AYURVEDIC PERSPECTIVE ON BITTER
Bitter taste has cholagogue action - it is cold, clear, light, and stimulating. It increases digestive enzymes and is laxative, and drying.
Bitter taste is disagreeable and your first impulse may be to spit it out.
Yet current research now supports what Ayurveda has long known, that bitter taste has many uses including clearing toxins from the body, and boosting digestion and fat metabolism.
A recent study on the impact of bitter taste describes how it impacts the your whole system via taste receptors that are not restricted to just the tongue, but are found throughout the body including on the thyroid, lungs, skin, stomach, intestines, and pancreas.
And there is also speculation that humans may have evolved specific taste buds for calcium, which has a bitter, slightly sour, taste.
Let's take a look at what bitter taste can do for you.
Bitter Taste in a Sea of Sweet
Western medicine identifies five tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and
umami) based on research that has uncovered five corresponding taste buds.
Ayurveda, on the other hand, recognizes six tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent and astringent) based on how we experience them.
You will experience bitter taste when you sip black coffee or eat dark chocolate or salad greens like kale or arugula.
While in short supply in modern diets, bitter taste is, in fact, the most common taste in nature and our ancestors ate many bitters for thousands of years.
Sweet taste, on the other hand, is rare in nature so our taste buds are calibrated to desire sweet taste.
Today most of us have an excess of sweet taste in our diets. As our taste buds have not yet evolved to recognize its convenient availability, they are not able to accurately guide us to an amount consistent with good health.
Overwhelmed by sweetness, we tend to miss (or even actively avoid) the amazing benefits of bitter taste, which ironically can help us with sugar cravings.
Bitter Taste & Ayurveda
Ayurveda describes bitter taste by its qualities (gunas), elements and doshas, which provide clues as to its impact on your body.
Bitter's Qualities (Gunas)
When you bite into something with a bitter taste, you introduce the following qualities into your body:
- Light, which is identified as reduced weight. Bitter foods join plain popcorn, salads and black pepper in promoting weight loss.
- Cool (or cold), which is anything that reduces body temperature, metabolism, and blood flow. Bitter foods draw hot bile from the liver and gallbladder - essentially cooling the blood.
- Clear which refers to anything that cleanses or flushes out wastes, or that digests ama (toxins).
- Dry, identified by lack of moisture, lack of fat, or anything that causes diuresis.
Additionally, bitters have a descending action generally, both pulling heat down from the head, and encouraging bowel elimination down and out of the body.
Bitter's Elements
Each of Ayurveda's six tastes is defined by two
elements. For bitter these are air and ether.
Ether is clear, incorporeal, receptive, and is subtle, soft, and light.
Losing weight or doing a cleanse, both enhanced by bitter taste, are catabolic, reduce mass, and increase the ether element. Bitter taste increases ether element by forcing the ego to confront displeasure,
The air element correlates with movement, direction and the process of change. Its qualities are light, dry, subtle, cold, and dispersive and it is associated with thoughts, nerve impulses, breath, touch, peristalsis, and the musculo-skeletal system.
Bitter Taste & the Doshas
While we should include all six tastes in our daily diet, the amount of each that promotes balance depends on a person's unique constitution (dosha). For example:
- Vata: In excess bitter taste aggravates Vata causing tissue wasting and hardening, loss of strength and libido, and dry mouth
- Pitta: Bitter taste clears excess heat from the blood alleviating Pitta. It may be used to treat Pitta imbalances such as fevers and dizziness.
- Kapha: Bitter's drying quality alleviates Kapha's heavy, oily and gooey biocharacteristics, lightening it up.
Bitter's Many Benefits
Ayurveda has long recommended bitters for improving digestion, cleansing your system, and boosting fat metabolism. Reducing food cravings, stimulating your organs to operate more efficiently and lowering fevers are also part of what bitters have to offer.
Let's take a closer look.
Bitters & Digestion
Inefficient digestion siphons large amounts of energy, making a person feel tired, moody or just plain yucky.
Bitters help improve digestion helping a person feel light, energized, refreshed, and clear headed. They are also a great appetizer (before the meal) if you often feel tired or lethargic after eating.
