PART TWO

The Four Inputs: Food, Water, Breath, and Perception

4

Food

IF YOU’RE LIKE most parents, knowing which nutritional guidelines to follow today in a sea of contradictory dietary advice, fad diets, and long lists of foods to avoid—that sometimes exclude entire food groups—can make mealtime feel downright messy. The last thing you want to do after a busy day when it’s time to put dinner on the table is second-guess your food choices. To make matters worse, parents often worry they are doing more harm than good and depriving their children of a myriad of health benefits by not following the latest popular advice and nutritional trends—adding one more concern to your plate.

The modern parent ends up puzzled. Is the apple you’re about to cut up for your child’s snack chock-full of the same nutrients as the organic apple you could have bought if you had time to go to your local farmer’s market or a different grocery store? Why is everyone suddenly gluten-free and lactose intolerant? Should you stop giving your child milk? Will one of the dozens of nondairy milk alternatives provide your children the protein and nutrients they need? Throw in the prevalence of childhood allergies and various conditions along with an abundance of superfoods and supplements available on today’s market, and it may feel like you’ve just lost the helm of your grocery cart. There must be an easier way to view food and nutrition. And in fact, there is.

The Four Inputs

Now that you have discovered Ayurveda’s fundamental principles of keeping the doshas balanced and fluently in sync with nature, it’s time to uncover the four inputs (ahara) that nurture, nourish, and maintain the flow of life: food, water, breath, and perception, which we’ll cover throughout the next four chapters. Ayurveda views human existence as a true microcosm of the universe at large and poetically explains that life is like a perennial river, continuously flowing and symbolizing the course of life itself. A river starts on a mountain cliff as a small stream, then runs downward through the valley, joining other channels of water to form larger streams, deepening and widening until it reaches the end of its passage, finally merging with the ocean. In the same way, human life starts as a single cell in the mother’s womb and continues to multiply until a human being emerges to grow and develop in the flow of life’s journey. That life continues to flow, inseparable from nature, until it eventually disintegrates and merges with the universe. Along the way, the body undergoes many processes of degeneration and deterioration of cells, bodily tissues, and the energy we use for various physical and mental functions required for day-to-day activities and development. For regeneration and replenishment to optimally occur, a constant systematic inflow is necessary to maintain this river of life.

The food that nourishes your children’s bodies, for example, also has the power to nourish their minds and souls when consumed according to body constitution and the Ayurvedic nutritional guidelines we are about to explore. Water consumption not only replenishes lost fluids, but it also aids digestion and absorption and strengthens or weakens the system’s agni, or metabolism. From your child’s very first breath, each and every inhalation and exhalation carries prana or life energy, throughout all the subtle energy channels of the system and connects the body and mind. Inhalations energize, stabilize, and nurture whereas exhalations purify and detoxify. Finally, perception determines how the internal self receives various stimuli from the outside world through the five senses. The mind’s entire framework for the way your children see, hear, touch, and respond to every piece of information they encounter in life relies on the input of perception.

When you view human existence as inseparable from nature and the influences of your changing environment the same way a river is inseparable from the universe, you can help chart your child’s journey according to Ayurveda’s four inputs of life and set them on a path to express their highest potential.

Food: The Primary Input

According to Ayurveda, food is the first and primary of the four inputs of life and ensures your child’s health, vitality, growth, and development. This includes proper nourishment of organs and tissues, development of sensory acuity, and balanced function of all the body systems. Did you know your child’s overall vitality is the collective outcome of well-nourished tissues and balanced digestion and metabolism? Your food choices determine your child’s present and long-term vitality. This is known as ojas in Ayurveda and is synonymous with vibrancy, vitality, immune strength, and sustainable energy. Ojas is the supreme glow of the body expressed as an outcome of optimal nourishment of all the tissues. And when we talk about vitality in Ayurveda, it includes physical strength, digestive and metabolic strength, sustainable energy, immune resistance, and the overall vibrance of an individual—vibrance not only in the physical sense but in an individual’s ability to focus and learn, remember and retrieve information (memory recall), and feel calm and balanced.

