Chapter 10

Stimulating the Palate: A Taste of Things to Come

In This Chapter

Discovering the six essential tastes

Learning about the effects on flavour in your body

Introducing agni and how you can enhance it

Looking at the six stages of digestion

Learning how to determine your digestive capacity

Ayurveda purports that all your senses react to food. Flavours therefore are part of a sophisticated system that yields chemical and emotional effects throughout your mind and body.

You’ve probably had the experience of smelling a favourite food from childhood and being flooded with memories. That experience supports the idea that your food nourishes more than bodily tissues and fluids.

In this chapter you discover that taste includes a lot more than what happens on your tongue. The whole picture of taste includes your sense of smell, texture and even more – such as how you feel emotionally.

Rasa: Discovering the Six Essential Flavours

The Sanskrit term rasa (flavour) shows how the Ayurvedic concept of flavour is fuller than our Western understanding of it. The word divides into two parts:

Ra means ‘to feel, perceive, taste, relish, love and desire’

Sa means ‘to encompass’ and also refers to the best part of anything or the juice in the stomach known as chyle.

The two parts of the word together – rasa – refer to the prevailing sentiment in human character, mind and heart, giving the meaning of flavour a much wider reach.

Ayurveda not only takes a fuller approach to explaining flavour but identifies six distinct flavours, which I explore in the following sections. An optimal diet is seen as being made up of each of the flavours every day. This is acknowledged as your best approach to building a satisfying diet and helping ensure good health.

Selecting sweet (madhura)

For most people, sweetness becomes embedded in the mind early, because a mother’s milk tastes sweet.

The sweet flavour tends to be heavy, cold, sticky and oily. Sweet foods are often slightly greasy and mild, and they bring about a change in your saliva, making it more viscous.

I remember my mother giving me a spoonful of jam after I ate a chilli in a curry. Just as the jam cooled down the heat of the chilli, so a sweet flavour can reduce the power of pitta – the fiery dosha. (Chapter 2 defines the doshas.)

Sweet flavours also reduce vata, the airy dosha. When you feel anxious and all at sea, something sweet immediately calms your jangled nerves.

Finally – and sadly, as far as my waist is concerned – sweetness increases kapha, which is the earthier dosha and confers the ability to build tissues. This makes it heavy, so that extra piece of pie will just add to your figure!

Within your body, sweet food has many uses:

Improving memory

Removing burning (such as gastritis or inflammation in your throat) from your system

Reducing thirst

Promoting milk production in pregnancy

If you’re fit and have good digestion, sweet flavours act as a tonic to your system. You should increase naturally sweet tastes if you’re debilitated. Eat raisins, for example, which are very nutritious and sweet. A tonic wine known as draksharishta is a stimulant for your digestion, particularly if you’re run down after a bout of the flu.

Sweet foods are easy to come by. Wheat and other staples in your diet are predominantly sweet, as are:

Grains, which leave you feeling full and satisfied, including:

• Barley

• Oats

• Rice

Tubers:

• Manioc

• Potatoes

• Taro

• Yams

Oil and oil-containing products:

• Almond

• Coconut

• Peanut

• Sesame

• Sunflower

Fruits such as:

• Apricots

• Grapes

• Nectarines

• Peaches

• Pineapples

Milk and milk products; goat’s milk is also astringent and therefore a little lighter to digest

Sugars:

• Agave

• Date sugar

• Jaggery

• Maple

• Sugar beet

• Sugar cane

This list isn’t exhaustive, and even certain herbs and plants have a sweet taste. For example, liquorice is sweet with a secondary aftertaste that is slightly bitter. Liquorice can help reduce inflammation, is a great expectorant, and is helpful if you have gastritis. Shatavari is a sweet and well-used root of asparagus that helps improve the memory, vitalise the nerves, promote breast milk production and clear out phlegm from the lungs.

If you want to include sweet flavours in your diet by using fruit, make sure you wait until the fruits are ripe. Many fruits are picked before they are ripe, and therefore their prominent taste is masked. For example, bananas are often sold green, and if you eat them at this stage they act as an astringent in the body.

