NOT JUST WHAT, BUT HOW: TOP 10 TIPS FROM ĀYURVEDA ON HOW WE EAT.

by: Anjali Sunita @villagelifewellness.medium.com

In most homes in India, there is an engrained and embodied knowledge of some segments of Āyurveda. Indian kitchens have long been a place of the household pharmacy. The understanding of kitchen spices as natural medicine, antiseptics, antibiotics, sedatives, digestive stimulants, anti-asthmatics, and antacids, has gained the attention of scientists who test their components in controlled studies.

In my family, my grandmother passed on two beautiful hand-written cookbooks of sweets, chutneys, and main dishes and her love for maintaining family recipes wet my taste buds for more unspoken knowledge of a more distant past. Our knowledge of cooking family cooking traditions and even our language changed in our family through evangelism and the influence of British rule in India, so I turn to Āyurveda, the holistic medicine of India and those who maintained the traditions, more purely in rural village families, as a way of surviving and thriving in the elements of nature.

Āyurveda as a science is more than 5,000 years old and dates back the the ancient Vedas. The trinity of three great vaidyas, who’s work was written as classical texts are Sushruta (a great surgeon), Charaka a wandering genius physician who believed largely in preventative medicine), and Vaighbat (one of the greatest…