According to Kaumarabhritya, food is the primary ingredient that facilitates the growth and development of your child, and it considers incorporation of various principles of nutrition crucial—both to prevent and manage many of today’s most prevalent pediatric conditions. Have you ever heard the saying “food is medicine”? Food has tremendous healing capacities and supports your body’s innate intelligence to resist and treat various diseases and disorders. Here are just a few examples: Winter melon heals degenerative lung conditions and manages anxiety. Arrowroot powder heals the gut. Black raisins heal anemia. Wild Indian yams heal hemorrhoids. Cumin and ginger relieve indigestion and bloating, and coriander seed heals urinary complications.

Ayurveda makes it easy for parents to follow simple nutritional guidelines that will nourish your child’s mind, body, and soul and encourage you to rely more on your own intuition at mealtimes and less on the latest and greatest nutritional study subject to dramatic patterns. No calorie counting necessary.

Three Ayurvedic Principles of Nutrition

There are three factors Ayurveda primarily considers when it comes to food: what to eat, how much to eat, and when to eat. Which one of these do you think is the most important? It may come as a surprise to people accustomed to Western diet principles that when to eat assumes the highest priority. Let’s look at the science.

when to eat

Every single function within your body—and the entirety of nature—is regulated by cyclical rhythms like sunrise and sunset, lunar rhythms, and seasonal rhythms. The same way everything in nature is cyclical, every function of the human mind-body system also works in cyclic rhythms—the cardiac rhythm, the respiratory rhythm, the digestive rhythm, the sleep rhythm, and the menstrual rhythm, for example. Even biochemical changes take place in cyclical rhythms such as enzymatic cycles, sugar cycles, and hormone cycles.

Ayurvedic principles show that if you are able to follow a regular eating pattern and establish breakfast, lunch, and dinnertime routines, over time that regularly repeated message will result in a circadian consciousness within your mind-body system. This in turn allows digestive secretions, enzymes, and hormones to seamlessly support the entire digestive process for optimal assimilation, absorption, and utilization of nutrients. The human body has an amazing intelligence superior to that of our minds in many ways, leaving us with much less to do than we imagine—which is always good news for parents!

You may be wondering how you can maintain consistent mealtimes if you have school-age children who have assigned eating periods that are beyond your control. It is important to do your best on the mealtimes you do have a say over at home in that case because, knowingly or unknowingly, a general rhythm will naturally set in for your children depending on what time they need to leave the house in the morning and the particular time they are scheduled to eat lunch each day. Your conscious awareness of these rhythms will help support your child’s nourishment, vitality, and energy levels.

How long exactly does it take to establish this consciousness within your child’s system—especially one that may have already gone haywire? According to Ayurveda, when you continue something at a particular time each day for one lunar cycle—or twenty-eight days—your system will become attuned to that schedule. It only takes twenty-eight days to reset your child’s entire system? Yes—and yours too if you wish, as the same principle applies to adults.

Let’s take a look next at what happens physiologically when you don’t pay attention to maintaining your children’s eating schedule. First, let’s consider a couple of statistics. One out of three children and adolescents in the United States are either overweight or suffering from childhood obesity, and the percentage of children affected by obesity has more than tripled since the 1970s. Metabolic imbalances are unquestionably on the rise. Establishing a cyclical rhythm of eating for children can help diminish these tendencies.

How exactly do regular mealtimes reduce your child’s chances of developing a metabolic disorder? All of the food you eat gets utilized in three ways. First, your body absorbs glucose and directly transforms it into energy. Second, food can be utilized for tissue nourishment—the most important for children as they are in a rapid growth stage of life, a time when their muscles, bones, nerves, and all of their tissues need to be continually nourished. Third, any leftover balance is deposited as fat for crisis management. When you maintain a mealtime schedule and establish a consistent rhythm of eating, your entire system is ready to digest, absorb, and utilize all the food you ingest. As a result, there is little chance of having any unwanted accumulation of unutilized food. According to Ayurveda, every metabolic disorder is defined simply by that which is not completely and properly transformed. When there is little or no balance left over from the food you eat, your chances of developing a metabolic disorder will be very minimal as that excess accumulation is what can lead to metabolic disorders such as obesity and diabetes.

