Understanding Nature Cure
Talk given by Shri S Swaminathan
Joint Director, Indian Institute of Natural Therapeutics, New Delhi
To live in health, many people take to medicines. Nature cure tells us that no medicines are actually necessary to live in health as Nature itself provides us with so many medicines. What are they?
They are the Pancha Tatvas, namely
1. Food,
2. Water,
3. Sunshine
4. Air, and
5. Rest.
For you to live in good health, all that you need to do is you must supply all these basic needs correctly. We shall see the above one by one below.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Chapter 1 - Food
While food is the most fundamental to living, right food is most fundamental to living in good health. To have the right food, you need to know
When to eat and when not to eat
What to eat and what not to eat
How to eat
How much to eat and How many times to eat,
If you know the answers to these five questions, you would live in good health. Now let us discuss these.
When to eat and when not to eat
What to eat and what not to eat
How to eat
How much to eat and How many times to eat,
If you know the answers to these five questions, you would live in good health. Now let us discuss these.
1-A Food - When to eat and when not to eat
When to eat and when not to eat
Generally the stomach takes four to five hours to digest any food and get empty for the next input. So let us take care. Let the stomach rest completely before we give the next food. Let us not eat in such a manner that the stomach cannot become empty. Look at the animals. No animal will work on a loaded stomach. When we feed an animal fully, the animal will lie down and will refuse to get up.
Allow the stomach to rest in your own interest. Be kind to your own stomach. Many people do not experience the hunger at all. Why? Because they do not allow the stomach to become empty, as they keep it full all the time. Early morning they start with bed tea, even before washing the teeth. Then they take breakfast as if they had fasted. Then they follow it with a mid-day snack, called a coffee break or tea break. Then they have the lunch. Then comes the afternoon snack and then the dinner, and lastly, a cup of milk at bed time.
Thus, continuously they go on eating, lunching and munching all the time. ‘They never allow the stomach to become empty at any time during the 24 hours of the day and this happens daily on all the 365 days of the year, year after year. If any part of the organism is not given rest, but forced to work all the 24 hours, its tone will be lost.
You will not need even a little drop of medicine throughout your life, provided you follow one principle. Not to eat till the stomach has become empty’. If this is followed, one will not fall ill throughout one’s life. You will not need a drop of medicine.
Eat when you are hungry. Never eat as per watch. Hunger should alone make you eat. Do not say, ‘It is lunch time’ or, ‘It is dinner time’. Know that hunger is an indication of health. If you have got good hunger, you are healthy. If you have lost your hunger, you are unhealthy. Hunger indicates, or should indicate, that your stomach is empty. If the stomach is not empty, you cannot have hunger. When the stomach is empty, you will have lightness in you. Hunger is a physiological need for food. The body needs food and it indicates to you through the sensation of hunger that you should take food.
You can eat, provided four conditions are met.
1. The first, the stomach should have become empty
2. Man is not a body alone. Man is a triple unit of body, mind and spirit. Hence at the time of eating, you must be emotionally calm. You must not be upset emotionally.
Be careful about your mental state at the time of eating. Our mind should be full of cheer and joy. It is very important. In the good old days, before eating the meal, people used to wash their hands and feet and sit for a prayer, calm themselves down and always sit along with their relatives, with children and others, so that there would be a happy atmosphere. Now children have to go to school at 10 am. The elders have to go at 7 am. Well the time is so dislocated that each one sit for meals separately and when you sit for the meals separately our own worries will come and bother us. And if you are bothered, if you are worried, if your mind is upset, your digestion will be nil. That is why in Sanskrit in the vedic scriptures there is a manthra. Kevaladho Bhavathi Kevalashi. Adha means sin. Kevala means along. The person who sits alone and eats alone eats sin. Sit with your family, sit with your children and enjoy with company, sit in cheer sit and eat joyfully. Joy and cheer are to mind what sunshine and dew are to grass and flowers. Please remember it. Many people sit alone worried, worried over something. Still their worries are not removed. But their digestion becomes worse and worse. Eat happily. Say a little prayer. There is nothing in the world which is more soothing to the body than prayer. Prayer is the food for the mind. Prayer is something which is very very essential. Prayer must be done not once a day but every time before the meal. Prayer must be said, prayer is very important. But not a mechanical prayer. It should not be just like the sound coming from the tape recorder. It should be from the soul. It was Gandhiji who said ‘a prayer without words is what is needed, not words without prayer’. So many people have memorized something and while waling they go on repeating mechanically. Their mind is somewhere else. Mechanical prayer is not prayer at all. Some people might be asking, what has prayer to do in a nature cure lecture? Everything that has got a health value, has got some relationship to nature cure. You cannot be healthy unless you have got a calm mind. And it is not possible to have a calm mind, without the right kind of prayer. But prayer, should be really prayer. Prayer from the soul and not pretence. Most of us do prayer only mechanically. We have memorized something and it comes out. And in between if some word is omitted, we become just like the school students suffering. That is not prayer. A memorized prayer is not a prayer is not a prayer at all. Prayer is communion. Words are not needed. So do a little prayer. Calm yourself down. Be cheerful, be joyful and then eat. Simply by being worried you do not remove worry. Everyone has got worries. Who is there in the world who has got no worries? Simply by getting worried are you going to remove the worry? There are ever so many worries, official worries, domestic worries, social worries so many, not one. And by being constantly worried you are only disturbing your sleep, disturbing your digestion and you are worsening yourself. And when you get worsened, your worries get more. Face the problem. After all there is something causing the worry. Face it boldly, understand, study the problem in depth. The solution of a problem lies within the problem, not outside. Study it deeply. So, to those who have got worries [and today I believe almost everybody is worried some more, some less]. I give them a practical suggestion. And I put it before you for your consideration. If you act upon it, your worry will be over in no time. So long as you are worried, even if you take raw vegetables, even if you take fruits, nothing can be digested.
If you are mentally agitated, if you are excited, even though your stomach is empty, you will not be able to digest the food. For, the digestive secretion depends upon the brain condition. If the brain is excited, if there is tension, there would be no digestive secretion. So, please ensure that the stomach has become empty and also, at the same time, you are mentally calm. If you are very much agitated, just calm down and then eat. Do not eat when you are agitated.
Now the stomach is empty and the mind is calm. Can we eat? No. Even if the mind is calm, the body must be free from fatigue. If the body is fatigued, if you are too tired or exhausted, even though the stomach is empty, you should not eat. The reason is, when we get exhausted physically, we need to go to bed and not to the dining table. What we need is rest, and not food, because, at that time your digestive glands would not work. So, do not eat when you are tired and fatigued.
We should not feel any pain or any other discomfort anywhere in the body. In other words, any severe discomfort – may be a headache, may be pain due to an injury – do not eat at that time.
Now suppose there is no pain, or discomfort in the body, the stomach is empty, the mind is calm, the body is not tired, still we should fulfill one more condition. And that is : you must be prepared to take rest after taking food. If we have no time to take rest after a meal, if we have to rush to the station or the office for work, we must not eat. Many people eat and rush to the bus stand, go to do physical and mental work. If we start doing mental or physical work of strenuous type immediately after meal, energy is needed to do the external work. Work and digestion cannot go together. In the good old days, people used to start their activity at 0400 or 0500 hrs [04.00 am or 05.00 am] and by 1000 hrs [10.00 am] or 1100 hrs [11.00 am] they used to compete all their work and then have their meal and rest thereafter and do little work in the evening. But, these days, we have the Indian type of eating for the western mode of working. We start our day somewhere at 0800 or 0900 hrs [08.00 am or 09.00 am] and go right upto 1700 hrs or 2000 hrs [07.00 pm or 08.00 pm]. We have no rest at all. Our place of work is far away from our residence. We have no rest, physical or mental. If we fill our stomach and do outside work, we become inefficient in the outside work and also the inside work.
Now when the stomach is empty, and the mind emotionally calm, with no discomfort in the body, and if we are prepared to take rest after the meal, then only we should eat. Otherwise, do not eat. Most of us have to do work during day time. So take a very light meal. Do not take the conventional meal. Many people say, ‘I have plenty of work to do, so unless I eat, how will I get energy for the work?’ Suppose we start our work at 1000 hrs [10.00 am] and we sit down at home for the morning meal at 0900 hrs [09.00 am] thinking that this is going to give energy for the work to be done at 1000 hrs. Now, the food that has gone into the stomach will not be digested in one hour, and so, is not going to release energy in one hour. It takes at least 5 to 6 hours to get digested. The digested part of the food first goes into the small intestine and assimilation has to take place before giving energy to your system. It takes at least 12 hours, if you are healthy, before energy could be released from it. So, from the food that you take in the morning at 0900 hrs, its value will be made available to you at 2100 hrs and you cannot have it by 1000 hrs. It is a little childish to think that the food taken just now is going to give you energy just now. It is a little time consuming affair, so never eat if you have got work ahead i.e. if you have plenty of work to do. Take a little fruit or little fruit juice or something very light.
We are all eating wrongly at wrong times and so we are not able to digest. Even if you put a first class food, a really good food, in the stomach at the wrong time, it is dirt and nothing more. So do not eat wrongly. If you know this, when and when not to eat, problem is solved.
Generally the stomach takes four to five hours to digest any food and get empty for the next input. So let us take care. Let the stomach rest completely before we give the next food. Let us not eat in such a manner that the stomach cannot become empty. Look at the animals. No animal will work on a loaded stomach. When we feed an animal fully, the animal will lie down and will refuse to get up.
Allow the stomach to rest in your own interest. Be kind to your own stomach. Many people do not experience the hunger at all. Why? Because they do not allow the stomach to become empty, as they keep it full all the time. Early morning they start with bed tea, even before washing the teeth. Then they take breakfast as if they had fasted. Then they follow it with a mid-day snack, called a coffee break or tea break. Then they have the lunch. Then comes the afternoon snack and then the dinner, and lastly, a cup of milk at bed time.
Thus, continuously they go on eating, lunching and munching all the time. ‘They never allow the stomach to become empty at any time during the 24 hours of the day and this happens daily on all the 365 days of the year, year after year. If any part of the organism is not given rest, but forced to work all the 24 hours, its tone will be lost.
