How Does This Ayurvedic Food Improve Wellness?

CLINICAL AYURVEDIC REVIEW

Too Tired After Turkey?

When you've overdosed on tryptophan (the chemical in turkey that makes you sleepy), the sour tart taste of cranberries refreshes your mind and stimulates your palate with a gush of saliva and juiciness. From saliva to the skin, from your liver to your GI tract, sour taste floods all your glands with juiciness. That makes sour taste a useful aid in protein digestion - and cranberries an indispensable accompaniment to your Thanksgiving meal.

Digesting Fats for the Holidays

Sour taste increases bile production and purgation from the liver, improving fat digestion and metabolism. Bile functions to emulsify fats in the small intestine, helping your body manage an overload of rich Thanksgiving yumminess. It promotes good cholesterol.

Sour Detoxifies the Blood

By flushing bile, sour taste assists the liver in detoxifying the blood. You can experience this detoxification as relaxation and refreshment of the eyes. The eyes are the window to the liver and relax whenever toxic liver heat is released from the body. Cranberry is high in antioxidants which detoxifies free radicals. It is also rich in beta-carotene, a liver restorative and blood alterative.

Juicy or Dry?

If the roof of your mouth is rough and dry after drinking cranberry juice, you've experienced astringent taste, one of the six fundamental tastes in Ayurveda. Astringent taste tightens and tones tissues. It is cooling and reduces inflammation. However, astringency is also drying, and will aggravate people with persistent dryness.

Cranberries are an astringent fruit. Their astringency helps them balance the dampness of their natural habitat: the swampy cranberry bog. Despite the gush of saliva from their sourness, cranberries are a strong diuretic and ultimately dehydrating. They increase urine production and effectively flush the urinary tract. Cranberry is also useful in bladder infection due to antimicrobial phenolic compounds and because it acidifies the urine. Under these conditions, bacteria are unable to attach to the wall of the bladder.

Bile and the Bowels

Bile's oilyness and heat is a digestive lubricant and remedy for constipation that keeps stool soft, encouraging regular elimination of the bowels. Ironically, cranberry is useful for both diarrhea and constipation. It's astringency helps bind stools, and soothes inflammatory heat conditions in the digestive tract.