Often, in India, Dr. J would encounter distressed mothers who sought out pediatric care because their children weren’t eating. One woman from a remote village in Bangalore traveled with her four-year-old boy, saying he had barely eaten anything for days. In consultation it became clear the child was not being offered meals according to any kind of schedule and was instead randomly snacking on candy and other sugary treats—then refusing to eat any semblance of a normal meal. Dr. J advised the mother to monitor her son’s candy intake and to feed him only at specific mealtimes. The woman was certain she needed an Ayurvedic herbal formulation to support her child, so Dr. J also recommended digestive drops, promising they would work as soon as she started feeding her child at regular times each day. Soon afterward, a second woman from the same village arrived at Dr. J’s with her own son in tow, asking for the same magic herbs that had helped her friend’s child! Of course it was simply the rhythm of established mealtimes that had effectively treated the problem.

what to eat

The second principle in Ayurvedic nutrition discusses the key points in deciding what to eat. Fundamentally, children have different nutritional needs based on age, constitution, and nutritional requirements due to activity levels, which are assessed in terms of how a child spends their day and how physically or minimally active they are overall. Obviously, a very athletic child needs more food than a less active one. Moving beyond these basic considerations, Ayurveda looks at the most important factor in determining every type of lifestyle or treatment plan for every person—individual constitution, or prakriti.

According to Ayurveda and as we’ve discovered in chapter 2, every individual is born with a certain innate nature that will remain the same throughout a person’s lifetime—similar to the concept of DNA Ayurveda classifies these body constitutions into seven different types, meaning if you take all of the children on the planet they can be categorized into one of seven groups based on their mind-body nature. According to that nature, your child’s tendencies and affinities will vary—and so should their diet.

A kapha child, for example, has a natural tendency to gain weight and experience accumulation. These children want to limit heavier foods and opt for a lighter diet, whereas children with a vata constitution tend to be dry, lean, and emaciated and require more nourishing and oily types of foods. In the same way, the warm and sharp qualities of pitta call for a more cooling, grounding diet. When you assess your child’s dosha along with current imbalances, you can easily gain an understanding of which foods will pacify and support your child’s constitution. These three elements together—age, constitution, and activity levels—can help you determine a blueprint for meal planning based on food choices that will support optimal nutrition as well as prevent, manage, and minimize recurrence of disorders and disease.

This brings us to one of the key principles of balancing the doshas through an Ayurvedic diet. Parents often wonder if they should focus on constitution or a specific imbalance when deciding what their children should eat. According to Ayurveda, the primary focus should always be to correct any imbalance first. Once the imbalance has been corrected, you can continue to follow nutritional guidelines for your child’s constitution. Simply put, when there is an imbalance, focus on the imbalance; when there is no imbalance, focus on the constitution.

THE AYURVEDIC BALANCED MEAL

After hours of precious downtime spent every week planning meals, parents are still looking for an answer to the million-dollar question—what exactly constitutes an ideal balanced meal?

Ayurveda considers a balanced meal to be a wholesome blend of food based on the principle of the six tastes. Ayurveda explains that all foods contain one or a multiple of the tastes sweet, sour, salty, pungent, astringent, and bitter, and each taste has its own distinct functional effects on the mind-body system as indicated in the charts on the following pages. Different tastes impact the mind and body according to which ones are most predominant in your diet. The inverse is also true—too little or less than is required of one or more tastes can also lead to imbalances.

As you know, children generally crave a lot of sweets, but what you might not know is this is actually considered a requirement in the growing stage of life because sweet is the most nourishing of the six tastes. Caution: when we say sweet in Ayurvedic terms, this doesn’t mean sugar as in lollipops and cake—it also includes grains, milk, rice, lentils, chicken, and other foods you can find on the Six Tastes Chart here.

Other tastes important for children are sour, salty, and a little bit pungent, which are considered facilitators for digestion and absorption. Lastly, we come to the bitter and astringent tastes that are used sparingly when preparing food for children as these two tastes are reductive, drying, and depleting.