You will not need even a little drop of medicine throughout your life, provided you follow one principle. Not to eat till the stomach has become empty’. If this is followed, one will not fall ill throughout one’s life. You will not need a drop of medicine.
Eat when you are hungry. Never eat as per watch. Hunger should alone make you eat. Do not say, ‘It is lunch time’ or, ‘It is dinner time’. Know that hunger is an indication of health. If you have got good hunger, you are healthy. If you have lost your hunger, you are unhealthy. Hunger indicates, or should indicate, that your stomach is empty. If the stomach is not empty, you cannot have hunger. When the stomach is empty, you will have lightness in you. Hunger is a physiological need for food. The body needs food and it indicates to you through the sensation of hunger that you should take food.
You can eat, provided four conditions are met.
1. The first, the stomach should have become empty
2. Man is not a body alone. Man is a triple unit of body, mind and spirit. Hence at the time of eating, you must be emotionally calm. You must not be upset emotionally.
Be careful about your mental state at the time of eating. Our mind should be full of cheer and joy. It is very important. In the good old days, before eating the meal, people used to wash their hands and feet and sit for a prayer, calm themselves down and always sit along with their relatives, with children and others, so that there would be a happy atmosphere. Now children have to go to school at 10 am. The elders have to go at 7 am. Well the time is so dislocated that each one sit for meals separately and when you sit for the meals separately our own worries will come and bother us. And if you are bothered, if you are worried, if your mind is upset, your digestion will be nil. That is why in Sanskrit in the vedic scriptures there is a manthra. Kevaladho Bhavathi Kevalashi. Adha means sin. Kevala means along. The person who sits alone and eats alone eats sin. Sit with your family, sit with your children and enjoy with company, sit in cheer sit and eat joyfully. Joy and cheer are to mind what sunshine and dew are to grass and flowers. Please remember it. Many people sit alone worried, worried over something. Still their worries are not removed. But their digestion becomes worse and worse. Eat happily. Say a little prayer. There is nothing in the world which is more soothing to the body than prayer. Prayer is the food for the mind. Prayer is something which is very very essential. Prayer must be done not once a day but every time before the meal. Prayer must be said, prayer is very important. But not a mechanical prayer. It should not be just like the sound coming from the tape recorder. It should be from the soul. It was Gandhiji who said ‘a prayer without words is what is needed, not words without prayer’. So many people have memorized something and while waling they go on repeating mechanically. Their mind is somewhere else. Mechanical prayer is not prayer at all. Some people might be asking, what has prayer to do in a nature cure lecture? Everything that has got a health value, has got some relationship to nature cure. You cannot be healthy unless you have got a calm mind. And it is not possible to have a calm mind, without the right kind of prayer. But prayer, should be really prayer. Prayer from the soul and not pretence. Most of us do prayer only mechanically. We have memorized something and it comes out. And in between if some word is omitted, we become just like the school students suffering. That is not prayer. A memorized prayer is not a prayer is not a prayer at all. Prayer is communion. Words are not needed. So do a little prayer. Calm yourself down. Be cheerful, be joyful and then eat. Simply by being worried you do not remove worry. Everyone has got worries. Who is there in the world who has got no worries? Simply by getting worried are you going to remove the worry? There are ever so many worries, official worries, domestic worries, social worries so many, not one. And by being constantly worried you are only disturbing your sleep, disturbing your digestion and you are worsening yourself. And when you get worsened, your worries get more. Face the problem. After all there is something causing the worry. Face it boldly, understand, study the problem in depth. The solution of a problem lies within the problem, not outside. Study it deeply. So, to those who have got worries [and today I believe almost everybody is worried some more, some less]. I give them a practical suggestion. And I put it before you for your consideration. If you act upon it, your worry will be over in no time. So long as you are worried, even if you take raw vegetables, even if you take fruits, nothing can be digested.
If you are mentally agitated, if you are excited, even though your stomach is empty, you will not be able to digest the food. For, the digestive secretion depends upon the brain condition. If the brain is excited, if there is tension, there would be no digestive secretion. So, please ensure that the stomach has become empty and also, at the same time, you are mentally calm. If you are very much agitated, just calm down and then eat. Do not eat when you are agitated.
Now the stomach is empty and the mind is calm. Can we eat? No. Even if the mind is calm, the body must be free from fatigue. If the body is fatigued, if you are too tired or exhausted, even though the stomach is empty, you should not eat. The reason is, when we get exhausted physically, we need to go to bed and not to the dining table. What we need is rest, and not food, because, at that time your digestive glands would not work. So, do not eat when you are tired and fatigued.
We should not feel any pain or any other discomfort anywhere in the body. In other words, any severe discomfort – may be a headache, may be pain due to an injury – do not eat at that time.
Now suppose there is no pain, or discomfort in the body, the stomach is empty, the mind is calm, the body is not tired, still we should fulfill one more condition. And that is : you must be prepared to take rest after taking food. If we have no time to take rest after a meal, if we have to rush to the station or the office for work, we must not eat. Many people eat and rush to the bus stand, go to do physical and mental work. If we start doing mental or physical work of strenuous type immediately after meal, energy is needed to do the external work. Work and digestion cannot go together. In the good old days, people used to start their activity at 0400 or 0500 hrs [04.00 am or 05.00 am] and by 1000 hrs [10.00 am] or 1100 hrs [11.00 am] they used to compete all their work and then have their meal and rest thereafter and do little work in the evening. But, these days, we have the Indian type of eating for the western mode of working. We start our day somewhere at 0800 or 0900 hrs [08.00 am or 09.00 am] and go right upto 1700 hrs or 2000 hrs [07.00 pm or 08.00 pm]. We have no rest at all. Our place of work is far away from our residence. We have no rest, physical or mental. If we fill our stomach and do outside work, we become inefficient in the outside work and also the inside work.
Now when the stomach is empty, and the mind emotionally calm, with no discomfort in the body, and if we are prepared to take rest after the meal, then only we should eat. Otherwise, do not eat. Most of us have to do work during day time. So take a very light meal. Do not take the conventional meal. Many people say, ‘I have plenty of work to do, so unless I eat, how will I get energy for the work?’ Suppose we start our work at 1000 hrs [10.00 am] and we sit down at home for the morning meal at 0900 hrs [09.00 am] thinking that this is going to give energy for the work to be done at 1000 hrs. Now, the food that has gone into the stomach will not be digested in one hour, and so, is not going to release energy in one hour. It takes at least 5 to 6 hours to get digested. The digested part of the food first goes into the small intestine and assimilation has to take place before giving energy to your system. It takes at least 12 hours, if you are healthy, before energy could be released from it. So, from the food that you take in the morning at 0900 hrs, its value will be made available to you at 2100 hrs and you cannot have it by 1000 hrs. It is a little childish to think that the food taken just now is going to give you energy just now. It is a little time consuming affair, so never eat if you have got work ahead i.e. if you have plenty of work to do. Take a little fruit or little fruit juice or something very light.
We are all eating wrongly at wrong times and so we are not able to digest. Even if you put a first class food, a really good food, in the stomach at the wrong time, it is dirt and nothing more. So do not eat wrongly. If you know this, when and when not to eat, problem is solved.
1-B Food - What to eat and what not to eat
What to eat?
The answer lies in our paying attention to quality. There is no use in eating the wrong good and there is no use eating at the wrong time. That is the most important thing. It is not merely filling up the stomach. It is a question of something really useful to the system. And it is from that point of view that in nature cure we pay the greatest attention to this aspect.
When I ask you to eat less, eat moderately, and eat only two meals a day, I lay full stress on quality. Today, the quality is completely over looked. Whatever is available in the bazaar, is eaten. A person comes and tells me, ‘I frequently go on tour and no good food was available. So whatever was available I ate’. This should not be the case.
The food that is taken should be of the right quality. Otherwise it is of no use. I want to tell you one thing. If you observe the principles of moderate eating and if you eat only twice a day, you will live longer. You will live healthily. So, take to moderate eating. Be frugal in eating; you will never fall ill.
In Nature cure, we divide food into three categories. The first category of food which is called primary or positive foods consists of food items which are very easily digestible. The expenditure is very little, whereas the income is more. They contain plenty of enzymes, mineral salts, vitamins and others.
The second category of food which is called the secondary foods or negative foods are those items requiring more energy to digest, and after digestion, the return is much less than the first category. The first is cumulative preference shares. The second is only ordinary shares, for which the dividend may not be there.
The third category of foods are those requiring a lot of energy to get digested, and from which you get no return at all.
This is the general classification of foods. Now, what are the categories?
Primary or positive food, the first category;
Secondary or negative foods, the second category and
Devitalizing foods, the third category.
All the food products available in the market today come under one of these categories. The polished rice, the maida, the hydrogenated oil, all pulses and grams without the outer covering, all manufactured, refined, processed, bottled and tinned foods all come in the category of devitalizing foods.
The refined, processed, manufactured, tinned and bottled foods, in fact any kind of food coming to you through the industry, any kind of food in which there is some interference by the industry is processing, every one of them, is a devitalizing food. If you want to be healthy, do not clamour for more hospitals, do not demand more medical aid, but reform your diet. Take to unrefined natural foods. Do not take bottled, tinned, and processed foods.
Then, what should you eat? Eat natural foods as they are in nature. Fortunately, all vegetables are not tinned and processed. We have not yet reached that stage of artificiality in the country. We can still get so many good things here.
Natural foods are of two categories – the primary and the secondary. What are they? All vegetable and fruits are primary.
All cereals, pulses, grams and milk are secondary. That is all. You can take both. Primary means that of primary importance and secondary means that of secondary importance only. It is the primary, not the secondary, that is more needed. You should take less rice, chappathis, dal, grams and pulses. Take more vegetables. Vegetables and fruits are primary food, and you take these in greater quantity, and correspondingly reduce your intake of rice and chappathi. Would such a meal be very costly? No. Not at all. Because, you would not be eating four or five times a day. There is no need for coffee, tea, etc. It is the weak man who requires coffee. When you eat rightly two times, there is no need for coffee. There will be no tension at all. You will be supplying all that the body needs. In fact, money will be saved. So from the economic point of view this is a wonderful proposition.
How to use the vegetables and fruits is the next question. There are three types of vegetables, the leafy vegetables, the green vegetable and the root vegetable.