Of course, sweet food in excess leads to trouble such as obesity and diabetes, so eat sweet foods in moderation. Interestingly for those of you who are worried about your weight but enjoy a sweet taste, honey is considered astringent and therefore okay.

Savouring sour (amla)

The sour flavour makes its presence known as soon as it hits your tongue. Right away, you start to salivate. This effect does good things for you, cleaning the mouth and causing sweating, which clears the channels of your body.

Sourness is made up primarily of earth and fire elements, which makes it hot, oily and heavy in nature. This is what you taste in acidic fruits and foods that are rich in oxalic acid, like spinach.

In your body, sour food reduces vata and increases pitta and kapha. In moderate quantities, it can improve your digestion and stimulate your appetite. Too much though can promote skin rashes, muscle weakness, jaundice, gastritis, and any inflammatory disorder related to pitta dosha.

Most fruit can be considered sour before it has ripened. Mango is both sweet and sour (and delicious). Other sources of the sour flavour include:

Ascorbic-acid-rich fruits like gooseberries.

Lemons, which are particularly easy to work into your diet by squeezing them over your food; besides keeping all the connective tissues in your body in good shape, lemon can help alleviate diarrhoea, cramps, nausea and fever.

Hawthorn berries, which boost your circulatory system.

Rosehips, which are packed with vitamin C.

Sorrel, which is often eaten with fish, and is a good blood cleanser.

Tamarind, which is acidic and sour, and helps if you feel nauseated or have diarrhoea.

Amalaki, which is a type of gooseberry extremely popular in India for its benefits, is more sour than anything but contains all of the other flavours except salty. Amalaki has excellent healing qualities, especially for the digestive system.

Securing salt (lavana)

Salt heightens the taste of anything that you add it to, which is why you find it on so many tabletops. It’s always been highly prized; the Latin word salary derives from the same root as salt.

Salt is mildly sedative and can act as a laxative and purgative. It can clear any obstructions in the channels of your body. It’s used in massage therapy, toothpastes, eye drops and ointments.

The qualities of salt are derived from its elemental make-up of fire and water, which give it hot, heavy, sharp, slightly oily properties. Ayurveda highly prizes rock salt, or saindhava lavana, which is rich in minerals such as iron and magnesium and is less likely than other salt to cause fluid retention in your tissues. This salt is mined in the province of Sindh in India and is regarded as a heart tonic and an aphrodisiac; this is possibly due to the fact that it’s considered cooling in nature, unlike other salts. Like all salts, rock salt encourages salivation. This means that your enzyme-rich saliva can get started straight away and digest your dinner!

In addition to table salt, you can find salt in:

Celery

Irish moss

Fish from the sea

Oysters

Seaweeds

Samphire

If you’re iodine-deficient, try adding a little seaweed to your rice while it cooks, to easily gain a nutritive boost.

Salt-free diets get a lot of attention these days, but Ayurveda states that a little salt not only improves the flavour of other food, but brings the digestive elements to the fore to help digest your meal.

Not everyone who has hypertension is affected by salt. Check your blood pressure over time to find out whether this is the case for you, and speak to your doctor if you aren’t sure.

Salt can increase the symptoms of gout and of all pitta issues within your body. In large amounts, salt:

Dries the skin

Induces vomiting

Causes the tissues to hold on to water; sea salt especially increases this tendency

Decreases virility

Creates thirst

Causes wasting of the muscles

So eat salt in moderation.

Broaching bitter (tikta)

The bitter flavour can eclipse the others, but it has great therapeutic value. Many animals know this instinctively and search out bitter herbs to eat when they’re ill. (That’s why your pet cat or dog eats grass when it’s sick.)

Bitter is a combination of the elements of ether and air, which makes it dry, cooling, light and reducing in nature. It reduces the flow of saliva when you put it in your mouth, but it’s great for promoting your agni (biological fire) and therefore your digestion. It purges all the channels in your body, and because of its drying action will dry up any secretions in your system, like excess mucus.

The bitter flavour works to break down fat, or meda dhatu in Ayurveda – great news if you’re worried about excess pounds. Bitter also has a blood-purifying action that makes it very useful if you have septicaemia (blood poisoning), pus-producing skin problems or wounds.

