Many people make overnight oats where they soak the oats in cow’s milk, or a plant-based milk. It makes it easy for those with young children or those who need to be in work very early, who don’t have much time to cook in the morning. So they just prep this dish the night before, take it out in the morning, eat it, and go on their way to work or school.
In the Western world, we primarily look at the nutritional qualities of the food we’re eating, and if that’s the only parameter we are looking at, then from a Western perspective oats and milk are both considered very nourishing, so this recipe would be considered healthy.
In Ayurveda, we look at food from a few other deeper perspectives, and based on those guidelines, overnight oats would not be something we would ordinarily recommend.
Ayurveda is kind of like the science of “what do we need to do to this food in order for it to be properly digested and actually assimilated into our cells”?
Once you swallow the food and you take it through the digestive tract, it has to be properly digested into very small particles so it can come out of this initial channel and absorb into the bloodstream. Which is why you’ll see a pattern emerge in all the food groups where the foods are cooked because the cooking process aids in the digestion of the food, so that it can in fact be digested and taken up into our cells of the blood stream.
If you notice, ghee is butter that is cooked, and by doing so, we are insuring that it doesn’t sit around clogging the initial channel or any of the subsequent channels the food will travel through once its digested. You’ll also notice that it’s recommended to cook the majority of your vegetables for better assimilation into the cells.
From the time you eat any food it enters a whole network of physical channels before it comes out the other end as bowel movement, urine and sweat. So the urine, lymphatic fluids, tears, sweat, bowel movement we make from the food we eat eventually make their way through these physical channels. If the food clogs the initial channel or the digestive tract, then all subsequent channels clog.
The sinuses, throat and lungs are a channel. Cold milk clogs those channels, which is why many people state that cold milk gives them congestion.
Let’s take a look at the oats as well. It would be easier to digest them if they are cooked. Even though they are soaking in milk overnight they are still not soft enough to be digested properly out of the digestive tract and into the blood stream. While some nutrients may cross through, many won’t, leaving a residue of partially digested food in the digestive tract, which is now going to rot and ferment and form toxins while sitting stuck in the gut.
The other issue we fail to understand in the West is that we actually have what we call a “digestive fire,” 13 fires to be exact, which actually work together creating heat to cook the food when it comes in. These could be interpreted as our bile acids, stomach acids and pancreatic enzymes, all of which heat up and break down the food for proper assimilation into the cells.
This digestive fire goes out when we are asleep at night, and it actually has to wake up in the morning. Which is why many of us are not that hungry as soon as we wake up. But as the sun comes up, our digestive fire will also start to ignite, and by the middle of the day when the sun is the highest in the sky our digestive fires are also the highest. Then as the sun goes down our digestive fire slowly goes back down which is why we have to be more careful what we eat in the morning and in the evening when our digestive fires are somewhat weak.
So eating cold oats and milk first thing in the morning would actually work against what is needed: they will put out the fire that is trying to ignite.
And finally, Ayurveda is always concerned about keeping Vata, Pitta and Kapha balanced. These are 3 energetic principles that are operating behind the scenes and if they become imbalanced, they set the early stages of the disease process in motion. See my book, Healing the Thyroid with Ayurveda, articles I’ve written or other videos I have made so you can learn what these 3 doshas control, but very basically here I can tell you that both Vata and Kapha are cold doshas, while pitta is hot, since all the pitta organs are cooking the food with the heat they create.
Cold food will aggravate vata, which is the element of coldness and weaken the digestive fires due to its coldness and when kapha, also a cold dosha, gets imbalanced, it can create congestion.
So here I’ve presented a few reasons why we wouldn’t want to start the day with overnight oats, which are clogging, upset digestion and over time could aggravate Vata and Kapha doshas, setting the stage for ill health later on down the road if you continue eating the offending food.
I know it’s more time-consuming than the overnight oats, but if you want to gain maximum nutrition from the oats and milk, both of which are highly nourishing, you have to spend a little time cooking them. And if you cook them with green cardamom pods, this spice will help you digest the protein in the milk and a Ceylon cinnamon stick, this spice will help you digest the sugar in the milk.
So not only is it recommended to cook the oats and milk, but the addition of the two spices, each of which contain some agni or digestive fire, will help you absorb the most nutrients from these two wonderful foods.
I hope this information helps you as you decide what to cook and eat for breakfast.