Leafy vegetable tops the list, because the leaf is the laboratory of the plant. It is the leaf that takes the sun’s energy and converts it into food. The greenness of the green leaves – what is known as chlorophyll – is very important. Our forefathers knew this great secret. The edible green non-poisonous leafy vegetable is known as ‘oushadhi’. Oushadhi is not rare herbs found in Kanyakumari or Kashmir. Every leafy vegetable is an oushadhi. Oushadhi means medicine. Whatever leafy vegetable you get in season, you pay attention to that first.
Then come the non-leafy green vegetables. There are even so many of these according to season, and you can take all of them. The word green does not actually mean green. The tomato, though not green, is actually a green vegetable. By and large, most of the green vegetables are green in colour and hence they are called green vegetables.
Among the root vegetables, there are two sub-categories: Starchy and non-starchy root vegetables. Among the root vegetables, the non-starchy root vegetables are equal to the green vegetables. Carrot and radish are root vegetables but they do not contain much starch. But the starch root vegetables like potato, sweet potato and yams are grains in vegetables form. They are not really vegetables. So use all vegetables. Only those vegetables which contain starch a little too much useful as other vegetables.
How to use these vegetables?
Many of these vegetables can be taken without cooking. There are many which can be taken as they are – the carrot, the cucumber, the tomato; whatever can be taken without cooking, please take them as they are. Because the process of cooking, is destructive of nutritive elements. The moment you put something on fire you lose something. How much you lose depends on how wrongly you cook. But in any kind of cooking some loss is there. Prepare a salad out of the raw vegetable, which can be taken in the raw form, and eat the salad every midday and every evening. Do not add salt. Do not season it. Take them as they are. You need salt, but not the common salt that you get from the shop. You need mineral salts, phosphorus, calcium, iodine and iron. The common salt you take is not utilized by the body. It is thrown out through the sweat and through the urine. It is not kept within. Because it is of no use to the body it is thrown out. The more salt you take the more you expel it. So, in the raw vegetable salad do not add any salt. Cut, slice, or grate two or three vegetables of the season. Please understand a few principles. First wash the vegetables and then cut. In many places, they cut the vegetables and then wash. When you first cut the vegetables and then wash it, the water comes in contact with the inner surface of the vegetables and the vitamins and mineral salts get washed away. So wash the whole vegetables and then cut them. Wash it in plain water. Use no chemicals [like lime, permanganate]. Wash very quickly, After cutting, slicing or grating, do not keep it exposed to the air. The longer you keep it exposed to the air, the greater is the loss of vitamins. They would be oxidized. So preparation of the salad should be done only when you are about to eat.
In many houses, vegetables to be cooked the next morning are cut the previous night. They have no time. Time is available for everything else. So, wash the whole vegetable and cut and use the whole vegetable with the skin except when the skin is unedible. May be in some of the vegetables the skin is thorny, hard or due to some reason, unedible. If so; remove the skin as little as possible [otherwise, the skin is very important. The skin is to the vegetable what the frontier is to the country. It is the frontier that is well – protected with armed forces. It is the skin, the portion just below the skin; that contains all the protective elements of the vegetable, namely, the vitamins and the mineral salts. The inner pitch does not contain much of these. So, use the vegetable with the skin. Use them whole. Prepare them the moment you are going to sit for your meal. When you have prepared the salad, make it a little tasty. Put a little tomato in it. Make it a little colourful. Put a little coriander leaves [Kothamalli leaves]. They contain a large amount of iron and vitamins A&C; and it adds flavour to the salad. Add some fresh coconut. Grade the coconut finely and add it to the salad. The raw salad will be colourful with the white coconut, the red tomato, the green coriander leaves and the colours of the other vegetables. So nice and so colourful. Do not add salt. Chew the salad very thoroughly. Eat it, Serve it to your children. The cellulose or the roughage in the raw vegetable will see that you are free from constipation.
Today, people are constipated. They eat only fried vegetables. They boil them and throw away the boiled water. They do not take raw vegetables at all. There is no roughage in he food we eat. That is why the bowels are constipated. If you want yourself to be free from constipation, take raw vegetables. Does raw vegetable produce wind? No. If you eat it only when you are hungry and if you chew it thoroughly and if you eat moderately, it will be digested. What is digested will not produce wind. It is the undigested food that produces wind. So, take raw vegetable. Whatever seasonal vegetables you get, take all. Do not use, much the potato, the sweet potato and the unripe banana. If, by any chance, there are no teeth to chew, put the vegetable in a mixer and drink the juice along with the roughage. Only the raw vegetables, or the uncooked food contain the enzymes. Anything cooked loses all the enzymes. As somebody put it a little harshly, ‘God created the food and the devil created the cook’. But that is the truth.
We have been living wrongly for years. If, suddenly we start living rightly today, can we get all right tomorrow? A little time is needed.
There are some vegetables the juices of which are extremely good and about which people generally do not know. One such vegetable is the ASH GOURD, what is called KOOSMANDAM in Sanskrit, KUMBALANGA in Malayalam. The juice of this vegetable is something beyond my word, I cannot explain it. I have seen this in practice. Take a small quantity of this vegetable, grate it finely and squeeze out the juice [not with the cloth, because cloth these days are washed with all sorts of powders] use your own hand or a filter. Drink the raw juice of this ash gourd. Two ounces for the child and 4 ounces for the adult is enough. Drink it early morning. Your acidity will be off. Your peptic ulcer will say good-bye to you. This will purify your blood stream. This is a great tonic. Any body can take it. Kindly do not add sugar or salt to it. Use the extract as it is. You may dilute it a little if you like. If the water is chlorinated, better dilute it with your own saliva which is unchlorinated. Do not drink it. Sip it slowly. It is a wonderful vegetable. Any inflammation anywhere in the body, the sour mouth, the acidic stomach, the peptic ulcer, will easily give way when you take the white ash gourd juice. Take a little in the morning and a little in the evening, in addition to your raw vegetables.
Next is the CARROT LEAFE JUICE, if you can get it. The carrot juice everybody is taking. You may take the whole carrot also. If carrot leave is available fresh you may take its juice also. It is very very good. Then there is another vegetable – the snake gourd [PADAVALANGA], which is available in a particular season. The tender variety of this vegetable can be cut into small pieces and added to the raw salad. This is very rich in vitamin A and C. You can extract the raw juice and drink it. Give it to your children. Another vegetable is the banana pith [VASHA PINDI]. Do not throw it away. Slice it and ‘add spice’ to your raw salad. Take it as it is or extract the juice and drink it. The banana pith can remove stones from the kidney or the bladder. I am not making extraordinary claim, I have not prepared them. God is giving it to us. I am only pointing out to you what they are for. The plantain pith is very good.
There are some leaves which are not commonly used as vegetables. For example, the BILWA LEAF or the BILWA PATRA [KOOVALAM] which is used for Shiva Puja. This leaf is extremely good. Take 3 or 4 the tender leaves, put them in your mouth and chew them. They are multivitamin tablets. It is good if you take it early in the morning. You can take a few leaves to the office and eat it there also. The TULSI LEAF is equally good.
Nature cure does not mean fruit diet. Those who can afford to buy, let them have fruits. Nature cure is not meant only for the rich. Nature cure is for all. Anybody can practice it. It is so simple. IF YOU TAKE THE SEASONAL VEGETABLES, THE BILWA LEAF, THE TULSI LEAF, OCCASIONALLY AND A LITTLE RAW SALAD IN THE DAY AND IN THE NIGHT, ALL YOUR TROUBLES WILL GO AWAY. It is so simple. Eat only when hungry. Eat rightly. Eat only twice a day. Eat moderately.
I have told you all about raw vegetables. Well, all vegetables cannot be taken raw. Some need cooking. Cooked vegetables and other cooked foods should be taken in small quantities only. The major part of the food should be raw. In fact even pulses and grams can be sprouted and taken raw and in that form, they are easy to take. They are tasty and they give you much more nutrition than the original pulses and grams. So, reform the food that way. Have a reformed diet.
I told you that there are three kinds of food, three categories of food; primary, secondary and devitalizing. Let us take more vegetables uncooked. Please remember, the uncooked food is sun-cooked food. We can in addition take a little raw vegetable juices early morning or late in the evening as food supplement to overcome the effects of past wrong living. This is especially needed in the case of pregnant ladies who have to look after the nutrition of the baby within.
We have got to know what to do with the vegetable which cannot be taken raw. There are certain vegetables which cannot be consumed raw. By all means cook them but do not cook them wrongly. Cooking necessarily means waste of nutrition, nutrients. So when it comes to the question of loss of the nutrients, why not lose the minimum? Why loss the maximum? So I mean cook sensibly. The frying which is normally done in the name of cooking is the most wasteful of all kinds of cooking. You lose the frying medium as well as the fired stuff. Everything is gone completely. The charred food which becomes a little coloured or dark brown is not very good. To tell you frankly charred food is carcinogenic, capable of producing cancer. Even non-smokers are getting cancer. Often people put the question if non-smokers are getting cancer how do you say hat the smoke produces cancer. There are so many, ever so many carcinogenic factors in the world; not one. Smoking is accepted as one of the dangers for human health. Later I will tell you how to give up smoking, how to give up alcohol and how to give up addiction. You can overcome these without any difficulty. But if you do not smoke so far so good. If you are taking masala dosa daily you know the fringes of the dosa, are all charred dark brown. When you take the bread and toast the slices they become charred in places. If you take such charred food it may be harmful to you. It may produce serious troubles.