The active ingredients in bitter-flavoured foods are called alkaloids and glycosides. They offer therapeutic benefits for adult-onset diabetes (people in India routinely use bitter gourd juice to balance their blood sugar and help with diabetes), digestive disorders, skin complaints, fevers and jaundice.

Don’t overuse the bitter taste in your diet if you have a low sperm count and want children, because it can dry up the precious seminal fluid that your sperm swim around in. If vata dosha is aggravated, you should also avoid too much bitter, because this taste has very similar properties because of its drying, lightening, cooling and dispersing nature.

In your diet, bitter comes from:

Coffee

Dark green leafy vegetables

Fenugreek

Karela, or bitter melon

Rhubarb

Bitter is the flavour most lacking in the Western diet, which might explain our penchant for coffee!

Turmeric is one of the most commonly used bitter herbs in Ayurvedic medicine. Turmeric has wonderful antioxidant properties. You can use it to:

Help manage your blood sugar levels

Reduce aggravated pitta dosha

Clear a sore throat and fever

Treat urticaria (if you use it in cream form)

Reduce the effects of rheumatism

With so many practical benefits, turmeric is a great seasoning to keep in your kitchen. Coriander’s another solid choice for the spice rack; it’s ubiquitous in Asian cooking, because it’s a very useful bitter taste that you can use to treat fevers and nausea.

Promoting pungent (katu)

The pungent flavour combines fire and air, and it packs a punch by increasing the flow of saliva in your mouth, causing a tingling sensation on the tongue and bringing tears to your eyes. This flavour makes even the blandest food exciting. Some people eat such hot food that it burns the lining of their gut and therefore creates ama in their digestive systems. (Chapter 5 explains ama, or toxins.) As in everything, moderation is the key.

In your body, pungent food works to reduce kapha and dosha while strengthening vata and pitta. It can help all the tissues in your body by improving their individual agnis, or enzyme activity. Pungent food has a drying action and can help you eliminate mucus. It can be used to break through any obstruction in your body and improves flow in the subtle channels (nadis; see Chapter 3).

You can use this taste to help relieve colds, asthma, obesity and diabetes. However, be very wary of it if your pitta is aggravated or you’re in a debilitated state. This is because excessive use of pungent tastes is said to cause giddiness, nerve pain due to inflammation, and debility.

Examples of sources of the pungent flavour in your diet include:

Black pepper

Garlic

Ginger

Horseradish

Lemongrass

Mustard

Onions

Black pepper is the most popular pungent flavour and appears on tabletops all over the world.

Therapeutically, the pungent taste can be utilised as a decongestant. A very simple remedy for a cold or cough is one teaspoon of honey with ¹⁄₄ teaspoon of black pepper, taken three times a day, especially after food.

The widely used mixture for low, sluggish digestion is called Trikatu, which is made up of three pungent substances, namely black pepper, long pepper and ginger.

Another pungent favourite in Indian cuisine because of its gas-expelling properties is hing, or asafoetida, formed from a tree resin. Asafoetida helps to promote a healthy nervous system, improves your digestive system and boosts your circulation, among other things.

Appreciating astringent (kashaya)

Within the astringent flavour, air and earth are in combination to give the effect of drying, cooling and lightness in your body. Perhaps the most elusive of the tastes, the astringent taste generates contraction in your system. For example, fresh pomegranate has a mouth-puckering dry quality – especially if you eat a bit of inner flesh. That’s astringent. You wouldn’t want to eat it, but applying witch hazel closes your pores because it’s astringent.

Used therapeutically, astringency draws two sides of a wound or an ulcer together to unite them. It also stops diarrhoea and staunches bleeding. Astringency alleviates pitta and kapha and promotes vata dosha.

You get the astringent taste in your diet by eating:

Alfalfa sprouts

Barley

Chickpeas

Green beans

Tea (which contains astringent tannins)

Therapeutically, the following astringent herbs offer benefits:

Hypericum helps with wound healing if applied externally.

Arjuna is the bark of a tree and is used for treating heart disease and as a heart tonic.

Triphala balances all three doshas and contains two substances, haritaki and bibitaki, that are primarily astringent in quality.

