One thing I can tell you having studied nutrition and holistic health for over 50 years is that at least here in the West, much of what I learned, I had to later unlearn, because the opposite was true, or at least the knowledge was incorrect and needed to be discarded.
This means that many things I learned, later, once research was done or the remedy was tested, it turned out that what we first thought was firmly established as a truth, turned out to be incorrect. This is probably true for any new discipline. It takes learning, rehashing and relearning before we can correctly state that something is true.
This is why I love Ayurveda so much. The ancient siddhantas or truths were cognized over 5,000 years ago and what those ancient doctors declared as true is pretty much the information we can give to our patients with confidence nowadays, with just a little tweaking to keep up with this modern age.
The problem is that here in the West we are not familiar at all with the tenets of Ayurveda, so we have to go through the painstaking steps of stating something which might seem obvious at first, try it out on patients (this is why it’s called “practicing” medicine), and if we’re lucky we can research it, and see what actually is true. But it turns out that even many things that have been properly researched have later been proven to be incorrect. As a result, many decades might pass as we unwittingly take on some habits that we think are healthy, but actually are not at all.
That’s why I tell the patients to familiarize themselves with the fundamental principles of Ayurveda so you can get it right the first time and don’t have to suffer the seemingly endless rounds of trying things out, only to find out later that what you thought was beneficial for your body turned out to be actually quite detrimental.
Let’s take a look at some of those things you might have heard about that you can actually discard right off the bat and the reasons they might not be beneficial for your health.
First, we have been led astray by numerous holistic and allopathic doctors who state that wine is good for you because it contains polyphenols. This is quite a ridiculous statement. Of course wine might contain some antioxidants from the original grapes, but to state that it is good for you because amidst all the carcinogenic poisons in the wine there is still a remnant of something left called polyphenols. And just because polyphenols are beneficial for our health, we can’t jump to the broad conclusion that therefore wine is good for you.
Yes, the bottles it comes in are very fancy, and maybe the grapes were grown on a beautiful countryside for optimum nutrition, but that’s where the benefits end. Research is now showing that “regularly drinking more wine than recommended increases a person’s risk of developing cancer, liver disease, pancreatitis, and many other health problems.” I personally feel that something which is addicting which ruins people’s health and requires longterm care in rehab facilities to help people overcome their addiction cannot be good, even if it miraculously contains some polyphenols when analyzed.
If you want antioxidants and polyphenols resort to the use of organic grapes, berries, pomegranates and many other fruits which nature provides for us. Ginger, black pepper, turmeric, cilantro, and many other herbs and spices are great sources of polyphenols. As are olives and olive oil, almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts and apples. In fact, we recommend our patients eat a stewed apple first thing in the morning to help enhance their production of Ojas, a divine blissful micromolecule which keeps us free from disease.
Next, we were always told to avoid cholesterol and instead eat vegetable and seed oils since they don’t contain cholesterol and to eat margarine instead of butter. Well, the opposite turned out to be true — when you heat the vegetable oils they form a plastic which clogs the arteries, causing untold amount of strokes and heart attacks. When you eat ghee or clarified butter, which does contain cholesterol, it actually protects the lining of the arteries so that no plaque can build up, keeping you free of heart disease even into old age.
The next big incorrect piece of information we all follow is that milk is a poison and causes cancer and autoimmune diseases. At first blush this might seem true, given that we break all the rules that the ancient doctors warned us against when taking milk. We give the cows grains when they should be eating grass, we homogenize and pasteurize the milk, we take it with incompatible foods and then when we suffer the consequences we blame the milk. However, if you fix the patient’s digestion and give good grass-fed non-homogenized milk that’s boiled with spices which aid in its digestion and take it either on an empty stomach or with grains, dried fruits and nuts only, it becomes a nectar, making Ojas almost immediately after consuming. Just about every food, with the exception of sweet juicy fruits takes almost one month to make Ojas. Listen to my video on milk and the other one on Ojas to understand this more fully.
The next bit of incorrect information circulating out there in the world of nutrition is that we should all drink 8 (or more) glasses of water a day. This too is untrue. The real truth is that the amount of water we consume is different for each person depending on their circumstances. If we’re sweating a lot we need to drink more, if the food we were eating is very salty we will be thirsty, for example, and we will need to drink extra on that day.
We want to sip water throughout the day, but to guzzle down 8 glasses, even when not thirsty and before, during and after a meal could dilute our digestive enzymes, making us feel bloated. So we need to rethink this idea that all of us need to drink the same amount of water everyday without any regard for our body’s needs.