There is a story that a kind in good old days took pity upon an old wood cutter a very old man and presented him a small grove of sandalwood trees thinking that he will lead a comfortable life. The story goes that the wood cutter began cutting the sandal wood trees and turned them into charcoal. Finally there was only one sandalwood tree left, by the time, the king met him again. We are buying first class vegetables containing enzymes, vitamins, mineral salts and all that sandal wood stands for. Sandalwood we are buying but we are turning them into charcoal – and rightly it is called curry in Tamil. The fried vegetable is called curry. The curry is also charcoal. Well we are buying first class vegetables and turning them into useless stuff and eating and naturally we do not get anything out of it. So whatever can be taken raw, take it raw. Whatever cannot be taken raw, do not fry it. Frying and then adding salt and condiments, spices may make it tasty in the mouth. Mind you, taste is a matter of habit. What is tasty to one, may not be tasty to another. Well it may be tasty to the person of perverted taste but it would not give anything inside. We must have certain control over the sense of taste. Otherwise taste can be perverted and taste is perverted in many cases. So we should enjoy the taste of the vegetables as nature has given it to them. The nature-given, nature-ordained taste must be enjoyed. Do not try to add plenty of condiments and spices. Condiments and spices are actually irritants. Every one of the condiments and every one of the spices is an irritant. It irritates the mucus membrane. No condiments and spices are an exception to this. Some irritates more and some irritates less. If you go on irritating the mucus membrane throughout the day, you know what will happen. Gastritis, inflammation of the intestines gastro enteritis and so many things occur. Constant irritations caused by fried food caused by heavily condimented, heavily spiced food is what actually leads to peptic ulcer and so many kinds of troubles. Kindly do not irritate. Constant irritation over any part of the body leads to inflammation. Constant inflammation will harden the skin and make it useless. So use condiments and spices as little as possible. Mind you, salt is also a condiment.
In the good old days, when the air conditioning was unknown the refrigerator was unknown, people used to prepare pickles, people used to preserve vegetables and other fruits with the help of condiments and spices. There might have been some use then. Today with so many modern contrivances for the preservation of the foods, we need not have any condiments and spices at all. Not that I am recommending the preservation of the food but then these [preserved with condiments and spices] actually have no food value, but they only irritate. Some people come and say, ‘In the nutritional chart, it is written there that the pepper, molaku [chillies] contain calcium. For the sake of calcium should you take this irritating stuff? Could you not have the calcium from some other non-irritating foods? Could you not have an employment with a better employer? You can have all the nutrition without condiments and spices. The condiments and spices have more irritating value than nutrition value. So cut down on condiments and spices as much as possible. Change your taste. The word satvic means non-irritating. If the food is non-irritating it will be digested much better because what irritates will disturb the secretion of the gastric juice [the digestive juices]. If the digestive juices do not come up further, you are not going to digest the food. If you go on constantly irritating the mucus membranes, your digestion will be poor. So kindly cut down your condiments and spices. Remember the person who eats too much of condiments gets the same kind of liver trouble which an alcoholic gets. The persons who take alcohol regularly gets some kind of liver trouble called Cirhosis. The same kind of trouble comes to the person who uses heavily condimented foods.
By all means make your food tasty. But let not the taste become the prominent criterion. Taste is only one of the aspects. You must taste the food, you must like the food, you must eat but you should digest it also. If you enjoy the food then alone you can digest it.
So cook your food rightly. Do not fry. You have got first class steam cookers now available; steam the vegetable, steam your rice; whatever you do you steam only. Steaming is the best. Steam it in a cooker. But if the cooker is made of aluminium, better do not put the rice straight in there. Put it in a stainless vessel. Put it in some other vessel. Do not put it straight in the aluminium vessel. Aluminium vessel not intended for cooking. When you cook rice, when you boil milk, in the aluminium vessel a little aluminium get mixed up in the food or milk and it creates gas. Aluminium is all right for flying; use it there. So use the cooker rightly.
By any chance if you cannot steam, boil it. Boil it with the least water that is needed. That means after the vegetable is cooked, after the food is cooked, let there be no water in it. Just put only enough water and when it is boiling please see that the boiling stuff does not get settled down in the vessel below and char the whole thing. Whether it is rice or vegetable, it may get settled in the vessel.
Cooked food should be taken immediately after cooking and not hours after cooking. The moment your food is cooked, let it be vegetable, let it be anything it is no more alive. Because you have heated it, from that moment decomposition starts. The longer you put it outside more is the decomposition. If you put it inside immediately digestion starts. But if you keep it out longer it cannot be digested. Suppose you put the cooked vegetable out side for 2 – 3 hours decomposition starts. The longer you keep it outside the greater the decomposition. If you take food 5 hours after cooking it is decomoposed food. Some people prepare rice, vegetable early morning at seven O’clock and take it along with them for tiffin and they take it at 1 O’clock. That is, 6 hours later. Even then, at the time of taking, it is decomposed. Now when it is decomposed at the time of eating, how will it give anything to you. So cooked food must be taken within half to one hour of cooking. The sooner the better. Many people cook the rice in the day and keep it over for the night. And sometimes the night food they give to the children next morning. These are all not very hygienic habits. Let us be very clear about it. Cooked food decomposes. In Tamil they say, ‘Usi pochu’. There is no use of taking that. If it is raw food, [if you get carrot in the morning and eat it in the evening so long as it is not cooked] it is all right. But when you take cooked food you must take it immediately. Many people return home at 8.30 pm. Kindly ask the family not to cook the food before 8 pm. It is not advisable that the food is prepared at 5pm and you should take the food at 9 pm. Cooked food must be taken immediately after cooking. It is very necessary.
While preparing chapatti please see that no ghee should be put on the iron plate. Do not make it into another kind of dosa when you put oil or ghee over the plate and place the chapati it actually tantamount to frying. What is called puri is still worse. So the puri, the parotta and all that may be tasty but they do not contain any nutrition. Fried starches cannot be digested in the mouth nor in the stomach. It will create only indigestion and heaviness. So prepare the simple chapati dry. To prepare chapti you need wheat flour. In the wheat flour there is the bran. Do not sieve and throw away the coarse surface. The coarse outer surface of atta, what is called the bran of atta contains many nutrients. The wheat bran contains vitamin E, a fertility vitamin, the absence of which may create disturbance in the reproductive system, menstrual disorders nd many other troubles may come up in women and in men. Vitamin E is a heart vitamin. It is the fertility vitamin. It is there in the bran of atta. So do not sieve it and throw away. Use fresh atta, preferably hand ground atta, because what is sold in the bazaar is the atta without the bran. It is of no use at ll. Get good wheat. Have it ground yourself. It is not difficult now-a-days as there are ball bearing chukys available. We can grind without difficulty. Use the whole wheat atta. Add some water. In rice you have got to add 2 times of water. But in atta you have got to add only a little water and prepare the dough. But do not put salt in it.
You can prepare special kind of chapatis. If you get good carrot in season, grind the carrot very finely and add the carrot to the atta. Add a little water and prepare the dough. Do not add salt. Prepare carrot roti. It is very very tasty. Similarly you can prepare coconut rotty, the cellulose roti. Grind the coconut very finely; add it to the atta, and very little water prepare the dough and prepare the coconut chappathy. It is very tasty. Similarly you can prepare plantain chapatis [glucose roti]. Well, throw away the skin. The inner part of the banana fruit is mixed with the atta. This contains enough moisture. You do not even need to add water. Mix up, and prepare glucose chapati. It is also very tasty. Now if such chapati are taken they are not only tasty but for people in poor health they will be more useful than ordinary chappathy. I will tell you how. Well, you have added something useful to the chapati. The individual who is eating chappathy unknowingly, is also taking some vegetable along with it. So he will stand to benefit more. These are known as composite chapati. You can prepare various kinds of chappathys; you can prepare the food yourself nutritiously, deliciously. But kindly do not spoil the nutrition. Now so much about cooking.
A few words about fruits. Fruits are of two types, sweet fruits and sour fruits, as there are men of two types; people of sour temperament and people of sweet temperament. The sour fruits and sweet fruits are there. Both are good. They are not penicillin, they are not streptomycin, they are not drugs. Local fruits are far better than imported fruits. Do not sit in Kerala and ask for Kashmiri apples. It is meaningless. The local fruits are far better. The seasonal fruits are good. It does not matter if they are sour. But in case you are having bad digestion, in case you are having some chronic disease, better do not take sour fruits till you recover. If your digestion is bad and if you are getting sour reactions, sour winds and if along with it you take anything sour or any sour fruits, it will only increase the complaint. So in case of people having bad digestion, in case of people having some chronic disease, [because very chronic disease has gas and indigestion in the background], better do not take sour fruits. Take the other fruits. Take only one kind of fruit at a time. Well you can take all fruits by rotation. Do not make the fruits as salad. With vegetables you can prepare salad. As far as fruits are concerned, take only one kind of fruit at a time. Take the fruits whole along with the skin as I pointed out to you yesterday. It is the portion below the skin that contains everything. If in any particular fruit if the skin is completely unedible, by all means remove it. But whatever it is edible do not throw it away. Then do not cut the fruit and keep it exposed to the air for a long time. Because, the longer the exposure, the greater the oxidation. So you will lose vitamin, you will lose the mineral salts. Well take them as quickly as possible after cutting. One very important thing is to take fruits only in an empty stomach. Do not take the fruit immediately after the meal and do not take fruits along with the meal. The reason being fruits are in a sense predigested foods whereas chappathys and other things are to be digested. If you mix up the two, one requiring easy digestion and the other requiring difficult digestion, the process of digestion will be upset. So take fruit in an empty stomach and allow some time for the fruit to be digested and then take the next meal. The habit of taking fruit immediately after the meal is not a very good habit. Well whether the fruits are sour or whether they are sweet they should not be combined with the meals. Now so much for the fruit eating.
The answer lies in our paying attention to quality. There is no use in eating the wrong good and there is no use eating at the wrong time. That is the most important thing. It is not merely filling up the stomach. It is a question of something really useful to the system. And it is from that point of view that in nature cure we pay the greatest attention to this aspect.
When I ask you to eat less, eat moderately, and eat only two meals a day, I lay full stress on quality. Today, the quality is completely over looked. Whatever is available in the bazaar, is eaten. A person comes and tells me, ‘I frequently go on tour and no good food was available. So whatever was available I ate’. This should not be the case.
The food that is taken should be of the right quality. Otherwise it is of no use. I want to tell you one thing. If you observe the principles of moderate eating and if you eat only twice a day, you will live longer. You will live healthily. So, take to moderate eating. Be frugal in eating; you will never fall ill.
In Nature cure, we divide food into three categories. The first category of food which is called primary or positive foods consists of food items which are very easily digestible. The expenditure is very little, whereas the income is more. They contain plenty of enzymes, mineral salts, vitamins and others.
The second category of food which is called the secondary foods or negative foods are those items requiring more energy to digest, and after digestion, the return is much less than the first category. The first is cumulative preference shares. The second is only ordinary shares, for which the dividend may not be there.