Honey is astringent in quality. It cleans and heals wounds, and also helps with fractured bones. (Remember that it should never be cooked or mixed with salt.)

Too much astringent flavour causes stiffness in your body and constipation.

Looking at the Six Stages of Digestion

The six stages in the process of digestion correlate to the six tastes I explain in the previous section.

The food that you eat enters your mouth and is gently warmed by one of the agnis, or ‘biological fires’, under your tongue. Saliva then mixes with a type of kapha called bhodak and between one and six of the tastes are presented to your body. Taste perception lies within you, which is why if you’re feeling off colour or your agni is low, your food appears rather tasteless.

Food enters your stomach with a predominately sweet taste. Then after about 90 minutes, hydrochloric acid in the form of pachacka pitta mixes with it and creates a sour substance.

Next, the contents of your stomach go into your duodenum in your small intestine, where pitta in the form of bile salts mixes with them and they are alkalised.

Now the nutrient chyle enters the jejunum, which is further along your small intestine, and the food becomes bitter. Some absorption into your system takes place here.

After your food passes through your small intestine it enters your large intestine and now has a predominately pungent taste. By this stage, most of the nutrients and water have been removed and circulated around your body. What will be eliminated is also differentiated at this stage.

Your body is a great conserver of energy, so by the time the food substances get to the end of your large intestine to the area known as the caecum, any remaining water has been removed from the waste by virtue of its astringent environment, and the rest is ready to be expelled from your system.

The Second Course: When Food Leaves the Mouth

The rasas, or flavours, that I describe in the previous sections have an immediate effect in your mouth that gives a feeling of satisfaction with your food. After you chew and swallow, the next stages of digestion begin.

The stage of digestion after rasa is virya (effect during digestion); then follows vipaka (effect after digestion).

Effect during digestion: Releasing energy with virya

The literal meaning of virya is ‘vigour’ or ‘potency’. The fresher the foodstuffs or herbs, the stronger their potency.

Virya occurs after you’ve chewed your food and after the enzymes in your mouth have had their way with it. The food heads to your stomach, and your system utilises the active power of what it’s taken in.

Virya determines whether the effect of the food is heating (a substance provides energy from the body during digestion) or cooling (a substance requires energy to the body during digestion). Salty, sour and pungent substances are heating; sweet, bitter and astringent substances are cooling.

As cooling substances work to remove excess heat from your body, they also:

Remove excess heat from the blood

Enliven the system and act as a tonic

Reduce inflammation

Promote firmness of your tissues

Increase kapha and vata dosha

Heating herbs and foods have a stimulating effect on your body and work to:

Remove dampness and heaviness

Make you sweat

Promote digestion

Increase pitta dosha in your tissues

Effect after digestion: Vipaka

During vipaka, the nutrient chyle reaches your tissues to be assimilated and absorbed. Vipaka also determines the effect of what you’ve eaten on your body and mind.

Post-digestively, the two main effects on your tissues are to build them (which is known as an anabolic effect) or the opposite, which is to break them down (a catabolic effect).

Table 10-1 shows how what you eat eventually affects the tissues of your body. For example, if you have an inflammatory condition and you take in a lot of sour tastes, the fiery element known as pitta will increase in your system. This in turn increases your experience of pain.

Table 10-1 Effects of Flavours on Tissues

Taste in the Mouth, or Rasa	Post-digestive Effect, or Vipaka
Sweet	Sweet, which increases kapha
Sour	Sour, which increases pitta
Salty	Sweet, which increases kapha
Pungent	Pungent, which increases vata
Bitter	Pungent, which increases vata
Astringent	Pungent, which increases vata

Prabhava

Defined as ‘inconceivable’ effects because of the difficulty of showing a cause and effect relationship, prabhava describes the special quality and effect of a herb or foodstuff in your body.

Some foods have what appear to be the same energetics, but their actions are totally different. For example, lemon is sour in rasa (flavour) and thus should have a sour vipaka (post-digestive effect); however, its vipaka is for some ‘unexplainable’ reason sweeter than that of any other citrus fruit (hence its alkalising effect!). Honey has a sweet rasa, which would normally suggest a cooling virya (effect during digestion), but it is heating even though the vipaka is sweet again.

