Welcome back to The Ayurveda Glow Podcast, a place to discuss how the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda can be applied to your modern, everyday life to help you feel vibrant in mind, body and spirit, enjoy optimal health, and glow from the inside out.

I’m your host, Katrina, an Ayurvedic Health Counselor & plant-based nutrition advocate based in Santa Monica, California. Through this podcast, I’ll be sharing with you what I’m learning in the areas of plant-based nutrition, sleep, yoga, meditationand a variety of holistic mind-body approaches to optimal health. I aim to explore each of these areas through the lens of Ayurveda.

In this episode, you’ll learn how the 6 tastes of Ayurveda can balance your nutrition and help you to curb food cravings. Specifically, you’ll learn how each of these 6 tastes impacts your mind and body. And, I’ll also share with you two genius food hacks to ensure you’re getting all 6 tastes in every meal.

Let’s dive in!

First up, let’s start with the basics.

Did you know?

A well-balanced meal includes all 6 tastes – sweet, sour, salty, astringent, bitter, and pungent. The reason for this is because taste is more than just a sensation of flavor that you experience when you eat or drink something. Different tastes activate chemicals in the mouth, triggering a series of messages to nerve cells and stimulating organs. Everything you eat has a specific taste and that taste has specific actions on the mind and body.

In addition, if you don’t have all 6 tastes represented in a meal, your body responds to this lack with cravings, usually for the most satisfying taste – the sweet taste.

So, to stay healthy, a well-balanced meal which includes the full spectrum of the 6 tastes is essential.

And, if you’re trying to curb your cravings, especially cravings for sweet or salty foods, it’s even more important to make sure that the 6 tastes are represented in your everyday meals so that you feel nourished and fully satisfied.

Let’s take a look at how each taste impacts your mind and body.

First up is the Sweet taste, which Ayurveda teaches is made up of the earth and water elements. For many of us, the sweet taste is considered to be the most pleasant taste.

In our modern culture, we love our sweets, whether they come in the form of a juicy watermelon, a breakfast scone, an artisan gelato, dark chocolate, baked goods or just about any other sweet variation under the sun. There’s absolutely no shortage of options to choose from when it comes to enjoying something sweet.

Many of us associate the sweet taste with sugar. However, it’s important to note that the sweet taste of sugar has an unusual intensity of sweet flavor that is not usually found in nature.

So, I want to be clear that when I share this foundational principle that Ayurveda teaches – which is that a well-balanced diet includes all 6 tastes, I’m not suggesting to go out and load up on foods that have a sweet taste resulting from refined sugars. Sorry friends, Ayurveda does not give a green light to devour a pint of gelato or a bag of Girl Scout Cookies to satisfy the need for including the sweet taste in your diet!

On the contrary – the sweet taste that makes up a well-balanced meal needs to be from real food or herbs provided directly from Mother Nature – not from refined, processed sugar.

Specifically, Ayurveda advocates a diet made up of whole foods that are abundant in prana or life force energy. In Ayurveda, we call food that’s abundant in life force energy Sattvic Food.

Processed food in packages, boxes, cans or jars, often has sugar and a bunch of other additives and the prana or life force of the food has been lost. Modern science is now revealing that these processed foods, especially processed foods with refined sugar added, are contributing big time to our global epidemic of chronic illness.

We now know that sugar is at the root of many chronic illnesses and I’ll go into this in more depth in a future episode.

So where can we find the Sweet taste?

Read more at: https://katrinah.com/the-six-tastes-o...

Resources:
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/ar...
https://lifespa.com/confused-salt

Let's Connect:

Website: https://katrinah.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katrinaheppler
Minds: https://www.minds.com/katrinaheppler

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Gratitude:
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