by Om Swami
Vishy’s salary now proved inadequate to take care of living expenses. He started working over the weekends. The interest rate was hiked by the federal bank. Suddenly, they were struggling to make ends meet. Sometimes, they used their credit card to pay for the essentials. It began adding up and before they knew, they were twenty thousand dollars in credit card debt, even though they hadn’t been on a vacation in five years.
His wife also started working and this upset their lifestyle. Both would come home stressed, and there was no time left to spend with the children and each other. Happy life as they knew had disappeared like the morning dew upon sunrise. They worked like this till their retirement to become debt-free again, and figured that in the preceding twenty-five years, they had paid three-and-a-half times their borrowing. Practically, they had worked day and night for seventeen years of their lives just to pay bank interest. Their kids had long since moved out, and the rooms in the house were now mostly empty. When they were finally free to enjoy life with their savings, they had little energy left. Years of neglect had given many ailments a permanent home in their bodies and minds.
All of this could have been avoided; it was unnecessary, in fact. If only they had dropped the thought of a million- dollar home, it would not have become a desire. They would then have not felt the urge to pursue it. But what has all this got to do with rajasic food, you may ask? Here it is: the ability to drop a thought or focus your attention elsewhere is dependent on your state of mind. A restless mind can’t drop a thought; only a stable and calm mind can. Rajasic foods make you more active – they make you more restless and fuel the thoughts and consequently the desires.
Almost all seafood, spices, and most grains, beans and lentils fall in the category of rajasic food. All soft drinks and junk foods are rajasic foods.
Tamasic
There are certain foods that wreak havoc on your physical and mental health. These are called tamasic foods. The next time you take frozen cooked food and heat it to eat, pay attention to your state of mind. I guarantee that it will leave you feeling lethargic. Cooking frozen ingredients and cooking fresh food won’t give you the same feeling. The frozen food will at best be nearly as good as fresh food. But reheating food that has already been cooked turns it into tamasic food. Your stomach may be full, but the natural tendency of the food is now tamasic.
Foods that are not freshly prepared, ill-cooked, insipid, putrid and burnt are tamasic. Foods that are stale, impure and unnatural are also tamasic. These foods make us lethargic and ultimately create aggression in our minds. They confuse the digestive forces of the physical body, as our body does not know how to break down unnatural foods. They also tend to take much longer to digest, causing acidity, heartburn, reflux, stomach ulcers and irregular bowel movements. Further, they generate excessive heat in the body. As a result, tamasic foods cause imbalance in the body.
Acidic foods are mostly tamasic. All canned and processed foods these days are tamasic. All meats are tamasic, and all red meets are highly tamasic.
We no longer live on trees or in caves; we no longer hunt on a day-to-day basis – we live in air-conditioned homes, we work in heated offices, and our vehicles have climate control. There is no real reason for sticking to our primitive dietary habit of meat eating.
Doubtlessly, societies in many parts of the world have been living a certain lifestyle for thousands of years. There, people’s bodies have adjusted to certain foods – and so have their minds. And someone living in Tibet or the Arctic tundra can’t be expected to be a vegetarian, because there’s barely any vegetation in these places to begin with. But these can’t be valid excuses for the rest of us – who have better options available and who live in warmer regions – to ignore our evolving consciousness.
During certain yogic practices of mental, physical and emotional detoxification, the aspirant is asked to observe a strict diet. It is called havishya-anna. The rationale behind the diet is brilliant and ingenious. Havishya-anna means food that is fit for the gods. Literally, it means food that is fit for oblations. Your body is the temple, the altar, and deserves your utmost respect; the living god in your body is your mind. Your food is one of the greatest offerings to this god – it affects both your body and your mind.
For a certain stretch of time – generally forty days, but sometimes many months – the yogis would go on the havishya diet. The rules were simple: no grains, no beans, no lentils, no gluten and no salt. Milk, butter, clarified butter, honey and sea salt were allowed, along with fruits and vegetables. During many of my own practices, I have lived on the havishya diet multiple times over the past two decades. It has been my personal experience that it truly does bring great calmness and positive changes in your health.
OXIDATIVE DAMAGE AND TAMASIC FOODS
In Ayurveda and yogic texts, any food that is not freshly cooked or made from fresh ingredients is deemed tamasic food. As covered earlier in this chapter, such food promotes ill health. It is often the root cause of disease, because tamasic food leads to excessive free radicals in the body. Often, in olden times, people had a few leaves of tulsi (Ocimum sanctum) after their meal, because tulsi is rich in antioxidants. Or people consumed a pickle of lemon, mango or amlaki (Emblica officinalis), that was rich in vitamin C and had a healthy dose of antioxidants.
What is the connection between tamasic foods and free radicals? Modern research has proven beyond doubt that oxidation of food is one of the major causes of inflammation in the body. Inflammation is the culprit in almost all major bodily ailments. It is either the direct cause, result or a significant contributory factor in most chronic disorders, from asthma to cancer.