The third category of foods are those requiring a lot of energy to get digested, and from which you get no return at all.
This is the general classification of foods. Now, what are the categories?
Primary or positive food, the first category;
Secondary or negative foods, the second category and
Devitalizing foods, the third category.
All the food products available in the market today come under one of these categories. The polished rice, the maida, the hydrogenated oil, all pulses and grams without the outer covering, all manufactured, refined, processed, bottled and tinned foods all come in the category of devitalizing foods.
The refined, processed, manufactured, tinned and bottled foods, in fact any kind of food coming to you through the industry, any kind of food in which there is some interference by the industry is processing, every one of them, is a devitalizing food. If you want to be healthy, do not clamour for more hospitals, do not demand more medical aid, but reform your diet. Take to unrefined natural foods. Do not take bottled, tinned, and processed foods.
Then, what should you eat? Eat natural foods as they are in nature. Fortunately, all vegetables are not tinned and processed. We have not yet reached that stage of artificiality in the country. We can still get so many good things here.
Natural foods are of two categories – the primary and the secondary. What are they? All vegetable and fruits are primary.
All cereals, pulses, grams and milk are secondary. That is all. You can take both. Primary means that of primary importance and secondary means that of secondary importance only. It is the primary, not the secondary, that is more needed. You should take less rice, chappathis, dal, grams and pulses. Take more vegetables. Vegetables and fruits are primary food, and you take these in greater quantity, and correspondingly reduce your intake of rice and chappathi. Would such a meal be very costly? No. Not at all. Because, you would not be eating four or five times a day. There is no need for coffee, tea, etc. It is the weak man who requires coffee. When you eat rightly two times, there is no need for coffee. There will be no tension at all. You will be supplying all that the body needs. In fact, money will be saved. So from the economic point of view this is a wonderful proposition.
How to use the vegetables and fruits is the next question. There are three types of vegetables, the leafy vegetables, the green vegetable and the root vegetable.
Leafy vegetable tops the list, because the leaf is the laboratory of the plant. It is the leaf that takes the sun’s energy and converts it into food. The greenness of the green leaves – what is known as chlorophyll – is very important. Our forefathers knew this great secret. The edible green non-poisonous leafy vegetable is known as ‘oushadhi’. Oushadhi is not rare herbs found in Kanyakumari or Kashmir. Every leafy vegetable is an oushadhi. Oushadhi means medicine. Whatever leafy vegetable you get in season, you pay attention to that first.
Then come the non-leafy green vegetables. There are even so many of these according to season, and you can take all of them. The word green does not actually mean green. The tomato, though not green, is actually a green vegetable. By and large, most of the green vegetables are green in colour and hence they are called green vegetables.
Among the root vegetables, there are two sub-categories: Starchy and non-starchy root vegetables. Among the root vegetables, the non-starchy root vegetables are equal to the green vegetables. Carrot and radish are root vegetables but they do not contain much starch. But the starch root vegetables like potato, sweet potato and yams are grains in vegetables form. They are not really vegetables. So use all vegetables. Only those vegetables which contain starch a little too much useful as other vegetables.
How to use these vegetables?
Many of these vegetables can be taken without cooking. There are many which can be taken as they are – the carrot, the cucumber, the tomato; whatever can be taken without cooking, please take them as they are. Because the process of cooking, is destructive of nutritive elements. The moment you put something on fire you lose something. How much you lose depends on how wrongly you cook. But in any kind of cooking some loss is there. Prepare a salad out of the raw vegetable, which can be taken in the raw form, and eat the salad every midday and every evening. Do not add salt. Do not season it. Take them as they are. You need salt, but not the common salt that you get from the shop. You need mineral salts, phosphorus, calcium, iodine and iron. The common salt you take is not utilized by the body. It is thrown out through the sweat and through the urine. It is not kept within. Because it is of no use to the body it is thrown out. The more salt you take the more you expel it. So, in the raw vegetable salad do not add any salt. Cut, slice, or grate two or three vegetables of the season. Please understand a few principles. First wash the vegetables and then cut. In many places, they cut the vegetables and then wash. When you first cut the vegetables and then wash it, the water comes in contact with the inner surface of the vegetables and the vitamins and mineral salts get washed away. So wash the whole vegetables and then cut them. Wash it in plain water. Use no chemicals [like lime, permanganate]. Wash very quickly, After cutting, slicing or grating, do not keep it exposed to the air. The longer you keep it exposed to the air, the greater is the loss of vitamins. They would be oxidized. So preparation of the salad should be done only when you are about to eat.
In many houses, vegetables to be cooked the next morning are cut the previous night. They have no time. Time is available for everything else. So, wash the whole vegetable and cut and use the whole vegetable with the skin except when the skin is unedible. May be in some of the vegetables the skin is thorny, hard or due to some reason, unedible. If so; remove the skin as little as possible [otherwise, the skin is very important. The skin is to the vegetable what the frontier is to the country. It is the frontier that is well – protected with armed forces. It is the skin, the portion just below the skin; that contains all the protective elements of the vegetable, namely, the vitamins and the mineral salts. The inner pitch does not contain much of these. So, use the vegetable with the skin. Use them whole. Prepare them the moment you are going to sit for your meal. When you have prepared the salad, make it a little tasty. Put a little tomato in it. Make it a little colourful. Put a little coriander leaves [Kothamalli leaves]. They contain a large amount of iron and vitamins A&C; and it adds flavour to the salad. Add some fresh coconut. Grade the coconut finely and add it to the salad. The raw salad will be colourful with the white coconut, the red tomato, the green coriander leaves and the colours of the other vegetables. So nice and so colourful. Do not add salt. Chew the salad very thoroughly. Eat it, Serve it to your children. The cellulose or the roughage in the raw vegetable will see that you are free from constipation.
Today, people are constipated. They eat only fried vegetables. They boil them and throw away the boiled water. They do not take raw vegetables at all. There is no roughage in he food we eat. That is why the bowels are constipated. If you want yourself to be free from constipation, take raw vegetables. Does raw vegetable produce wind? No. If you eat it only when you are hungry and if you chew it thoroughly and if you eat moderately, it will be digested. What is digested will not produce wind. It is the undigested food that produces wind. So, take raw vegetable. Whatever seasonal vegetables you get, take all. Do not use, much the potato, the sweet potato and the unripe banana. If, by any chance, there are no teeth to chew, put the vegetable in a mixer and drink the juice along with the roughage. Only the raw vegetables, or the uncooked food contain the enzymes. Anything cooked loses all the enzymes. As somebody put it a little harshly, ‘God created the food and the devil created the cook’. But that is the truth.
We have been living wrongly for years. If, suddenly we start living rightly today, can we get all right tomorrow? A little time is needed.
There are some vegetables the juices of which are extremely good and about which people generally do not know. One such vegetable is the ASH GOURD, what is called KOOSMANDAM in Sanskrit, KUMBALANGA in Malayalam. The juice of this vegetable is something beyond my word, I cannot explain it. I have seen this in practice. Take a small quantity of this vegetable, grate it finely and squeeze out the juice [not with the cloth, because cloth these days are washed with all sorts of powders] use your own hand or a filter. Drink the raw juice of this ash gourd. Two ounces for the child and 4 ounces for the adult is enough. Drink it early morning. Your acidity will be off. Your peptic ulcer will say good-bye to you. This will purify your blood stream. This is a great tonic. Any body can take it. Kindly do not add sugar or salt to it. Use the extract as it is. You may dilute it a little if you like. If the water is chlorinated, better dilute it with your own saliva which is unchlorinated. Do not drink it. Sip it slowly. It is a wonderful vegetable. Any inflammation anywhere in the body, the sour mouth, the acidic stomach, the peptic ulcer, will easily give way when you take the white ash gourd juice. Take a little in the morning and a little in the evening, in addition to your raw vegetables.
Next is the CARROT LEAFE JUICE, if you can get it. The carrot juice everybody is taking. You may take the whole carrot also. If carrot leave is available fresh you may take its juice also. It is very very good. Then there is another vegetable – the snake gourd [PADAVALANGA], which is available in a particular season. The tender variety of this vegetable can be cut into small pieces and added to the raw salad. This is very rich in vitamin A and C. You can extract the raw juice and drink it. Give it to your children. Another vegetable is the banana pith [VASHA PINDI]. Do not throw it away. Slice it and ‘add spice’ to your raw salad. Take it as it is or extract the juice and drink it. The banana pith can remove stones from the kidney or the bladder. I am not making extraordinary claim, I have not prepared them. God is giving it to us. I am only pointing out to you what they are for. The plantain pith is very good.
There are some leaves which are not commonly used as vegetables. For example, the BILWA LEAF or the BILWA PATRA [KOOVALAM] which is used for Shiva Puja. This leaf is extremely good. Take 3 or 4 the tender leaves, put them in your mouth and chew them. They are multivitamin tablets. It is good if you take it early in the morning. You can take a few leaves to the office and eat it there also. The TULSI LEAF is equally good.
Nature cure does not mean fruit diet. Those who can afford to buy, let them have fruits. Nature cure is not meant only for the rich. Nature cure is for all. Anybody can practice it. It is so simple. IF YOU TAKE THE SEASONAL VEGETABLES, THE BILWA LEAF, THE TULSI LEAF, OCCASIONALLY AND A LITTLE RAW SALAD IN THE DAY AND IN THE NIGHT, ALL YOUR TROUBLES WILL GO AWAY. It is so simple. Eat only when hungry. Eat rightly. Eat only twice a day. Eat moderately.
I have told you all about raw vegetables. Well, all vegetables cannot be taken raw. Some need cooking. Cooked vegetables and other cooked foods should be taken in small quantities only. The major part of the food should be raw. In fact even pulses and grams can be sprouted and taken raw and in that form, they are easy to take. They are tasty and they give you much more nutrition than the original pulses and grams. So, reform the food that way. Have a reformed diet.
I told you that there are three kinds of food, three categories of food; primary, secondary and devitalizing. Let us take more vegetables uncooked. Please remember, the uncooked food is sun-cooked food. We can in addition take a little raw vegetable juices early morning or late in the evening as food supplement to overcome the effects of past wrong living. This is especially needed in the case of pregnant ladies who have to look after the nutrition of the baby within.