This Ayurvedic principle simply states that a proper blend of all six tastes constitutes a balanced meal. You will find that such a plate contains the necessary requirements of protein, fat, and carbohydrates your child needs for proper growth and development. Once you begin serving meals that contain an adequate amount of grains, protein, vegetables, and fruit, you can also use some household kitchen spices to enhance your child’s digestion. Common spices like turmeric, cumin, coriander, or a little bit of black pepper are all found to be very effective in supporting digestion. From this point, you can continue to fine-tune your children’s individual diets according to other factors including digestive strength, season, weather, and current imbalances.

Keep in mind that all of the Ayurvedic principles on nutrition are supported by one simple guideline: follow a natural, wholesome meal plan with ingredients like whole grains, vegetables, fruits, lentils, and spices, and try to avoid or minimize processed, canned, preserved, and refined food items. The human body is a natural living entity and can easily digest, absorb, and utilize natural wholesome ingredients, whereas chemically processed, bleached, or refined ingredients create crisis in the body that leads to inflammation and various diseases.

FOODS TO AVOID

One of the best things you can do for your children when it comes to their diet is avoid serving cold food and beverages, a primary cause of poor digestion. We will discuss this in more detail in the next chapter, but for now know that cold always causes constriction and stagnation. Ingesting cold food items weakens the digestive fire and may also increase congestion as well as any blockages that may be present in your child’s body system. Warm food and beverages are always a better choice for your children and considered to be digestive enhancers that will improve circulation and boost your child’s overall health.

Do you have kids that love raw vegetables or salads? That’s great—and you don’t have to banish your go-to cucumber slices, but a lot of raw veggies, which parents often think of as healthy, are actually difficult for the body to digest. Ayurveda simply suggests being mindful about how much raw food you give your children as all raw vegetables carry cold and dry qualities, which can hamper digestion and increase tendencies toward the colds and congestion your children are already prone to in this kapha stage of life. It is best to avoid raw items completely anytime you notice your child’s digestion is dull or weak, which we’ll cover shortly.

Digestion is a similar process to cooking. Just as the heat and flame of a stove can break down raw food ingredients into an easily digestible and absorbable form, the digestive secretions in your gut including salivary amylase, acids, and pepsin break down ingested food. Since the gut can only absorb nutritional ingredients like proteins, fats, or carbohydrates on a molecular level, it is much easier to absorb these nutrients from food that has already been broken down by cooking rather than raw food items.

This is a good point to address the popular notion that cooking vegetables destroys their nutritional value. The reality is that the natural proteins, fats, and carbohydrates of a particular food are never lost through cooking. It is true that some of the enzymes and vitamins can get denatured through cooking, but these are still abundant in fruit, which is considered much easier to digest than raw vegetables because the ripening process is equivalent to natural cooking. So you see, if you are providing balanced meals to your children, there is no need to worry about the minimal amount of nutrients that may be lost by cooking your broccoli when the fruit your child is eating will provide a regular, sufficient amount.

INCOMPATIBLE FOOD COMBINING

Ayurveda identifies and classifies food ingredients according to their unique properties, the six tastes, and individual health benefits along with the best practices of combining them properly to ensure optimal absorption and nourishment of all the body’s systems and tissues. However, incompatible food combinations (viruddha) are also important to keep in mind. Ayurveda clearly states that certain food items cannot be combined with others because they can lead to health problems. These incompatibilities arise for various reasons such as incompatible potencies, opposite qualities, and improper interaction when consumed in the same quantities, to name a few. When you eat a meal with incompatible food combinations, it causes digestive imbalances along with metabolic and other systemic issues and aggravates the doshas. While it may not always be possible to follow these guidelines, it is best to become familiar with this table so you can avoid creating ama, or improperly digested food that may act as toxins, and other disturbances within your child’s system. Following is a list of Ayurveda’s key incompatible food combinations. It bears repeating that blending fruit with milk in the ever-popular fruit smoothie should be strongly avoided.

how much to eat

Portion control understandably receives a lot of attention in Western nutrition, as it is considered a key component in preventing and fighting obesity. The third component of the Ayurvedic nutrition principles explains the differences between Ayurvedic and conventional nutrition and will give you a different framework for planning your child’s meals. How much should you eat? The answer of course is to eat in moderation, but outside of overeating or fasting, what exactly is moderation? It is the amount of food that nourishes your child without causing sluggishness in the digestive system or excessive accumulation. Since Ayurveda is person-specific, there is not a fixed quantity of food you should strive to serve your children. The best way to assess your child’s nutritional needs and goals is to see how your child performs over a period of time. Do they have enough energy throughout the day? Are they gaining weight as expected? These types of considerations are the yardstick by which you can identify whether your child is overeating or undereating.