Bitters can also facilitate improved elimination. Ayurveda suggests that a healthy gut will eliminate food six hours after eating it.
Today, however, six hour elimination exists mostly in indigenous societies, which still have a high consumption of bitters.
It is rare or non-existent in a society, like ours, that eats lots of refined flour and sugar and few bitters.
Fortunately, increasing the amount of bitters in your diet can help promote improved digestion by:
- Stimulating release of digestive fluids, enzymes and bile from the pancreas, liver and gallbladder, improving agni.
- Releasing ghrelin a hormone that tells your brain you are hungry and it is time to eat.
- Releasing
glucagon-like peptide-1, a hormone produced in the digestive tract that reduces appetite and promotes insulin release.
- Lifting stomach heaviness and sluggishness after eating
- Strengthening peristalsis, the cleansing muscular contractions of the digestive tract.
- As a laxative, bitters relieve abdominal bloating and swelling.
Bitter Taste Stimulates & Refreshes Organs
Your body tends to perceive bitter tasting foods as poison, which paradoxically triggers your organ's protective and cleansing systems.
In the case of edible bitters, this has a beneficial, stimulating effect on your body impacting everything from the colon to the liver, gallbladder, breath, metabolism (Prana) and circulation.
For example, bitters can help:
- Stimulate breath by promoting bronchodilation and the clearing of mucous from the airways. Recently, scientists have discovered the presence of bitter taste buds in the lungs!
- Increase metabolism by inhibiting the thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), releasing stored energy
- Alleviate dizziness and fainting due to heat conditions like fevers
- Clear and refresh the mind
Bitters, Weight Loss, Fat Metabolism & the Liver
Bitter taste's clear, light qualities increase metabolism and reduce fat by stimulating bile production and release (cholagogue action). This has the effectof
- Decongesting & refreshing the liver and gallbladder
- Lowering cholesterol, blood sugar, and triglycerides - Bile is an oily fatty substance. Bile release is thus fat scraping (lekhana, hypolipidemic).
Bitters help with weight loss because they condition the body to accept displeasure, thereby reducing food addiction
Bitters Purify, Cleanse and Clear
Bitter taste's bile purging properties are the key to its light, clear, cooling and drying qualities. Bitters are a great choice for clearing and purifying the body.
- Detoxify the Blood by:
- Removing hot, toxic bile
- Removing heat and fat.
- Laxative action - clearing the bowels
- Dry all secretions.
- Reducing oiliness generally
- Clearing mucus from the lungs, removing harmful pathogens and toxins.
- This dry, purifying effect
- Clears wounds
- Improves concentration & sharpen cloudy thoughts.
Bitters are used to treat fever because they also clear the
blood plasma of impurities (ama) and sweet taste (kledaka
Kapha).
Food Cravings
Bitter taste destroys
food cravings arising from organs and tissues that stimulate the taste buds. For example, bitters may counteract sweet cravings promoted by low metabolism.
In addition, bitter foods help reset the taste buds, making them a more reliable guide to the foods most likely to bring you back into balance.
Examples of Bitters
Bitters have been part of Western, Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine for centuries. In the
late 1600s in Europe bitters also became popular as treatments for gout.
Today you can find bitter formulas for sale, or you can incorporate bitter foods into your diet.
Some examples of bitter foods are leafy greens, coffee, and orange peel are examples of bitter foods.
Chocolate, another popular bitter, often undergoes significant processing to remove bitter taste.
Other foods with bitter qualities include beer, eggplant, bitter melon, burdock root, leafy greens (kale, arugula, beet greens,spinach), parsnips, sesame seeds, Jerusalem artichokes and rutabaga. See the complete list below.
Gymnema sylvestre (gurmar), used for diabetes, food cravings, and weight loss, as well as turmeric, fenugreek, cumin, guduchi, haritaki and white willow.
In herbalism, simple bitters are differentiated from alkaloidal bitters and unpleasant tasting foods. Dandelion greens and neem are simple bitters whose actions are primarily due to their taste.
Coffee and chocolate are alkaloidal bitters. Each alkaloid has a unique effect on the body beyond the action of a simple bitter.
On MeWe
On Pinterest
On Facebook
On Twitter
On WhatsApp
On Email
