Food Combinations: Digest With Ease

In Ayurveda we focus on wholesome fresh foods and how we can put them together in simple ways that the body can easily digest.

Consuming foods that don’t combine well weakens agni and ojas. This results in symptoms, such as fermentation, indigestion, gas and belching, that eventually lead to disease.

Eating poor food combinations occasionally may not seem like a big deal in the moment but over time the effects accumulate and whittle away at the strength of agni and your health.

Remember that all food has a rasa, primary taste, virya, the energy of heating or cooling, and vipaka, post-digestive effect.

The shad rasa are madhura (sweet), lavana (salty), amla (sour), tikta (bitter), katu (pungent), and kashaya (astringent). Examples of virya are sesame oil being heating and coconut oil being cooling. An example of vipaka is that banana tastes sweet when first eaten but the effect on the body post digestion is sour. So if banana is taken with milk there will be a curdling effect in the gut, which creates fermentation and ama in the body and weakens agni.

Food combinations that have strong differing rasa (taste), virya (cooling or heating effect) and or vipaka (post digestive effect) challenge agni and disrupt the enzymes in the digestive tract, weakening agni going forward.

These same foods eaten in separate meals may be fine or even enhance agni. Eating combinations of food that blend well, in terms of rasa, virya and vipaka, optimize our ability to process and utilize the nutrients and prana in the food.

Unfortunately, our modern diets have little awareness of these above-mentioned concepts (eating fruit with other foods or cheese with meat & beans is rampant in folks’ everyday diets). Such examples are responsible for many common diseases we see today whether that’s food intolerances, allergies to dairy and gluten, and even mental and emotional disturbance.

As a helpful guide, I suggest printing out this PDF document & putting it on your fridge so you can become acquainted with supportive food combinations and those that are less so.

Happy healing & eating!