Food as Medicine

There is an ancient ayurvedic proverb explaining the significance of healthy food and healthy eating.

“When Diet is Wrong, Medicine is no Use.

When Diet is Correct, Medicine is of no Need.”

This proverb describes the importance of FOOD AS MEDICINE. Food can become your medicine to cure the various diseases. Therefore, we have started in section in our website giving the importance to food in healing various diseases.

We can use various food ingredients in home remedies. Specific food recommendations and restrictions can help in treating diseases without medicines.

Hippocrates quote also tells us:

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”

General principles of Food as Medicine

1. Eat foods of various varieties.
2. Increase amount of fresh fruits, vegetables and colorful fruits in diet.
3. Minimize the use of refined sugar, candy, soda, carbonated drinks and industrial or packed foods.
4. Eat foods according to season.
5. Eat foods according to your body type. According to ayurveda, each person has a unique body type. Ayurveda divided body uniqueness into seven categories according to some common unique characteristics found in various people. It helps us for choosing most appropriate diet for healthy living and maintaining optimum health.
6. Foods in different diseases can vary, so if a person suffers with a disease, then he might need to change diet according to the disease.
7. If food is correct and according to disease, it assists the medicines to cure the disease fast. On the other hand, if you are eating foods that worsen the symptoms of disease, then they might cause medicine failure.
8. Ayurveda chooses food according to three humors, also known as TRIDOSHA (VATA, PITA & KAPHA) in ayurveda. However, genetic of each person differs from others, so there will be millions of types of humans, but there will be a difficult for deciding the suitable foods, diet and medicines. Therefore, ayurveda identified some common characteristics and divided them into three humors. These characteristics and humors help choosing the suitable things for a particular individual. This principle is always correct in 99% of cases.

According to modern concepts, food can work as medicine, when we carefully choose foods and follow the balanced diet. There is bombarding of information on healthy eating with contradictory research studies. Some  studies favor some foods and their benefits in a particular health condition and other contradict the same food in same disease. However, some of these studies are not perfect and lacks evidences and in-depth analysis. Therefore, we have to rely on latest updates available. This does not happen in case of ayurveda, which is pioneer of using food as medicine. It is because ayurveda follows simple rule of three humors. It identifies the body type and symptoms or characteristics of a particular humors involved in a disease, and then ayurveda physician recommends food and diet, which becomes diet as medicine and makes food as healer.

We have included this section (Food as Medicine) in our website, so that people can understand how to use food that becomes medicines.

References

1. Charaka Samhita.
2. Sushruta Samhita.
3. Vagbhata, Ashtanga Hridayam.