Oxidation is your food going rusty. Think of a piece of iron that is in a moist, wet or marshy area. It is going to rust quickly. Exactly the same thing happens with your food. When it has been cooked for a while, it gets oxidized. Cut an apple and leave it out for a few minutes and it goes brown; it gets oxidized. Squeeze a few drops of lemon on the apple you have cut, and it doesn’t go brown because the vitamin C in the lemon prevents oxidation.
An ideal diet must have a portion of foods rich in antioxidants. Free radicals damage your skin, cells and arteries. They are capable of inflicting harm on your very DNA. The two chief methods of avoiding oxidative damage is by eating freshly prepared meals and ensuring an intake of foods rich in antioxidants. Lemons and most citrus fruits rich in vitamin C are an excellent source of antioxidants. Most berry fruits such as strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and cranberries are packed with antioxidants. Beans such as small red beans, red kidney beans, pinto beans and black beans have plenty of oxidants. Chlorinated water is highly oxidized and should be avoided as much as possible. You should drink good water. And yogic texts believe that deep breathing, which will flush your body with excess oxygen, also helps in balancing some of the ill effects of consuming tamasic foods.
Compare two burgers: one made at a fast-food outlet and the other one made at home. If you make a fresh burger at home, even though it is junk food, the damage to your health is going to be far less than when you eat a burger with identical ingredients at a fast-food outlet. According to Ayurveda, there are many factors other than the actual food that determine the effect of the food on your body. Such factors include; who prepares your food and under what conditions, the surrounding environment where you consume your food, your own state of mind, the freshness and quality of the ingredients, the time of consumption and the time taken to eat your food. These factors determine the nourishment (or lack of it) that you will derive from your meal.
You don’t have to be a fanatic or a food freak. It’s okay to indulge sometimes. An occasional cup of coffee, a glass of wine or a gratifying dessert with egg in it may all be okay. For that matter, anything is okay as long as it doesn’t become a part of your routine – as long as it doesn’t become a habit. If you remember that your body is paying a price for everything you consume, you are free to eat
whatever you fancy.
In earlier times, people ate more and they worked more. The tiredness from their physical work allowed them to sleep well. They lived in close-knit communities – a support system that helped them stay relatively free of stress. They prepared meals made from fresh and wholesome foods; the water they drank was free of chlorine or any other chemicals. Pesticides or artificial fertilizers did not exist. It was a perfectly balanced, natural and sustainable environment.
That is all there is to good health: eat well, exercise well, sleep well and be happy. In the present day and age, some of these may be a long shot. But you can still eat wholesome foods with a grateful attitude; you can still do physical workouts; your life and living can still have a discipline; you can choose to respond to stressful situations in a more composed and calm manner; you can cut down on your television and Internet time – and consequently enjoy the unique benefits that come from good health alone. For these, there is no substitute. And it all begins with knowing what to eat and how to eat it.
7
Medicine Cures, Food Heals
While growing up, I was severely asthmatic. My father took me to every chest specialist and every doctor anyone recommended. He had more belief in the modern system of medicine than Ayurveda. Ultimately, when all else failed, we ended up at the clinic of an Ayurvedic doctor. In his late fifties, the doctor was soft-spoken and extremely knowledgeable. He checked my pulse, examined me compassionately and prescribed a couple of Ayurvedic medicines. At the back of the prescription, he patiently scribbled a long list of foods I was to avoid. Considering my constitution, he asked me to avoid potatoes, mangoes, too many sweets, yogurt and cold water, among a few other things.
I frowned at him because I loved mangoes. If I wasn’t allowed to have sweets, of what use was human life, I thought. Yogurt was my favourite. I wasn’t too fussed about potatoes. But no cold water? I felt that God had sent this doctor to ruin my life. I would always try my best to avoid visiting him, because in front of my father he would ask me if I’d been observing the restrictions on my diet. The truth was difficult and lying wasn’t an option.
The truth was difficult indeed, because the truth was that if I wanted to cure myself, I had to consider food as part of my medicine. Why part? It was the medicine! This was a lesson I learned much later. The carbohydrates in the prohibited foods were causing inflammation of my airways, making it difficult for me to breathe. I was too young to realize this back then.
I kept eating the forbidden foods, and the medicines had little effect. I kept falling sick at the change of seasons. But a couple of severe asthma attacks when I was fourteen made me rethink things. I began following the dietary recommendations, and I never popped another allopathic pill for my asthma. I kept inhalers with me, just to be on the safe side, but at least no chemical was going into my stomach. Nothing was making me drowsy or tired now. I realized that food truly was my medicine.
We are what we eat. This is not philosophy but science. Think about this: you consume an apple and a little while later, once it is processed by your body, the apple has become a part of your body. You are the apple; your body is entirely made from the food you consume. Therefore, you underestimate the importance, role and medicinal value of food at your own peril.
