Digestion is the key to good health

When discussing the practice of Ayurveda with friends and colleagues most have expressed an apprehension about the strict rules regarding diet and food intake. “I cannot stick to the pathyam” is what many 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.

What 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 Malayali, I love my sambar made from toor dal (tuvara paruppu). But I’d constantly suffer from vague aches and after-meal burping. Then I realised toor dhal increases vayu. It causes flatulence and gas. Simply avoiding sambar or substituting the toor dal with the less gas producing green-gram without the skin the problem to a large extent.

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. Often, vaidyars will ask you embarrassing questions about the texture and colour of your faeces and the colour of your urine. This helps in understanding the root cause of the problem.

Vaidyars will repeatedly admonish you not to eat anything before your previous meal has digested properly. It means that you give at least a three-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 create toxins or ama, vitiates the doshas and is a primary cause of diseases.

If you had a meal that causes you acute digestive discomfort, the best thing to 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 diluted 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. It is part of my travel kit.

Ashta chooranam is also readily available in most ayurvedic pharmacies. It has been in use for over a thousand years. Hence, it’s unlikely to be withdrawn from the market like Lomotil, a popular yesteryear allopathic drug for treating diarrhoea!

Ashta Chooranam

It can be easily prepared at home. Take 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 seeds and the nigella seeds. Powder the

ingredients separately, sieve and mix.

Ashta chooranam is available in most ayurvedic shops.