We have got to know what to do with the vegetable which cannot be taken raw. There are certain vegetables which cannot be consumed raw. By all means cook them but do not cook them wrongly. Cooking necessarily means waste of nutrition, nutrients. So when it comes to the question of loss of the nutrients, why not lose the minimum? Why loss the maximum? So I mean cook sensibly. The frying which is normally done in the name of cooking is the most wasteful of all kinds of cooking. You lose the frying medium as well as the fired stuff. Everything is gone completely. The charred food which becomes a little coloured or dark brown is not very good. To tell you frankly charred food is carcinogenic, capable of producing cancer. Even non-smokers are getting cancer. Often people put the question if non-smokers are getting cancer how do you say hat the smoke produces cancer. There are so many, ever so many carcinogenic factors in the world; not one. Smoking is accepted as one of the dangers for human health. Later I will tell you how to give up smoking, how to give up alcohol and how to give up addiction. You can overcome these without any difficulty. But if you do not smoke so far so good. If you are taking masala dosa daily you know the fringes of the dosa, are all charred dark brown. When you take the bread and toast the slices they become charred in places. If you take such charred food it may be harmful to you. It may produce serious troubles.
There is a story that a kind in good old days took pity upon an old wood cutter a very old man and presented him a small grove of sandalwood trees thinking that he will lead a comfortable life. The story goes that the wood cutter began cutting the sandal wood trees and turned them into charcoal. Finally there was only one sandalwood tree left, by the time, the king met him again. We are buying first class vegetables containing enzymes, vitamins, mineral salts and all that sandal wood stands for. Sandalwood we are buying but we are turning them into charcoal – and rightly it is called curry in Tamil. The fried vegetable is called curry. The curry is also charcoal. Well we are buying first class vegetables and turning them into useless stuff and eating and naturally we do not get anything out of it. So whatever can be taken raw, take it raw. Whatever cannot be taken raw, do not fry it. Frying and then adding salt and condiments, spices may make it tasty in the mouth. Mind you, taste is a matter of habit. What is tasty to one, may not be tasty to another. Well it may be tasty to the person of perverted taste but it would not give anything inside. We must have certain control over the sense of taste. Otherwise taste can be perverted and taste is perverted in many cases. So we should enjoy the taste of the vegetables as nature has given it to them. The nature-given, nature-ordained taste must be enjoyed. Do not try to add plenty of condiments and spices. Condiments and spices are actually irritants. Every one of the condiments and every one of the spices is an irritant. It irritates the mucus membrane. No condiments and spices are an exception to this. Some irritates more and some irritates less. If you go on irritating the mucus membrane throughout the day, you know what will happen. Gastritis, inflammation of the intestines gastro enteritis and so many things occur. Constant irritations caused by fried food caused by heavily condimented, heavily spiced food is what actually leads to peptic ulcer and so many kinds of troubles. Kindly do not irritate. Constant irritation over any part of the body leads to inflammation. Constant inflammation will harden the skin and make it useless. So use condiments and spices as little as possible. Mind you, salt is also a condiment.
In the good old days, when the air conditioning was unknown the refrigerator was unknown, people used to prepare pickles, people used to preserve vegetables and other fruits with the help of condiments and spices. There might have been some use then. Today with so many modern contrivances for the preservation of the foods, we need not have any condiments and spices at all. Not that I am recommending the preservation of the food but then these [preserved with condiments and spices] actually have no food value, but they only irritate. Some people come and say, ‘In the nutritional chart, it is written there that the pepper, molaku [chillies] contain calcium. For the sake of calcium should you take this irritating stuff? Could you not have the calcium from some other non-irritating foods? Could you not have an employment with a better employer? You can have all the nutrition without condiments and spices. The condiments and spices have more irritating value than nutrition value. So cut down on condiments and spices as much as possible. Change your taste. The word satvic means non-irritating. If the food is non-irritating it will be digested much better because what irritates will disturb the secretion of the gastric juice [the digestive juices]. If the digestive juices do not come up further, you are not going to digest the food. If you go on constantly irritating the mucus membranes, your digestion will be poor. So kindly cut down your condiments and spices. Remember the person who eats too much of condiments gets the same kind of liver trouble which an alcoholic gets. The persons who take alcohol regularly gets some kind of liver trouble called Cirhosis. The same kind of trouble comes to the person who uses heavily condimented foods.
By all means make your food tasty. But let not the taste become the prominent criterion. Taste is only one of the aspects. You must taste the food, you must like the food, you must eat but you should digest it also. If you enjoy the food then alone you can digest it.
So cook your food rightly. Do not fry. You have got first class steam cookers now available; steam the vegetable, steam your rice; whatever you do you steam only. Steaming is the best. Steam it in a cooker. But if the cooker is made of aluminium, better do not put the rice straight in there. Put it in a stainless vessel. Put it in some other vessel. Do not put it straight in the aluminium vessel. Aluminium vessel not intended for cooking. When you cook rice, when you boil milk, in the aluminium vessel a little aluminium get mixed up in the food or milk and it creates gas. Aluminium is all right for flying; use it there. So use the cooker rightly.
By any chance if you cannot steam, boil it. Boil it with the least water that is needed. That means after the vegetable is cooked, after the food is cooked, let there be no water in it. Just put only enough water and when it is boiling please see that the boiling stuff does not get settled down in the vessel below and char the whole thing. Whether it is rice or vegetable, it may get settled in the vessel.
Cooked food should be taken immediately after cooking and not hours after cooking. The moment your food is cooked, let it be vegetable, let it be anything it is no more alive. Because you have heated it, from that moment decomposition starts. The longer you put it outside more is the decomposition. If you put it inside immediately digestion starts. But if you keep it out longer it cannot be digested. Suppose you put the cooked vegetable out side for 2 – 3 hours decomposition starts. The longer you keep it outside the greater the decomposition. If you take food 5 hours after cooking it is decomoposed food. Some people prepare rice, vegetable early morning at seven O’clock and take it along with them for tiffin and they take it at 1 O’clock. That is, 6 hours later. Even then, at the time of taking, it is decomposed. Now when it is decomposed at the time of eating, how will it give anything to you. So cooked food must be taken within half to one hour of cooking. The sooner the better. Many people cook the rice in the day and keep it over for the night. And sometimes the night food they give to the children next morning. These are all not very hygienic habits. Let us be very clear about it. Cooked food decomposes. In Tamil they say, ‘Usi pochu’. There is no use of taking that. If it is raw food, [if you get carrot in the morning and eat it in the evening so long as it is not cooked] it is all right. But when you take cooked food you must take it immediately. Many people return home at 8.30 pm. Kindly ask the family not to cook the food before 8 pm. It is not advisable that the food is prepared at 5pm and you should take the food at 9 pm. Cooked food must be taken immediately after cooking. It is very necessary.
While preparing chapatti please see that no ghee should be put on the iron plate. Do not make it into another kind of dosa when you put oil or ghee over the plate and place the chapati it actually tantamount to frying. What is called puri is still worse. So the puri, the parotta and all that may be tasty but they do not contain any nutrition. Fried starches cannot be digested in the mouth nor in the stomach. It will create only indigestion and heaviness. So prepare the simple chapati dry. To prepare chapti you need wheat flour. In the wheat flour there is the bran. Do not sieve and throw away the coarse surface. The coarse outer surface of atta, what is called the bran of atta contains many nutrients. The wheat bran contains vitamin E, a fertility vitamin, the absence of which may create disturbance in the reproductive system, menstrual disorders nd many other troubles may come up in women and in men. Vitamin E is a heart vitamin. It is the fertility vitamin. It is there in the bran of atta. So do not sieve it and throw away. Use fresh atta, preferably hand ground atta, because what is sold in the bazaar is the atta without the bran. It is of no use at ll. Get good wheat. Have it ground yourself. It is not difficult now-a-days as there are ball bearing chukys available. We can grind without difficulty. Use the whole wheat atta. Add some water. In rice you have got to add 2 times of water. But in atta you have got to add only a little water and prepare the dough. But do not put salt in it.
You can prepare special kind of chapatis. If you get good carrot in season, grind the carrot very finely and add the carrot to the atta. Add a little water and prepare the dough. Do not add salt. Prepare carrot roti. It is very very tasty. Similarly you can prepare coconut rotty, the cellulose roti. Grind the coconut very finely; add it to the atta, and very little water prepare the dough and prepare the coconut chappathy. It is very tasty. Similarly you can prepare plantain chapatis [glucose roti]. Well, throw away the skin. The inner part of the banana fruit is mixed with the atta. This contains enough moisture. You do not even need to add water. Mix up, and prepare glucose chapati. It is also very tasty. Now if such chapati are taken they are not only tasty but for people in poor health they will be more useful than ordinary chappathy. I will tell you how. Well, you have added something useful to the chapati. The individual who is eating chappathy unknowingly, is also taking some vegetable along with it. So he will stand to benefit more. These are known as composite chapati. You can prepare various kinds of chappathys; you can prepare the food yourself nutritiously, deliciously. But kindly do not spoil the nutrition. Now so much about cooking.
A few words about fruits. Fruits are of two types, sweet fruits and sour fruits, as there are men of two types; people of sour temperament and people of sweet temperament. The sour fruits and sweet fruits are there. Both are good. They are not penicillin, they are not streptomycin, they are not drugs. Local fruits are far better than imported fruits. Do not sit in Kerala and ask for Kashmiri apples. It is meaningless. The local fruits are far better. The seasonal fruits are good. It does not matter if they are sour. But in case you are having bad digestion, in case you are having some chronic disease, better do not take sour fruits till you recover. If your digestion is bad and if you are getting sour reactions, sour winds and if along with it you take anything sour or any sour fruits, it will only increase the complaint. So in case of people having bad digestion, in case of people having some chronic disease, [because very chronic disease has gas and indigestion in the background], better do not take sour fruits. Take the other fruits. Take only one kind of fruit at a time. Well you can take all fruits by rotation. Do not make the fruits as salad. With vegetables you can prepare salad. As far as fruits are concerned, take only one kind of fruit at a time. Take the fruits whole along with the skin as I pointed out to you yesterday. It is the portion below the skin that contains everything. If in any particular fruit if the skin is completely unedible, by all means remove it. But whatever it is edible do not throw it away. Then do not cut the fruit and keep it exposed to the air for a long time. Because, the longer the exposure, the greater the oxidation. So you will lose vitamin, you will lose the mineral salts. Well take them as quickly as possible after cutting. One very important thing is to take fruits only in an empty stomach. Do not take the fruit immediately after the meal and do not take fruits along with the meal. The reason being fruits are in a sense predigested foods whereas chappathys and other things are to be digested. If you mix up the two, one requiring easy digestion and the other requiring difficult digestion, the process of digestion will be upset. So take fruit in an empty stomach and allow some time for the fruit to be digested and then take the next meal. The habit of taking fruit immediately after the meal is not a very good habit. Well whether the fruits are sour or whether they are sweet they should not be combined with the meals. Now so much for the fruit eating.