And many of us have been told to cut out dairy and fat if we want to lose weight. It turns out the opposite is true: if you have good quality milk taken correctly and incorporate ghee, the easiest fat of all to digest, you will nourish your body so well that your appetite control centers in the brain will be so satisfied that you will be craving less food in general, making it much easier to lose weight. If you avoid fat and dairy you will be continually thinking about food all day and will overeat to overcompensate for the fact that the brain is looking for the large amount of cholesterol that it needs each day in order to function properly. After avoiding fats and dairy for too long we will eventually give in to our body’s cries for fats and eat four slices of cheesecake or a half gallon of ice cream as we eventually cave as the body demands more fat.
We were all also told incorrectly that since turmeric is good for you, then isolating out the curcumin, the active ingredient in the turmeric, and taking capsules of it every day must be even better for you. Well, my teacher from India, Vaidya Rama Kant Mishra warned his students: “if you do that, you are looking for trouble” he would say when he first found out about this practice. Isolating active ingredients out of foods and spices is a pharmaceutical approach and one that should be avoided when we are trying to heal our bodies in a more natural way. The latest research now shows that taking curcumin isn’t as good for our health as we previously thought. Food and spices contain all the synergists, activators and co-activators surrounded in the whole food or spice. By isolating out an active ingredient you run the risk of side effects as these other nutrients are no longer there to maintain nature’s balance within that particular food or spice.
The next bit of bad advice currently going around is to take melatonin to help us sleep better. Your pineal gland works seamlessly with the delicately balanced endocrine glands and glands in the brain to keep a natural rhythm of hormonal release synchronized with the daylight and darkness coming into our eyes. If we take melatonin from the outside you throw this delicate balance out of whack, confusing the pineal gland which normally makes the melatonin.
The same is true for the thyroid gland — that’s part of the reason why I wrote my book, “Healing the Thyroid With Ayurveda.” If your thyroid tests weak you will immediately be put on thyroid medicine which shuts down the thyroid gland because it is no longer called upon to make its hormones. The better thing is to identify all the reasons that the thyroid is weak, address these underlying causes, and then strengthen the thyroid gland. Giving the thyroid hormone does nothing to strengthen the gland — in fact, it weakens it as it goes into hibernation and shrinks down once the thyroid hormone is given.
The next bad idea is to immediately take acid reflux medicine for heartburn and GERD without identifying the underlying causes for the refluxing of acid from the stomach. What I usually find in the majority of my patients suffering from acid reflux is that the real culprit is the gall bladder. It releases bile which alkalinizes the stomach acids as they come pouring into the duodenum, which is the beginning of the small intestines. There could be dozens of reasons which prevent the gall bladder from releasing the bile, allowing acids to build up in the stomach and duodenum and reflux back up. And these underlying causes need to be identified and treated.
In addition, Ayurveda understands that the food should move downwards as it makes its way through the digestive tract, and identifies all the reasons it might incorrectly move upwards. This can occur if the apana vata is moving up at the time we are eating our food. Apana vata is the energy located in the lower intestinal region which is responsible for the downward flow of food going through the digestive tract. We have to see in each person what they might be doing wrong which allows the apana vata to move upwards and tell them to stop doing those things, and then heal the lining of the gut which got burnt from the acids going through it.
Next, when you decide to take a calcium supplement, make sure it meets these two requirements: that it is found in nature and that the molecule is small enough to be absorbed. If we take “unintelligent” calcium, or synthetic calcium made in a lab, it will give an unintelligent effect, creating a huge disturbance at the level of the bone tissue. And the calcium molecule is very large — the ancient doctors of India knew that the calcium had to be burnt into an ash repeatedly which creates a nanoparticle or a very small particle able to absorb into the teeth and bones. Research now confirms what the ancients already knew: that most calcium supplements do not in fact absorb into the bone and remain stuck in the blood stream, creating hardening of the arteries.
The next big mistake we make is that we cook with honey. Many of the health food stores sell pastries and other foods that have been cooked with honey since they realize that white refined sugar is bad for our health. Since honey is natural, they assume this would be the better choice to use in their baking. Raw honey is the best, processed without heat. If you heat it, even if you put it into a warm or hot tea, it creates a compound that is extremely channel-clogging and hard to remove from the body. Use natural sweeteners such as evaporated cane juice, maple syrup, sucanat, jaggery and other natural sweeteners in your baking. But don’t ever use honey. Reserve its use for drizzling on top of fruit, yogurt and foods that are already cooked and cooled off.
Another bad practice is to take antifungal and antibacterial medicines to treat candida albicans yeast, whether allopathic or natural. Once we start to kill microbes in the intestines, these remedies can’t distinguish against the good and bad guys in our gut, so as they decimate the yeast, they also kill off the friendly bacteria. The best way to treat yeast is to encourage the growth of the good bad bacteria, and let them kill off the yeast.
These examples are just a few of the many mistakes we make as we strive to heal ourselves and keep our bodies healthy. Be mindful of all the fads going around, and instead learn Ayurveda so you can see what the deeper truths are regarding the health of your body. By doing so, you can eliminate a lot of the mistakes that people are making as they follow the latest fad down the rabbit holes.
Thank you