Transform your health with correct food combining

Can understanding your body's needs revolutionize your health? You may be eating all the "good" stuff, but is it really doing you good internally?
Unlock the secrets of Ayurvedic principles & transform your relationship with food in this enlightening episode with our guest Divya Alter. We journey through the core tenets of Ayurveda, exploring how geographical location and climate profoundly influence food compatibility.
We illustrate the importance of choosing foods that align with your environment. We dive deep into the Ayurvedic concept of body type, stressing the necessity of considering the time of day, season, and stages of life when planning meals. We highlight the importance of balancing your current "dosha" (vikruti) over your birth dosha (prakriti) to ensure optimal health. According to Ayurveda, a person’s health is based on their dosha — a balance of the five elements of the world -air, earth, space, water, & fire. Tune into a discussion that underscores the role of digestive strength (Agni) in making informed food choices and how personal self-awareness is key to understanding your digestive health. By recognizing signs of improper digestion, like gas and bloating, you can better tune into what your body needs. We also explore the idea of "sathmya", emphasizing how foods familiar from childhood impact digestion and comfort.
This episode serves as an impetus for you to rely on your heightened self-awareness, and offers practical insights into personalizing your diet for better health. Discover how deeply cultural & geographical aspects shape your dietary preferences & comfort foods, making Ayurveda a uniquely tailored approach to wellness.
For an in-depth perspective, listen to full recording from S2Ep 16.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for informational purposes only. This is not to be construed as medical advi

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Chapters

• 0:00 Principles of Ayurvedic Food Compatibility
• 16:30 Discovering Personalized Ayurvedic Food Balance

Transcript

Divya Alter: 0:00

What Ayurveda is is the science of life. It's meant to be applied in your life, so make it better. Well, ayurveda speaks about 18 categories of food compatibility aside from well. One of them is what to combine with what, right. But compatibility extends to, as you mentioned, the location, the geographical location. Desha is called in Sanskrit, so geographical location also involves the climate. So you mentioned you were in South India, you went to visit your family in South India. Now compare the climate of South India to New York. Very different, right. So if I wanted to eat South Indian food in the middle of the winter, that in New York City, that would be incompatible. If I'm really craving the South Indian flavors, I would use the spice combination with the ginger, the mustard seeds, the curry leaves. You know those spice combinations. But I will make the food easy to digest in the location that I'm in, maybe I'll use local vegetables of course I'll use local vegetables.

Divya Alter: 1:14

I'm not going to import south indian vegetables, but I would consider these. It's like okay, let's make south indian style meal, but it will not be exactly the same way you eat it in South India because the ingredients are different, the climate is different, like that. Then another category is kala. Kala means time, and time can mean time of day, time of year, like season. It can mean also time in your life. So we all know our diets change as we go through different stages in our life. So when you eat is also important, and dosha is another category. So eating according to your dosha or your, your constitution, what's the predominant dosha in your body? And this is where modern Ayurveda gets very confusing, because even yesterday one of our servers at the restaurant she's really passionate about Ayurveda and she's like so I'm Pitta Kapha, so how do I eat for my dosha? And I said it's very important to consider what your predominant dosha of your prakriti, your constitution, is, but you have to consider what dosha is, the balance right now for you. So which is the vikruti?

Vai Kumar: 2:37

Yes, exactly Okay. So prakriti being the one at birth and vikruti being as of right now.

Divya Alter: 2:44

Yeah. So this is a mistake. People say they would say oh, I'm with vata pitta, so I have to eat vata balancing foods till the rest of my life. And when they get, let's say they get the flu and they have coughing balance, they're congested, they're coughing, you know, they feel heavy, sleepy and they keep eating vata pacifying foods. It's not going to balance them.

Divya Alter: 3:07

So it's very important. That's why in my books, both of my books I explain the next category is agni your digestive strength. Not just digestive, but your metabolic strength as well. So if you have weak digestion, then you need something a little more pungent, a little more sour, to increase your digestive fire. And that becomes more important than your prakriti, your dosha, because you have to work on the imbalance to bring you back to your original balanced state. So it's not just eating for your dosha, it's eating according to season, your strength of digestion. Another one that I really love is satmya. Satmya means the foods that you're accustomed to since early childhood. So, for example, you tell me what is one food that you're accustomed to eating since early childhood, growing up in India. That's not so common in the US. What is one food?

Vai Kumar: 4:15

Well, I guess I would say eating the amount of times that I would eat rice or rice-based products.