The modern approach to nutrition is based on two factors. One is the nutritional component of food—protein, carbohydrates, fat, and nutrients. The second is calories. Ayurveda has a much more comprehensive approach to nutrition and is not at all aligned with the concept of calorie counting. While Ayurveda agrees with the approach of monitoring input and output, the reality is that even when these match up—and despite controlling input in terms of calories and monitoring output in terms of activity—there is still a high incidence of diabetes and other metabolic disorders.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU DIGEST, NOT WHAT YOU EAT

There are many differences between conventional and Ayurvedic nutrition highlighted in the table here. According to Ayurveda, just because you eat something healthy, it doesn’t mean your body will optimally digest and absorb all of the nutrients that food item has to offer and nourish your body. The general perception in modern nutrition is that if you are able to manage the quantity or intake of protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals, you will be well-nourished. Hence the saying, “You are what you eat.” Ayurveda has a different saying: “You are what you digest.” There is a missing link in Western medicine that is Ayurveda’s primary focus when it comes to nutrition: a person’s internal digestive and metabolic efficiency.

When an individual’s digestion and metabolism are weak, even minimal calorie intake can cause accumulation and lead to metabolic disorders like obesity due to poor transformation. Similarly, if your child’s digestion and metabolism are strong and fast, even a slightly higher calorie intake than what may be standard will still not cause an accumulation because digestion and metabolism are burning bright and properly transforming calories. Ayurveda assigns much more importance to a person’s internal digestive fire and metabolic efficiency than calorie computation—especially when it comes to children. Childhood is a time for growth, and you never want to inappropriately restrict calories during this period so crucial for nourishment and energy.

In Dr. J’s practice as an Ayurvedic physician over two decades, he has seen many children who eat the required amount of calories suggested by modern dietary nutritional guidelines yet still suffer from deficiencies, weaknesses, and depletion in their overall health in the forms of vitality, nourishment, and energy levels.

The efficiency of your child’s digestive and metabolic system is what decides whether the food they eat will nourish them. It is by no means an absolute. You can eat all the food you want, but if it is not able to be properly digested, absorbed, and assimilated, it simply won’t nourish the tissues because the body system isn’t able to transform the food into nutrients. Keeping an eye on your child’s digestive strength is key in making sure the food they eat will nourish them. We’ll take a look at how to do that next and how to manage and improve digestive weaknesses.

MONITORING YOUR CHILD’S DIGESTION

How can you tell if your child has normal digestion? Natural methodologies are the best way to initially assess your child’s digestive strength, and there are a few indicators parents can monitor that signal proper digestion. The first is that your child feels hungry and ready to eat at mealtimes. When your child has a strong appetite and asks for food at the usual times, it is an immediate indication that digestion is strong. Second is to monitor your child after mealtimes. Are there expressions of heaviness or tiredness? When digestion is weak, dullness impacts energy levels after a meal. The third is to ensure your child is properly tracking in weight gain and development. These are all indications of reasonably good digestion.

The first and foremost indication that your child’s digestion is weak is a lack of interest in eating. It’s much easier to monitor children than adults because they usually say what’s on their mind, so if you’re calling your child to the table at mealtimes and they are expressing disinterest in eating or aren’t feeling hungry, this is when to really start watching for signals that their digestion may need a boost. Second is noticing that after eating a meal your child feels tired and wants to lie down or expresses they aren’t feeling well. A decrease in activity after meals or sluggishness is also an indication of slow digestion. The third is if after eating a meal your child says their stomach hurts on a recurrent basis or feels nauseous or vomits. These are all indications of weak digestion.