1-C Food - How to eat
How to eat
You chew your food little by little, morsel by morsel. Chew thoroughly, whatever food you take whether it is rice or chappathy. Chew it thoroughly. The more you chew, the greater the salivary flow and better the digestion. Many people have got gas complaint and other troubles just because they do not chew the food thoroughly. Chew the food thoroughly. Eat slowly. Do no commit the mistake of hurried eating. Remember that the saliva should come in the mouth. It cannot flow in the stomach. Some people take rice, add a lot of sambar, rasam or buttermilk, make it all into a form of liquid and drink it in no time. If you do not chew the food thoroughly, if your starch is not dry and if it is messy and pasty no saliva will come. Consequently the starch cannot be digested and if the starch is undigested, the undigested starch will absorb the pepsin and so the protein also will not be digested. So, see that your food is chewed thoroughly. Some people take one morsel of rice, and then drink one cup of water to wash it down and another morsel of rice and another cup of water. They never chew it. They just wash it down. From the physiological point of view it is really objectionable. So chew the food thoroughly. Do not eat very hot foods. If you eat food which is very hot, the saliva will beome ineffective. Some people drink very hot coffee, milk or tea. It is so hot that it cannot be put in the mouth. So they make the mouth into a funnel and pour into the funnel and like that they drink very hot coffee, very hot tea, or very hot milk. Regularly drinking very hot liquid produces peptic ulcer. So do not eat very hot foods. The food that you eat should be at the body temperature. Because if the food is very hot the ptylin, the digestive enzyme in the saliva is destroyed, it is ineffective. Similarly just because you have got a fridge do not take very cold foods. Foods which are very very cold, will also make the ptyalin effective. So please remember not to take very cold foods, not to take stale foods and all that..
We spend so much for food but we are eating it wrongly. So we are ill. Our children are ill and we are suffering and if you eat wrongly all the time, by the time you reach middle age you become useless to the society. We develop various diseases. Remember the one great sentence of a great American authority on health that the diseases of 40’s and 50’s are mostly due to mistakes of 20’s and 30’s. When we are young we go on committing mistakes day after day. We do not bother. When we reach the age of 50 or 55 then we suffer due to the cumulative effect of the wrongs done by us. Let us be careful and practicable.
You chew your food little by little, morsel by morsel. Chew thoroughly, whatever food you take whether it is rice or chappathy. Chew it thoroughly. The more you chew, the greater the salivary flow and better the digestion. Many people have got gas complaint and other troubles just because they do not chew the food thoroughly. Chew the food thoroughly. Eat slowly. Do no commit the mistake of hurried eating. Remember that the saliva should come in the mouth. It cannot flow in the stomach. Some people take rice, add a lot of sambar, rasam or buttermilk, make it all into a form of liquid and drink it in no time. If you do not chew the food thoroughly, if your starch is not dry and if it is messy and pasty no saliva will come. Consequently the starch cannot be digested and if the starch is undigested, the undigested starch will absorb the pepsin and so the protein also will not be digested. So, see that your food is chewed thoroughly. Some people take one morsel of rice, and then drink one cup of water to wash it down and another morsel of rice and another cup of water. They never chew it. They just wash it down. From the physiological point of view it is really objectionable. So chew the food thoroughly. Do not eat very hot foods. If you eat food which is very hot, the saliva will beome ineffective. Some people drink very hot coffee, milk or tea. It is so hot that it cannot be put in the mouth. So they make the mouth into a funnel and pour into the funnel and like that they drink very hot coffee, very hot tea, or very hot milk. Regularly drinking very hot liquid produces peptic ulcer. So do not eat very hot foods. The food that you eat should be at the body temperature. Because if the food is very hot the ptylin, the digestive enzyme in the saliva is destroyed, it is ineffective. Similarly just because you have got a fridge do not take very cold foods. Foods which are very very cold, will also make the ptyalin effective. So please remember not to take very cold foods, not to take stale foods and all that..
We spend so much for food but we are eating it wrongly. So we are ill. Our children are ill and we are suffering and if you eat wrongly all the time, by the time you reach middle age you become useless to the society. We develop various diseases. Remember the one great sentence of a great American authority on health that the diseases of 40’s and 50’s are mostly due to mistakes of 20’s and 30’s. When we are young we go on committing mistakes day after day. We do not bother. When we reach the age of 50 or 55 then we suffer due to the cumulative effect of the wrongs done by us. Let us be careful and practicable.
1-D Food - How much to eat
How much to eat - at each time?
There is a theory in science called calorie theory of food. Well, they say that the food that you take is burned inside and calories are produced out of it. It is this heat energy that actually drives your body, they say. This is a great myth [falsehood] and 100% untrue. You do not require 3,000 to 3,500 calories per day in order to live healthily. What is needed for health is more self-restraint and self-disciplineIt is the quality of food that matters and not the quantity. The calorie theory is all completely wrong.
By and large, people today lack religious approach. When you do not have the total approach, when you look upon the human body as only a machine with no spirit in it to drive it and when you misunderstand and misinterpret human organism as a simple steam engine, you are likely to come upon a very grievous error. Whether you like it or not, the human being is a body backed by mind and spirit. It is this spirit that gives us the energy. There are people who eat plenty of food every day and they are all the time ill. So dismiss the calorie theory.
If food is the source of energy, why should you need to sleep every day, and still feel tired?
When you take the requisite energy through food, where is the need for relaxation?
If every day you supply energy through food, why is there death in world?
If food is what gives life, there are people who take three meals a day, why should they die?
The very theory that food is the source of energy is wrong. Then what for must we eat food? I will tell you about that a little later. But I will tell you not to eat more than what you need. The idea is not to fill the stomach but to eat the right type of food which will give you the enzymes, vitamins, mineral salts, amino acids, and so on. It is quality that matters, not quantity. If a person takes maida, polished rice, white sugar, hydrogenated oil and fried vegetables, the individual may fill his stomach but will not get anything out of them. What are known as the deficiency diseases which are rampant today in society are there in people who eat for calories. So do not go by the calories theory. Eat moderately. Remember that the space inside the body is not unlimited. The space inside the stomach and the intestines is not unlimited. When you fill the stomach completely, you hamper the work.
So how much should you eat? Never more than half the stomach. Why? You fill half the stomach with food; one fourth is for the digestive juices and one fourth you leave empty so that the stomach can contract and expand, so that the mechanical part of digestion can start. If you fill up the stomach with food, if you do not leave any room for contraction how will digestion begin? So, never eat more than half the stomach.
Modern people, somehow or other, are very much after medicine. When allopathy fails they turn their eyes to ayurveda. When that too fails, they turn to another system of medicine. There is a verse in ayurveda. The verse is this:
Disease retraces its steps even without medicine if only one reforms his food. If a person says ‘I am not going to reform my food’, give him hundreds of medicines – there will be no use.
Therefore, eat only half the stomach. Here, a question arises. If we eat only half the stomach each time, and if we eat only twice a day, will not we be starving ourselves? Will not we lose our weight? Will not other people around complain? Will not it lead to further danger? This is the fear in many people. There is fear results in overeating.
The stomach complaints to the over eater: ‘Oh! Please do not over eat. What is half a minute’s work to the mouth is half an hour’s work for me and you go on eating like this and I have tolerated all these nonsense for so many years. Now it has come to a stage that I cannot tolerate it any more. Please stop. .
All the digestive disorders starting from hyperacidity and sour mouth to peptic ulcer and stomach cancer are the results of wrong eating. So let us not intentionally invite disease. So let us all be moderate eaters. The whole nature cure can be simplified in just one sentence. Eat moderately twice a day, that is enough, you will never fall ill and do not be miscarried by the calorie theory.
When to stop eating
As the stomach is getting filled and when the stomach is half full, part of the air which was originally there escapes. This is the first wind. Most of us would have experienced a wind which comes from the stomach when the stomach is half full. We do not bother about it. We go on eating further because there is space in the stomach, there is something left in the plate, and, perhaps, the person who serves food urges you to eat more. Whatever the reason, you go on eating further in spite of the fact that a wind has come up. What does this wind indicate? When the stomach is completely filled, when we begin to over eat, when the stomach cannot expand anymore, the remaining part of the air that was there also escapes. That is the second wind. The first wind comes when the stomach is half empty and half full. The second one comes when the stomach is completely full. When the stomach is completely full, we feel very uneasy. We like to like down. When the stomach is completely filled, we will not feel like reading and writing or moving a bit, because all energy is diverted to the stomach. But when the stomach is completely filled digestion cannot start. Why? Digestion is partly mechanical and partly chemical. The mechanical part of the digestion starts slowly with the churning movement of the stomach. When the stomach is completely filled and cannot contract at all, how can the churning movement take place? It does not. When the mechanical part of the digestion cannot start, chemical part of the digestion also cannot start. The result is indigestion.
The stomach is not a Refrigerator that you store your food there. It has got moisture and heat in it. So if the food that is put into it cannot remain as it is. So it starts decomposing, fermenting, petrifying. So the food, instead of getting digested, starts fermenting. We do not get anything good out of the petrified and decomposed food. As the food cannot remain in the stomach, the petrified food is passed out to the small intestine which is very bad for health. Intestine is the place wherefrom all nutrients are extracted from the food. And when only petrified food is there in the intestine, there are no nutrients to extract from. All that the petrified food offers is unhealthy elements.
There is a theory in science called calorie theory of food. Well, they say that the food that you take is burned inside and calories are produced out of it. It is this heat energy that actually drives your body, they say. This is a great myth [falsehood] and 100% untrue. You do not require 3,000 to 3,500 calories per day in order to live healthily. What is needed for health is more self-restraint and self-disciplineIt is the quality of food that matters and not the quantity. The calorie theory is all completely wrong.