Divya Alter: 4:23

Okay. So your body is accustomed to digesting rice really well, and that's very prominent people eating in the South, because that's where rice grows a lot. Now, like somebody like me, I grew up in Bulgaria. Rice was not a big part of our diet. We had a lot of wheat, and wheat grows in cooler temperatures, cooler climates. Wheat can grow all over the world, but especially in the North, even in India. You see, in North India they use a lot more roti or flatbreads than rice. I mean, my body is trained to eat rice. I love rice, I can digest it, but growing up I didn't have a lot of rice. So for me it's easier to digest wheat than rice. And when I get really stressed out, my comfort food is something baked or bread, something like that, something with wheat, because it immediately calms me down. That's my comfort food. And for you, probably, your comfort food is related to some dish with rice.

Vai Kumar: 5:23

Oh, absolutely Any day you know yeah. Yeah, everything rice, anything you name rice.

Divya Alter: 5:29

Right. So for some people for them it's easier to digest soy products, for others not simply because they grew up with these foods and other people didn't. So glass noodles it's not my satmya, it's not compatible with what my body is used to. And of course you can develop, you can become accustomed to a food that you didn't grow up with. It usually takes about six months. So let's say you move to another country and you're trying to become accustomed to the local diet. It usually takes six months for the body to start fully digesting the local foods.

Vai Kumar: 6:07

Because it is just recognizing something new that's coming in and it's trying to adjust to it. Okay, so it's interesting and it's a topic of discussion that can be had for hours together, but definitely for me, eating rice versus eating oats or quinoa or something and one of my good friends in India she is, you know, an integrative practitioner. She would always remind me hey, it's not the oats that you need to go after, it's not the quinoa that you need to go after, and it's not even millets that you need to go after, because that wasn't something that we were doing on a daily basis. So, though the world recognizes some of these as superfoods, nowadays, I think you know, it just becomes very significant to eat what we were accustomed to. So what about world cuisine? Say, let's take Mexican cuisine. There's a lot of bean and cheese and things like that, right? So what would you say to that?

Divya Alter: 7:13

Yeah. So bean and cheese is another very heavy to digest combination and it can be incompatible for you if you have weak digestion. Yes, bean and cheese I mean even cheese and bread is very heavy to digest. Wheat and cheese it's so delicious. I mean we have the pizzas. Every culture has some kind of cheese and bread dish or bean and cheese. It is incompatible if you have weak digestion. That's why you have to be careful. And so let's say, you eat bean and cheese dish and you feel so tired afterwards as if your whole energy was drained from your body. So it's because all the energy goes in the stomach to break down this very heavy food that you just ate. That's an indication that that's not the right combination for you. But if you're a construction person and you're doing heavy physical work and you use a lot of energy, then you'll be craving bean and cheese and you'll feel very happy.

Vai Kumar: 8:14

So it's a matter of how much you're able to utilize whatever you have had, and it depends on the amount of activity that you're able to do correct.

Divya Alter: 8:26

Yeah, it also depends on the portion. So I always tell my students let's say you go to a dinner party and it's a very nice dinner and you see something that's incompatible, you know it will be very heavy for you. You can honor the host by having like a couple of bites. You can have small amounts. So if you have a small amount of incompatible foods they will not affect you so much. And then the other solution that you mentioned earlier is the use of spices. So because spices have tremendous digestive properties, if you cook with a lot of spice the incompatible foods will become less damaging. But you have to know there's always a price to pay. You may not pay the price right away Exactly, but the buildup from undigested and from not digesting fully incompatible foods it starts to build up in the body.

Divya Alter: 9:24

It can start hardening your arteries. It can start building around your waist area and you're starting gaining weight there. It can build in your colon. Everybody who's done colonoscopy and seen what comes out of the colon it's like okay, that's the undigested food that you may have eaten years ago that's still stuck in there. And this undigested food is called ama. It can grow into amavishu, which is reactive, toxic ama, semi-digested food that becomes the breeding ground for disease and inflammation. So when I tell people with chronic inflammation, I always tell them you have to really pay attention to the combination of foods, because if you're not digesting them you're just perpetuating the inflammatory processes in your body.

Vai Kumar: 10:18

And when an inflammation becomes the breeding ground for very serious health problems, inflammation becomes the breeding ground for very serious health problems, and you pointed out very nicely, divya, you have connected it all. And we talked about Indian cuisine, we talked about Mexican and just to reiterate, ayurveda need not necessarily be related to Indian cuisine alone, correct? The Ayurvedic principles can be incorporated and you can cook any type of world cuisine and you, coming from Bulgaria, I guess you know we can incorporate it into any kind of cuisine, correct?

Divya Alter: 10:54

Yeah, of course. See, one of the main principles of Ayurveda is using the local ingredients, the foods that grow locally. So Ayurveda it came from the land of India. Ayurveda gives very detailed descriptions of individual ingredients, herbs, what they look like, what is, what are the properties, etc. Authors of the Ayurvedic classical texts. They described the herbs and foods that were grown locally. Right, they couldn't travel to Mexico and examine quinoa, for example, which grows in South America. They couldn't travel to Bulgaria and examine the local herbs. They just described what was grown locally, in the same way with cuisine. They just described what was grown locally, in the same way with cuisine. One of the main precepts of Ayurveda is to use local food because it's grown locally. That food that uses the water that you drink, the sun that shines on you, the climate, the air that you breathe, that food will be most compatible to you.