Certain effects seen in Ayurvedic practice can’t be explained scientifically. Rather than denying the existence of certain phenomena just because the current theoretical model can’t explain them (as is so often the case in modern medicine), Ayurveda offers a dedicated category to such ‘inconceivable’ phenomena.

Introducing Agni: The Fuel for Life

Agni, which literally means ‘fire’, is worshipped as a god in India. Nothing would be possible without this eternal spark that fires your being. Agni refers to the principle of transformation and how well what you take in is converted into energy to use in your daily life. The very fact that you can taste and digest your food is due to this aspect of your biology.

Your body contains more than 40 different agnis, or biological fires, that govern your metabolic rate. The main agni (jathar agni) lies in the stomach, which is filled with the enzymes and hydrochloric acid that break down your meal.

Then there are five different agnis (bhuta agnis) that work from your liver to separate the nutrient chyle into its five constituent elements: ether, air, fire, water and earth. Further on, dhatu agni works at your tissue-production level to help produce the seven dhatus, or life-supporting tissues, referred to in Chapter 3.

The agni inside your cells is known as pithar agni and operates between your cells to ensure cooperation between them. Lastly, working within your cells to maintain the production of energy and maintain your immune integrity is pilu agni.

The Ayurvedic qualities of agni are sharp, hot, subtle, mobile, dry and light. (See Chapter 2 for more on Ayurvedic qualities.) Thus any substance which enhances these characteristics can boost your digestion. For example, sharp, hot and light ginger aids your digestion, particularly if you add a little salt and lemon juice and chew it 15 minutes before your main meal.

According to Ayurveda, a healthy condition of your agni can confer on you the following benefits:

A beautiful clear complexion with a lustrous glow

Plentiful energy, body warmth and a good metabolism

A strong immune system, great digestion and the ability to easily absorb all that you eat

Plenty of enthusiasm, intelligence and energy are (the emotional attributes of good agni)

A long life!

Examining Your Digestion

Your digestive system is the engine room of your body, and you need to nurture it. When things go wrong in the stomach, all systems are affected; this is why Ayurveda places so much importance on food. Keep an eye on your digestion so that you can spot when things are out of kilter. The four states of agni (fire) to be aware of are:

Sama agni. This is your benchmark for a normal-functioning digestive system. You can digest anything within reason with no ill effects. Nothing perturbs you, irrespective of time of day, season or place. You’re in good health; your energy is high and you wake up bright and full of enthusiasm for the day ahead. You maintain a constant weight and have a strong metabolism.

Tikshna agni. This state is related to pitta dosha. You notice burning sensations, dryness in your mouth and throat and heartburn. Your appetite is voracious; you want to eat often and in large quantities. You experience swings in blood sugar and have an intense desire for sweet things for a quick fix. If left unchecked, the excess pitta creeps into your system and results in gastritis, colitis, nausea, hypoglycaemia, migraines and inflammatory conditions of your body. The accompanying emotions are irritability, lack of patience and envy.

Manda agni. This condition is related to kapha dosha and displays all its qualities. You experience dullness and heaviness after eating that often results in indigestion. You notice an increase in salivation and mucus in your system, and a loss of appetite. Even a lettuce leaf seems to add a pound to your waistline, because nothing is effectively burned off. You feel lethargic and lack any real enthusiasm. This situation can lead to diabetes, congestion and obesity. Emotionally you have accompanying feelings of depression, greed, possessiveness and attachment.

Vishama agni. This type of digestion is related to vata dosha and displays all its characteristics. If this is applicable to you, the most recognisable trait of your digestion is changeability – sometimes it’s fine and sometimes it isn’t. You experience bloating, flatulence, burping and sometimes accompanying pain, especially when you eat raw food. You may alternate between diarrhoea and constipation. You often notice a gurgling in your intestines. You may notice your skin and hair becoming drier. Your joints may feel achy and crack as you move them. After some time, your sleep may be disturbed and you may develop muscle tics as well as feeling anxious and fearful.

The following two chapters (11 and 12) can help you to choose the best foods for your personal health and keep your digestion in tip-top condition.