The food you eat is consumed by the digestive fire in your body. Some foods fuel your digestive fire, some merely aid it and some extinguish it. Imagine a fire pit where a fire is blazing. If you put butter in it, it will flare up. If you stoke it with firewood, it will burn longer. If you pour water on it, it will douse the fire. According to Ayurveda, what may fuel your fire may douse another person’s fire. No one food is good for everyone. It depends on your own mental and physical constitution. Food has a nature of its own. Food is not independent from health; health is not independent from food. What is nectar for your body could poison another person’s body.
Therefore, most anomalies in physical health can simply be remedied by eating the right food. Not only this; if you eat the right food, the chances are that such ailments won’t even emerge in your body. The more you know yourself (by identifying your physical and mental humours), the better you can judge the food you should be eating. The rule of thumb is to avoid consuming food that is not congenial to your own temperament.
Ayurveda is perhaps the only system of medicine that places an extraordinary emphasis on food. So much so that, in Ayurveda, the food a patient can eat is often prescribed just as a physician would prescribe medicine. There is a profound rationale behind this. Think about it: the amount of food we consume is far greater than the amount of medicine we may take. We may swallow some pills weighing a few grams, whereas the mass of food we consume is several hundred times greater. And ultimately, all food we ingest gets processed by the stomach and becomes part of us.
The modern system of medicine specializes in the treatment of symptoms. For example, how do painkillers work? What happens if you have a backache? The back sends a signal to the brain that something’s not quite right there. The brain receives these signals and responds with a pain signal that prompts you to do something about it. If you go to a doctor with this pain, he’ll give you a chemical that will first go in your stomach and then through the blood to reach the affected area. The receptors there either stop receiving the pain signals from the brain or stop sending those signals to the brain asking for help.
It’s doing practically nothing for the root cause of the pain. It can’t, because the physician hasn’t found the root cause. If the ailment is minor, for the little while when the signal is not being sent or received, the body heals itself and you are cured. Even this doesn’t sound like a bad idea. The real issue arises when the ailment is not minor. You keep taking painkillers, and eventually your brain gets used to the chemical and refuses to let it interfere with its job. No matter how much you increase the dosage, the brain will get used to it. Eventually, the painkillers will stop working. And then the physician will either change the painkiller or tell you that nothing can be done for you.
Ayurveda and yogic texts look upon this problem differently. They don’t believe that all your intelligence resides in your brain. Since metabolism is occurring even at a cellular level, it is evident that each cell has a certain intelligence, almost like its own brain. Any colony of cells can form a self- healing network. This is why an ointment helps in healing a wound; it’s communicating directly with the local brain. The formation of pus or the clotting of blood – the healing of the wound – are all due to the cells’ local intelligence. And this brings me to the crux of the matter.
Food is your greatest medicine. You consume medicines in milligrams. What chance does twenty or two hundred milligrams of a chemical have to interact with or influence the local intelligence in the body? Compare this to one kilogram of food you may eat every day. This is ten thousand times more than one hundred milligrams. It reaches every single cell of your body. The goal of Ayurveda is to interact with the local intelligence, and it does it by way of prescribing food based on the humours and other treatments – massage, oil bath, steam, purgation, etc.
Ayurveda categorizes all foods based on their taste. Taste in Ayurveda doesn’t only mean how it tastes, but how it impacts the health. For example, vata is cold and dry, so foods that are hot and rich in fat are good for the vata person. This seems contrary to the contemporary food sense, where foods with fat are avoided by most health-conscious people. This is a mistake because fat, like carbohydrates and protein, belongs to the fundamental group of nutrients. Fat is as essential as any other nutrient. This doesn’t mean, however, that everyone will be okay having the same amount of fat. To help people with different constitutions, pick the right food. Ayurveda intelligently classifies food in six tastes.
THE SIX TASTES
All food is made up of the five elements and together they produce six tastes. They are sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter and astringent. Each food has a unique comb
ination of the six tastes. Variations in the combination gives a food its distinctive flavour. In various permutations and combinations, the six tastes create sixty-three different flavours. Of the five elements, water is the primeval source of taste. In its own right, it is soothing, cold, light and devoid of any taste. However, it either accentuates or pacifies the inherent taste of a food. Lack of water concentrates the taste and excess of it leads to dilution of the taste. This is water’s only role across the six tastes.
Further, Ayurveda states that seasons have a bearing on the taste of foods. For example, the taste of an out-of- season mango tends to be sour. Also, one of the properties of pitta is acidic. If a pitta person was to consume a sweet mango during the season, it would do him no harm, but if he consumed a sour mango, it would aggravate his acidity. The six tastes are not merely about how they taste on the tongue but how your body tastes them. Let me elaborate on this subtle but profound difference, beginning with an elucidation of the six tastes.
Sweet
Water is the primary element of this taste, known as madhura in Sanskrit. The sweetness is due to the water element. Classical tantric texts state that earth too is an element in this taste. Madhura is nourishing, delightful to the sense organs and conducive to longevity. It promotes all dhatus, strength and lustre. It allays pitta, quenches thirst and provides energy to the mind and body. It is heavy, unctuous and cold.