Ayurvedic Cooking for All: Familiar Food Prepared with Ayurvedic Principles [MLBD]

It is important to understand that Ayurveda is a healing science. How you eat is considered a major therapeutic tool, one of the most important things you can do to help yourself from an Ayurvedic perspective.

In Ayurvedic cooking, first you want to regularize absorption, assimilation and elimination. This is the most important offering an Ayurvedic cook can make: sharing foods which are easy to digest. As the Ayurvedic “eater”, your first aim is to be able to take in what you are eating well and easily.

Next you work (with an Ayurvedic practitioner, traditionally) to correct any im-balances that need righting (your vikruti). Then, you can choose foods best suited
to your physical constitution (your prakruti, Vata, Pitta, Kapha). But, as Dr. Sunil Joshi, an internationally recognized Ayurvedic physician, once told me most kindly and emphatically, first attend to appetite, digestion and elimination. Then work to balance the finer points of constitution.

To do this, the first step is to eat a primarily sattuic (pure, fresh) diet, avoiding rajasic (fiery) and tamasic (spoiled) foods in the main. Sattuic foods are fresh and light and help clear the mind. For more information about sattva, rajas and tamas, see p.