Eating according to Ayurveda (the world's oldest health system) doesn't have to be complicated. You don't have to cook sophisticated Indian dishes and follow strict rules about what you can and can't eat. Basically, there are six overarching principles for food in Ayurveda:
1. Consider the process of digestion.
2. Different people feel good with different eating habits
3. Food has different effects at different times
4. Be careful about changing habitual eating habits
5. Use all six tastes
6. See your food as medicine – but also as joy
The first principle differs from how we have previously viewed food in the West. There, we have counted calories and the amount of protein, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. But what matters is not what passes through the mouth, but what happens in the body. If the body can't digest the food, it cannot assimilate the nutrients we put in. And what is even worse is that the undigested food creates waste products, impurities called ama. These block the body's channels and are a root cause of obesity, cardiovascular diseases and many other diseases.
Recently, Western medicine has also slowly begun to realise this. For example, there is talk of leaky gut syndrome - that the intestine leaks, which causes large, complex molecules that the body cannot handle to enter the bloodstream, which leads to atherosclerosis and chronic inflammatory conditions.
According to Ayurveda, there are a number of important things to consider for digestion to function well:
• Eat in a way that leaves you pleasantly full, but not overly stuffed. If we fill the stomach too much, it will have difficulty digesting the food.
• Do not eat until you have digested the previous meal. If the stomach is digesting a meal and suddenly other food falls in, chaos will arise, and it will not know what to prioritise. So eat meals at regular times and do not snack in between.
• Never drink cold drinks with your food. This makes sense even from a Western science perspective. In chemistry, we learn that chemical reactions usually speed up when you raise the temperature and slow down when you lower it. Digestion is a chemical reaction. If you then pour cold liquid on it, the process stops, and the result is blocking waste products. Therefore, it is ideal to drink warm water with your food instead.
• Prioritise hot, cooked food. Regarding heat, it is for the same reason as above. You also benefit from boiling or otherwise preparing food instead of eating, for example, raw vegetables and grains. Some nutrients are lost during cooking, but what remains is much easier to absorb, and the risk of waste products is much lower. Raw food is much harder to digest.
• Eat less meat and more vegetarian food. Red meat and processed meat products in particular are difficult to digest.
• Eat clean, natural food without artificial additives. The body isn't designed to handle them.
• Use (natural) spices in your cooking. Most spices support digestion and also make food tastier.
• Eat in peace and quiet. If we eat while stressed, the sympathetic nervous system activates. Then blood goes to the muscles to prepare us for activity, and digestion shuts down.
• Focus on the food and enjoy it. The sense of taste is important because it gives the body information about what is coming down. Then the body can prepare the enzymes, etc., needed to digest that particular thing. But if our mind is on our mobile phone or TV, it doesn't work as well. And besides, it's a shame not to fully enjoy the good food we have cooked or bought.
That was a lot of text 😊 I will come back to the other principles in future posts.
