Raw Food & Ayurveda

July 11

Properly metabolizing the food we put into our bodies is the common theme of raw food and eating Ayurvedic-ly. If we’re just filling our bodies with food, even seemingly healthy food, if the metabolism and digestion are less than optimal, problems can arise.
Following Ayurveda, we see that many foods are cooked so digestion needs to be strong. Eating within your dosha will support a healthy digestive process. Many traditional peoples ate meats raw and the communities thrived. The digestive strength of these people are genetically designed to break down the protein and be metabolized perfectly. Some threw their catch on the fire and eventually we began to see a shift in the health of the population. Since heat is not introduced, or is severely limited, in the raw food diet, the enzymes are intact and the body can assimilate the nutrients with little build up of internal waste.
A raw food diet seems great for an internal cleanse during a change of the seasons or periodically, but I feel like eating cooked food isn’t as badly cracked up as raw-foodists claim it to be. It’s just not black and white. How do we get more lycopene from our tomatoes? We cook them.
It makes sense to learn what I can about different styles or schools of eating for health and try them out for a period of time that seems appropriate. Not in a forceful way, but rather in an exploratory way with awareness and intention. Maybe macrobiotics is better for my constitution than a raw diet. The point is to learn and give it your body a chance to see if there is improvement with energy, complexion, vibrancy, etc.
Ayurveda eating makes sense to me, but at the same time, it seems overwhelmingly complicated after reading Morrison’s The Book of Ayurveda.
I think that Mr Pollan’s continued work on educating us about the loss of connection to our food is an eye opener to the fact that people are dying to find an answer to our food issues. A large part of the problem is that food-things are created to benefit a corporation, not the body.
When we start looking in our cabinets, we might see that there are products that no longer resemble anything that grows. Cracker and cheese bites, mac and cheese, chips, canned gray beans, etc. Where’s the food?
We can see that corn rules the American diet. By allowing our diets to become reduced to just a few main crops, imbalance is all we have in store for our bodies. The processed food-things were never developed to maintain health, let alone support or even help it.
Our connection to what sustains us and brings us radiance has been pushed aside for too many of the wrong reasons. Here is an excellent opportunity to practice brahmacayra, or personal responsibility.