Vai Kumar: 12:03

Because it already recognizes your body, recognizes something that's coming in.

Divya Alter: 12:09

Yes, exactly. So how do you use local foods and apply the Ayurvedic principles? You apply the Ayurvedic principles of compatibility. You can use local herbs, like culinary herbs, for example, and because of good transportation global transportation we have access to all the Ayurvedic spices as well. So we have access to turmeric and to cumin and cardamom and cinnamon and all that, so we can use those as well. But you can create different flavors based on your local cuisine, and that's another compatibility that's so important the satmya remember.

Divya Alter: 12:48

So you cannot force, let's say, somebody from Sweden for example I live in Sweden up north Very heavy diet. They use a lot of heavy cream in their diet because it helps them with the cold temperatures. But you cannot force somebody who grew up in Sweden to eat Indian food. You know it's not their, they're not accustomed to it. Another category of compatibility is called hridja palatability, something that you really like. So it can be the healthiest food for you, freshly prepared and everything. But if you don't like it, it's not going to be healthy for you. So you have to make local food tasty and approachable to people and you can totally apply the Ayurvedic principles to any kind of cuisine.

Vai Kumar: 13:35

Okay, and just to touch upon that fact or that example of someone living up north trying to eat tropical say you mentioned South Indian food in the peak of winter in New York City, so what exactly is an alternative? Or how does anyone tweak, living in a cold temperature, trying to eat something which is, you know, perhaps their usual traditional stuff, say, like a tropical type of food?

Divya Alter: 14:07

Let's go with the example for New York. In the middle of the winter I'm not going to eat coconut, which is very typical for South India and the South in general. So coconut is very cooling. It produces coolness in the body, cools you down and in the winter when it's so cold, you don't want to eat cooling foods unless you really heat it. So coconut is also heavy. So we need heavy foods in the winter. But if it's so cooling, then I'll wait for the summer when I really enjoy drinking coconut water, making coconut chutney, fresh coconut chutney and making these beautiful coconut desserts. So I really enjoyed that. But in the winter it will be incompatible, and so vice versa. So in the middle of the summer I'm not going to eat heavy stews. You know the heavy beans stew, something that's really heavy grounding. No, we crave light foods in the summer. Right, we enjoy fruits, salads. We crave lighter foods because we don't feel eating heavy in the summer.

Vai Kumar: 15:19

What about raw versus cooked food? And what about, say, sprouting?

Divya Alter: 15:23

So again raw food needs extra fire to be digested. If your digestion is weak, then you're not going to fully digest the raw food and get benefit from all the nutrients that it has. So that's another thing. A lot of people have weak digestion. They eat raw foods and they feel terrible. They get more bloated, they feel ungrounded, not satiated like that. But if you have strong digestion, especially in the summer, raw food is great and then sprouting. So think about nature. When does everything begin to sprout? Spring? It's in spring, yeah. So sprouts very light, they're very airy in nature. So the best time to eat sprouts is in spring, which is now. But they're also very airy, so they will aggravate your vata very much. That's why I like to make mung bean sprouts, but I lightly saute them first with a few spices. I have a sprouted mung bean recipe in my new cookbook. Enjoy your Balance. But then it's easy to digest. It will not make you gassy. So if you're getting gassy and bloated after you eat, that's another indication that you're not digesting the food fully.

Vai Kumar: 16:43

Okay, okay and again, anything you know. So what is the answer to anyone that says hey, how do I? Even you talked about whatever is called dosha, which is the body constitution you know, which can be something that you were inherently born with, versus what is the current state of affairs right now with someone's body? So how does someone identify what will really suit them and how do they know whether they need more of the air element, whether they need more of the fire element, which is the pitta, and then the kapha, which is the earth, correct?

Divya Alter: 17:22

Earth and water. Yeah, I mean, the best thing is to see an Ayurvedic doctor or practitioner. They check your balls, they examine you and they can tell you exactly what's out of balance and what you need to do what foods, what remedies, what exercise and all that. They can personalize all this for you, but that's kind of rare, um, that's why I'm so passionate to help people learn self-awareness, to actually stop and feel okay, how do I feel right now? Am I cold? Am I, am I hot? Do I heavy? Do I feel lightheaded? So, by practicing self-awareness and you connect to those elements in your body, then it's like oh yeah, I'm not really hungry. It's time to eat lunch, but I'm not really hungry. What should I do? That's why I love teaching.