Arogya Mantra 002 --- Digestion: Key to Good Health

When discussing the practice of Ayurveda with friends and colleagues most have expressed an apprehension about the strict rules to be followed regarding diet and food intake. I cannot stick to the pathyam is what many people say. In Ayurveda, food and its digestion is the key to good health. It is not possible to eat whatever you want, whenever you want, in any combination you like and expect to keep good health. The food you eat influences the three doshas. Some foods deplete a specific dosha and others enhance it. If you have aches and pains, the dosha that is probably vitiated is vata. You have to eat foods that lessen vayu and not enhance it. Being a typical Tamilian, I love my sambar made from toor dhal (tuvaram paruppu). I often used to wonder why when I was eating such simple fare I was constantly suffering from vague aches and pains and after-meal burping. I did not for a moment imagine that sambar was the culprit. Toor dhal is vayu enhancing, in that it causes flatulence and gas. Simply avoiding sambar or substituting the toor dhal with the less gas producing greengram without the skin (pasi parippu) eliminated the problem to a large extent. Most beans and legumes tend to increase vayu.

Ayurvedic vaidyars are seemingly obsessed with the digestive process. Agni or the digestive fire has to be maintained just right. If the agni burns too fiercely, the food is burnt. Too low, it is not properly cooked or digested. If the agni burns steadily the food is cooked or digested just right. Only properly digested food contributes to good health. Hence the Ayurvedic obsession with what you eat, your bowel movements and your urine output. Often you will be asked embarrassing questions about the texture and colour of your faeces and the colour of your urine, all of which helps the vaidyar understand why you are sick and get to the root cause of the problem.

Ayurvedic vaidyars will repeatedly admonish you not to eat anything before your previous meal has digested properly, which normally means that you give at least a 3 hour gap between one meal and the next. The notion that you should frequently eat small meals, sometimes advocated for diabetics, is wrong. Once the digestive process starts it does not make sense to interrupt it by adding some more food into the stomach. The newly added food will prevent full digestion of the earlier consumed food. The products of incomplete digestion creates toxins or ama, vitiates the doshas and is a primary cause of diseases.

If you had a meal which causes you acute digestive discomfort the best thing you can do is to induce vomiting and throw it up. If you feel a little queasy about doing so you can take half to one teaspoon of ashta chooranam with dilute buttermilk or lukewarm water. A little bit of Ashta chooranam can be had with rice or idlis on a regular basis and is a good digestive aid. Ashta chooranam is part of my travel kit.

Ashta chooranam can be easily prepared at home and is made with equal parts of dried ginger (chukku), black pepper (milagu), long pepper (thippili), ajowan seeds (omam), rock salt (kalluppu), cumin seeds(jeeragam), nigella seeds (karum jeeragam) and asafoetida (perungayam). Gently fry separately the dried ginger (after pounding it a bit), the long pepper, the cumin sees and the nigella seeds. Powder the ingredients separately, sieve and mix. Ashta chooranam is also readily available in most ayurvedic pharmacies. The composition of Ashta chooranam is from Ashtanga Hridaya:Gulma Chikitsa; 7th Century AD. Ashta chooranam. having been in use for well over a thousand years is unlikely to be withdrawn from the market like Lomotil, a yesteryear popular allopathic drug for treating diarrhea!