Another scenario is when a child feels constantly hungry and eats a lot of food, but simply isn’t gaining weight. The hunger is there, the quantity is there, but the nourishment and energy are not. This is also considered an indication of weak digestion because the tissues are craving nourishment. This tissue craving manifests as excessive hunger, but the digestion, absorption, and transformation of food into nutrients is not taking place. This is why despite having an appetite or even a heavy food intake, children sometimes don’t get the nourishment they need. Ayurvedic principles state that proper digestion—not the quantity of food—is the primary source of proper nourishment. Efficiency is key.

Common Concerns about Modern Trends

Now that you know the three core principles of nutrition, you may be wondering where Ayurveda comes down on other nutrition trends as you consider sharing your own health practices with your child. What is the Ayurvedic take on vegetarian diets, vitamins, supplements, probiotics, and raw juicing?

plant-based and vegetarian diets

Should children follow a plant-based or vegetarian diet? Ayurveda classifies the properties and health benefits of all whole foods and natural ingredients found on the planet, so it is a myth that Ayurveda is strictly vegan or vegetarian. Ayurveda is a universal life science that believes individuals should follow their own beliefs and paths. Whether you wish to be a vegetarian or vegan is a deeply personal choice, and Ayurveda respects every person’s individual practices. The overarching guidance is to follow healthy principles, avoid incompatible food combinations, and eat balanced meals in the right quantity at the right time.

vitamins, supplements, and probiotics

Many parents today who prioritize health and wellness or take supplements themselves wonder if they should be giving their children vitamins and supplements, especially with the myriad of options available on today’s market. Ayurveda primarily suggests that if you prepare balanced, wholesome meals with a variety of fresh, whole foods and your children eat well, they are most likely getting the nutrients they need to ensure proper growth and development. In cases of a known deficiency or possibility of deficiency, you may want to take a look at making some changes to their diet or consider supplementation. But remember that all vitamins are not equal! It’s important to be aware that the majority of supplements available today are synthetic. If you do choose to give your child a multivitamin, choose food-based supplements that can be absorbed and utilized by the body in a much more effective way than non-whole food nutrients.

Taking probiotics is another popular trend and a fairly recent practice. It is very interesting to note that people go out of their way to use 99.99 percent bacteria- and virus-killing wipes, sanitizers, soaps, and countertop cleansers and then pay for probiotic supplements with the hopes of enhancing the bacterial flora inside their bodies! Emerging knowledge and science confirm the microbiome controls the majority of our mind-body functions and does in fact relate to many aspects of your health. What you can conclude from that is there has been sufficient microbiota within your body from the time of birth that can be supported by a natural diet and lifestyle. Ayurveda’s perspective is that a person who lives in accordance with the principles of nature and follows a healthy, balanced diet and lifestyle that includes body and mind care has the ability to sustain healthy digestion and a balanced microbiome without the need for supplements.

raw juicing for children

Have you ever wondered if you can offer your child a few ounces of the raw green juice you prepared at home or picked up from your local juice bar? The key concept to keep in mind is that anything raw or uncooked will be much heavier for your child’s gut to digest.

As we’ve discussed, digestion is equivalent to cooking; the raw materials broken down during the cooking process make it easy for the gut to further digest and absorb nutrients. Raw food items like raw juice have to be broken down from start to finish by the gut alone. Children with a strong digestive fire (agni) can enjoy small quantities of raw green juice without overloading their digestive system, but this should be avoided anytime you notice signs of weak digestion. There are no restrictions for fruits or fruit juices as almost all fruit is used in a ripened stage, which is nature’s equivalent to cooking.

Ayurveda’s principles of food and nutrition can help you support your children’s body systems in growing and developing while maintaining the input of food in a seamless way, without any stagnation or depletion. Such a balanced flow in alignment with the principles of nature can sustain a healthy, harmonious, peaceful, and long life. Please continue to explore the inspiring world of Ayurvedic eating with your children and loved ones at home. In the next chapter, we will discover the importance of water and the ways this second input can facilitate the balanced dynamics of life.