THE AYURVEDIC APPROACH TO COOKING AND HEALTH                    (Ayurveda is the ancient Indian science of health) Ayurveda says that the quality of the digestion is every bit as important as the nutritional quality of the food that you eat. What this means is that you can be eating the most nutritious food possible, but if you can't digest it properly, you may as well be eating at McDonalds. Western science focuses on the nutritional value of food because they can chemically analyse food to determine what nutrients it contains. It is very much more difficult to determine how well nutrients are being assimilated into the body. Consequently western science tends to do it's usual thing by pretending what they can't study either doesn't exist or is not important. Ayurveda says that food that looks appetising, smells and tastes good is better digested and better for you than more nutritious food that you force yourself to eat. This is easily explained by considering the digestive juices. Appetising food makes your saliva run in anticipation. Saliva is a digestive juice. Appetising food similarly stimulates the secretion of the stomach's digestive juices. This is why people that love eating at McDonalds may be healthier than people on strict (supposedly highly nutritious) diets. So many people on so called healthy diets don't look all that healthy. If you are forcing yourself to eat nutritious food and denying yourself so called non-nutritious food then you may not be any more healthy than someone that eats what they enjoy most.   This should not be taken as an excuse to live on junk food, but it does show that if you don't love your food you won't be getting full value from it. The aim is to be a bit less concerned with nutritional value etc and be more concerned with the quality of digestion. They are both equally important. If in the process of ingesting highly nutritious food you sacrifice your enjoyment of the food then you tend to cancel out the benefits of the better food. You can be punishing yourself for no benefit. There are other things that affect the quality of the digestion as well as the looks, smell and taste. If you are watching TV or having a heated discussion while eating, your attention will not be on your food. As a consequence your body is not prepared to receive the food. The food arrives in your stomach unheralded and your system has to make do with less digestive secretions. One simple way to draw your attention to your food is to use chop sticks. Yes, there is a good reason why Asians don't just shovel their food into their mouths. Indians traditionally take it one step further and eat with the fingers. This really puts your attention on the food and helps with the digestion. Ayurveda says to do and eat what is good for you regularly and often, and to also do and eat what is not so good for you irregularly and occasionally. This keeps the system flexible, and helps the body to feel the difference between the two. By experiencing both what is good for you and what is bad for you it gives the body the opportunity to cultivate the desire for that which is good for it. You gravitate towards desiring what is good for you and not desiring what is not good for you. As a simple example it can be good for vegetarians to eat meat occasionally, as what your body feels can reinforce the desire to not eat meat. Then it is your body that is desiring vegetarian food and it is not just an intellectual decision. If vegetarians find that they like eating meat, then they should bear in mind that to deny yourself what you like to eat is not good for the quality of the digestion. In this case it is best to eat meat at least occasionally and irregularly. Don't force your body to do what it doesn't want to do. Ayurveda says that frustrating your body's desires is not good for your health. Being rigidly vegetarian can upset friends and relatives that feel forced to prepare vegetarian food for you when you come to visit, it can also make life difficult when travelling. Being flexible allows us to make life easier and more enjoyable for ourselves and our friends and relatives. In this situation enjoy what you eat for the company you are keeping at the time, and for the ease and simplicity it lends to your life. Ayurveda breaks people up into seven different body types. What is good for one type of person may be bad for another type of person. Western science is only just beginning to discover the magnitude of this. In the past if some research finds that adding too much salt to food (for example) has bad effects on thirty percent of people, then the assumption and consequent recommendation is for everyone to cut down on salt intake. Ayurveda on the other hand says that salt is bad only for specific body types (the thirty percent), the other seventy percent need not worry. The ayurvedic approach cultivates the body’s ability to feel for itself what is good or bad for it. The desires then tend to spontaneously evolve towards that which is good for you. The intellect can be miles ahead of the body in feeling what is good or bad for you, but it also tends to fool itself and lie to itself on a regular basis. Depak Chopra's book "Perfect Health" is a good introduction to Ayurveda. Graham' background in Ayurveda