Lauki squash comes under many different names, such as doodhi, bottle gourd, long squash and many others. It is a light green squash — you need to peel it and chop the squash into one-inch cubes before cooking it.
My teacher and mentor Vaidya Rama Kant Mishra used to prescribe this squash to most of our patients, especially during the beginning of the summer. He told them to eat the squash 2-3 times a week throughout the summer to keep the heat from building up in their liver and blood.
During the hot season, known as Pitta season in Ayurveda, the heat slowly begins to build in our bodies at the beginning of the summer as the sun is now closer to the earth. If you didn’t know how to keep the heat down in the blood and the liver, you may suffer with rashes by the end of the summer or early fall. Or you may get a UTI as the urine becomes hot and burns the friendly bacteria which reside in the bladder, leaving you prone to pick up a bladder infection. You may also notice more anger as your liver and blood heat up, giving you “hot-blooded emotions.”
Lauki squash is one of the best foods to eat throughout the hot season to prevent this buildup which may occur by the end of the summer.
Ayurveda describes lauki squash in the following way: it says that it has a very unique capability of pacifying both kapha and pitta. Kapha is the element of coldness in the body because it contains a lot of cooling lunar energy known as soma. The lauki squash contains a lot of soma which can cool down the pitta, but the reason it can also pacify the kapha is because it absorbs a lot of agni, or heat form the sun, as it matures out in the fields, yet it still maintains its somagenic or cooling properties. Which means that it can pacify the kapha at the same time due to its inherent agni or heat which it contains.
This is highly unusual for a food that is full of soma to be laghu or light. Usually foods that contain a lot of soma are heavy, such as coconut. There are two components to soma — earth and water. The earth component is heavy while the water component is much lighter.
Coconut has both liquid and heavy earthy soma which is why it can sometimes clog our physical channels if we don’t prepare it properly. But the lauki squash contains 90% water which makes it very light since it contains more liquid soma and not the heavy earthy soma contained in many somagenic foods.
So it’s light, just like water. In fact you can melt ghee, add some spices and just let it cook in its own juices with the lid on, stirring it every so often. It will become very wet on its own, without the addition of water. It is in the same family as cucumber and watermelon, both of which contain a lot of water. Water is light and can get absorbed in your body without clogging the channels.
Because it is light and can be digested so quickly, it can absorb into your 7 tissues very fast. The 7 tissues are the blood plasma, the blood, muscle, fat, bone, bone marrow and reproductive fluids. Usually the food you eat spends 3-5 days in each of the 7 tissues, nourishing the last tissue, the shukra dhatu (which is the reproductive fluids) within 3-4 weeks of ingesting the food. The lauki squash digests and absorbs so quickly that it will not take a lot of time to travel to shukra dhatu. And the best part of all is that at the end of the nourishing our 7th tissue, we make Ojas, which gives us great strength and stamina and immunity to diseases. When you see someone’s face glowing and clear whites of the eyes you know they have a lot of Ojas.
So lauki squash can make Ojas much more rapidly than many other foods due to the transformational power of its liquid soma.
This squash grows in the summer and winter, but the summer variety is lighter. We don’t recommend using it as much in the winter since you lose the protective power of the sun which will help you digest it quicker and prevent the coolness of the squash from turning into channel-clogging ama.
If you do heavy physical labor you can eat the winter squashes, but most people nowadays are sedentary, so there is less capability of burning up these heavy and tough winter squashes. So we have all our patients avoid the lauki squash grown in the winter, along with all the other winter squashes, such as pumpkin, butternut squash, and acorn squash.
The summer variety of lauki squash is especially good for pregnant women since it is very nourishing to the fetus and it enhances shukra dhatu or the reproductive fluids.
It can also bind the toxins from the blood but only does a little detoxifying so it is therefore safe to use during pregnancy. Usually we don’t recommend our pregnant patients do any detox during pregnancy or when nursing because we don’t want to pull the toxins from the deeper tissues and into the blood where the baby could get them while in the womb or from the breast milk.
The ancient texts stated that lauki squash was nourishing to the whole body, enhancing strength and stamina. They stated that if the 7 dhatus or the 7 tissues were too low or depleted, that lauki squash could nourish all 7 tissues very quickly and that you could feel the strength coming back if you ate it several times a week. If you are dehydrated you can feel it immediately bringing fluid into the tissues.
If you can’t find lauki squash then look for the yellow summer squash. Get the crooked neck variety as opposed to the one which is straight up and down. The yellow summer squash contains 100% of the actions of lauki squash while the green zucchini has about 80% of the effectiveness of lauki squash.
I hope you enjoyed learning about the wonderful health benefits of lauki squash and incorporate it into your diet throughout the hot summer months to pacify the heat in your body.
Thank you,