Western Nutrition & Ayurveda

Western nutrition focuses on content, where Ayurveda focuses on the qualities of food. Content include macronutrients (calories, proteins, carbs, fat) as well as vitamins & minerals in your food. Quality includes taste and the gunas (hot/cold, oily/dry, heavy/light, etc). The gunas show you how to be your own expert of food, and how it makes you feel. We've become used to relying on experts in the food industry to tell us what to eat, from the food pyramid, nutritional science, food packaging, government advisory boards (FDA), media, doctors, & diet books.

It a strange that we know about polyphenols, flavonoids, antioxidant, saturated fats, carbohyrdates. It's as if we've stopped seeing the food and see only the nutrients instead. Traditional food cultures, void of nutritional science don't suffer from chronic western diseases like diabetes & obesity. It's true that people are living longer in the west, but longer lifespans are due to gains in infant mortality, child health, public health, and surgery, not diet or pharmaceuticals. Human beings were healthy & ate well for thousands of years before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it. It is possible to eat healthy without knowing what an antioxidant is.