cold milk, straight from the refrigerator, is difficult to digest. But boiled and cooled milk, taken with a pinch of nutmeg, is lighter and a natural tranquilizer. Similarly, the properties of most foods change with the way they are processed. In general, raw foods require more agni to digest, so they stay in the stomach longer. Therefore, the Ayurvedic preference is for cooked foods over raw. Lightly cooked and mildly spiced foods are considered the most beneficial. While it is true that some nutrients are lost in cooking, that loss is compensated for by the lightness of the food. If you use a healthy cooking technique, such as sautéing, steaming, or roasting, you will be able to retain essential nutrients.
4. Is the food compatible with your location? Within the same country, there are different climate zones and therefore different ways in which our bodies respond to foods. If you’ve recently moved from a cold, wet place to a desert region, you will need more moist, sweet, and oily foods such as carrots, zucchini, beets, cilantro, cumin, ghee, sesame oil, and light beans. This is because the desert environment is dominated by the dry vata dosha. Clarified butter, or ghee, lubricates and nurtures the body from the inside, so it is especially good for people living in desert lands. In the same way, coastal towns and green belts have their own seasonal doshas and food requirements.
5. Is the quantity right? Each of us has a certain capacity, beyond which the system has to struggle to digest food. Typically, a pitta type of person can eat large amounts of food and digest it without trouble. A vata person has a rather irregular appetite, while a kapha-type person, whose digestion is somewhat sluggish, is satisfied with smaller amounts of food. Your appetite and capacity will depend on both your prakriti, or original constitution, and your vikriti, or current dosha state. This capacity is known in Ayurveda as your unique matra. Consuming much more or less than your ideal matra will cause an imbalance in your digestive system, so get a feeling for your capacity and try to eat accordingly. Whatever your dosha type, the Ayurvedic recommendation is to leave one-quarter of your stomach empty so as not to put a strain on the digestive fire. How do you know when your stomach is “three-fourths full and one-fourth empty?” Go by feel. Chew every bite well. When you have eaten enough to feel satisfied, but not full or stuffed, put your fork down. Avoid second helpings. Don’t read or watch television while eating because these activities prevent you from eating mindfully, and can cause you to overeat. By not loading your stomach with food, you help your digestive juices work more efficiently. This keeps undigested food — and hence ama — from piling up in your system, staving off the possibility of disease.
As with understanding the intricacies of your doshas, don’t worry too much about balancing every aspect of the food you eat. For one thing, it is not practical, and for another, it is not necessary. To help you make good food choices with minimum fuss, I’ve coined two acronyms. The next time you go grocery shopping, ask yourself: “Is this food both FOR and YUP?”
FOR: Fresh and Organic.
YUP: suited to Your Unique Personality.
If the food meets both criteria, take it home.
This, then, is a basic introduction to the Ayurvedic way of nutrition. As you go along, however, you will realize that you have several questions about individual foods. For instance, “Which vegetables should I favor?” “Is yogurt good for me?” “If raw foods are hard to digest, then what about salad?” And so on.
Turn the page, and you’ll find answers to these and several other basic concerns.