By and large, people today lack religious approach. When you do not have the total approach, when you look upon the human body as only a machine with no spirit in it to drive it and when you misunderstand and misinterpret human organism as a simple steam engine, you are likely to come upon a very grievous error. Whether you like it or not, the human being is a body backed by mind and spirit. It is this spirit that gives us the energy. There are people who eat plenty of food every day and they are all the time ill. So dismiss the calorie theory.
If food is the source of energy, why should you need to sleep every day, and still feel tired?
When you take the requisite energy through food, where is the need for relaxation?
If every day you supply energy through food, why is there death in world?
If food is what gives life, there are people who take three meals a day, why should they die?
The very theory that food is the source of energy is wrong. Then what for must we eat food? I will tell you about that a little later. But I will tell you not to eat more than what you need. The idea is not to fill the stomach but to eat the right type of food which will give you the enzymes, vitamins, mineral salts, amino acids, and so on. It is quality that matters, not quantity. If a person takes maida, polished rice, white sugar, hydrogenated oil and fried vegetables, the individual may fill his stomach but will not get anything out of them. What are known as the deficiency diseases which are rampant today in society are there in people who eat for calories. So do not go by the calories theory. Eat moderately. Remember that the space inside the body is not unlimited. The space inside the stomach and the intestines is not unlimited. When you fill the stomach completely, you hamper the work.
So how much should you eat? Never more than half the stomach. Why? You fill half the stomach with food; one fourth is for the digestive juices and one fourth you leave empty so that the stomach can contract and expand, so that the mechanical part of digestion can start. If you fill up the stomach with food, if you do not leave any room for contraction how will digestion begin? So, never eat more than half the stomach.
Modern people, somehow or other, are very much after medicine. When allopathy fails they turn their eyes to ayurveda. When that too fails, they turn to another system of medicine. There is a verse in ayurveda. The verse is this:
Disease retraces its steps even without medicine if only one reforms his food. If a person says ‘I am not going to reform my food’, give him hundreds of medicines – there will be no use.
Therefore, eat only half the stomach. Here, a question arises. If we eat only half the stomach each time, and if we eat only twice a day, will not we be starving ourselves? Will not we lose our weight? Will not other people around complain? Will not it lead to further danger? This is the fear in many people. There is fear results in overeating.
The stomach complaints to the over eater: ‘Oh! Please do not over eat. What is half a minute’s work to the mouth is half an hour’s work for me and you go on eating like this and I have tolerated all these nonsense for so many years. Now it has come to a stage that I cannot tolerate it any more. Please stop. .
All the digestive disorders starting from hyperacidity and sour mouth to peptic ulcer and stomach cancer are the results of wrong eating. So let us not intentionally invite disease. So let us all be moderate eaters. The whole nature cure can be simplified in just one sentence. Eat moderately twice a day, that is enough, you will never fall ill and do not be miscarried by the calorie theory.
When to stop eating
As the stomach is getting filled and when the stomach is half full, part of the air which was originally there escapes. This is the first wind. Most of us would have experienced a wind which comes from the stomach when the stomach is half full. We do not bother about it. We go on eating further because there is space in the stomach, there is something left in the plate, and, perhaps, the person who serves food urges you to eat more. Whatever the reason, you go on eating further in spite of the fact that a wind has come up. What does this wind indicate? When the stomach is completely filled, when we begin to over eat, when the stomach cannot expand anymore, the remaining part of the air that was there also escapes. That is the second wind. The first wind comes when the stomach is half empty and half full. The second one comes when the stomach is completely full. When the stomach is completely full, we feel very uneasy. We like to like down. When the stomach is completely filled, we will not feel like reading and writing or moving a bit, because all energy is diverted to the stomach. But when the stomach is completely filled digestion cannot start. Why? Digestion is partly mechanical and partly chemical. The mechanical part of the digestion starts slowly with the churning movement of the stomach. When the stomach is completely filled and cannot contract at all, how can the churning movement take place? It does not. When the mechanical part of the digestion cannot start, chemical part of the digestion also cannot start. The result is indigestion.
The stomach is not a Refrigerator that you store your food there. It has got moisture and heat in it. So if the food that is put into it cannot remain as it is. So it starts decomposing, fermenting, petrifying. So the food, instead of getting digested, starts fermenting. We do not get anything good out of the petrified and decomposed food. As the food cannot remain in the stomach, the petrified food is passed out to the small intestine which is very bad for health. Intestine is the place wherefrom all nutrients are extracted from the food. And when only petrified food is there in the intestine, there are no nutrients to extract from. All that the petrified food offers is unhealthy elements.
1-E Food - How many times to eat per day
How many times to eat per day?
How long a meal would take to get digested? There are only 24 hours. No one has more and we cannot engage the digestive system all the twenty four hours. We must give it some rest also. Otherwise it will not work properly. So we must give to it the right type of work, and also rest. We must ensure both. We cannot work all the 24 hours inside.
Then, how many meals can be taken in a day? One meal. Meal means some rice or chappathi, pulses, vegetable, ghee, whatever goes into the ordinary meal. I am referring to the ordinary meal.
A meal takes 18 hours. When you take a meal, it goes into the digestive canal and reaches the stomach. The food that we take into the stomach, takes 5 to 6 hours, provided your digestion is good, and 8 to 10 hours, if the digestion is not good. It requires 6 to 7 hours to do the work in the small intestine. In all it takes about 12 hours. Then the digested part of the food is passed on to the blood stream and from there goes to various tissues. Then undigested part of the food is passed on to the large intestine. The digestion is not complete till this is thrown out. Otherwise we will feel heavy. Thus it requires 12 hours for the digestion and six hours for the elimination. It takes 18 hours to deal with the food. There are only 24 hours. You cannot help it.
Suppose you take three meals a day – a fairly good breakfast, a sumptuous lunch and a heavy dinner. The breakfast at 0800 hrs, the lunch by 1300 hrs and the dinner at 20.00 hrs and in between there are always snacks to oblige us. Now, what happens to you by 2200 hrs? The stomach contains dinner just taken, the small intestine will contain the lunch and the large intestine will contain the breakfast. No part will be empty. From the stomach down to the end, the whole thing will be full. No part is empty and no part can contract. When you get up early morning, you will feel restless within because you never gave rest to the system, and this restlessness manifests as digestive disorders, what are known as flatulence, acidity, peptic ulcer, gastro-enteritis, jaundice etc. All these are caused because we do not give rest to any part of digestive canal at any time in the 24 hours. Suppose you take only two meals a day, out of the three parts, one will take rest in turn and there is scope for some rest for all the three parts, and the individual can lead a fairly, comfortable life. Suppose there is an individual who takes only one meal a day, then one out of the three will be working and the others will be resting. Thus there is a greater scope for rest. There is a proverb, ‘A man who takes on meal a day is a yogi, one who takes 2 meals a day is a bhogi and one who takes three meals a ‘rogi’. This is also 100% correct scientifically. Those who over eat, must know that they over eat at the cost of rest to their internal organs.
Take only two meals a day. One in the day and the other in the night. When you get up in the morning, it is meant for work and not for eating. You will feel rested. If you have to work, you should allow hunger to mature and take your meal somewhere between 1100 hrs and 1300 hrs. Do not take breakfast – The No Breakfast plan must be adopted by everyone. If you miss your breakfast, 90% of the disease will immediately vanish. No healthy person will feel hungry early in the morning. If a false sensation of hunger is felt, it is mere pathological symptom. It is more a desire and not hunger. Breakfast is not the first thing that is needed. In the good old days, people never used to eat in the early morning. If you do that we shall digest whatever we eat. In other words, there will be no indigestion.
Lesser eating means greater energy and fasting will not produce any weakness unless you are mentally broke. If on the fasting day your mind is crying for food, you cannot be healthy. There are some people who are fasting for other’s sake. “Well, tomorrow is ekadashi, I do not take food”. The man is a pandit. He is doing it for outward show. But inwardly he is cautioning his wife. “Tomorrow is ekadshi. By 5 am everything should be ready; ghee should be there; payasam should be there, this should be there, that should be there etc”. Because the mind is always on food. That is not fasting. Not for exhibition sake, but real fasting where you understand that you are fasting or a holiday for you internally. It gives rest within. If you do it that way, you will never suffer.
Energy is given to you by the Lord, by communion and by prayer. The more philosophical you are, he more religious you are really religious, not ritualistic, the more you rely on God, the less food you need. It is ungodly people who require 3500 calories a day. So if you are godly, if you are leading a godly life [you need not take sanyas – be godly – have faith in God], God sustains you. Fasting will never weaken anyone. Sensible fasting will not weaken. But there is a limit to fasting. Each one has got a capacity upto which one can fast. Little by little improvethe capacity of fasting and Iask you intentionally to increase the capacity of fasting.
A very high official of the Government of India had high blood pressure about 20 years ago. He was an additional secretary. He tried all possible sources to become normal. Everybody diagnosed his disease as high blood pressure, and drugs were prescribed. But he was not becoming normal. Having plenty of resources, he was eating all the time. At last, he sent for me. I am a little blunt. I told him, ‘Sir, you are not having high blood pressure but you are having food pressure. High food pressure is the cause and the high blood pressure is the consequence. So unless you reduce eating, you cannot become normal. You must give up drugs and you must eat less. Eat less does not mean starve but only eat to the extent needed. There is no need in eating more than what you really require. It is not a bank where the more you deposit, the greater will be the savings’.
The officer got annoyed and said, ‘I must eat to keep my health’. I said, ‘Sir, are you having gas trouble’? ‘Yes’. ‘Are you digesting your food?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you having constipation?’ ‘Yes’. ‘Then what is the use of eating more when you are not digesting it?’. It is just like giving more work to a very inefficient person.
Most people eat more than what they really require under the delusion that they are supplying energy to the body. A small quantity of food in the day and a small quantity of food in the evening is enough to sustain the body. You would not need more. When you are eating more, you are unnecessarily agitating you body and thereby you get into trouble.
What I eat is so small that I am no burden to my host. Like the other guests, I do not require 4 courses a day. “Prepare this and prepare that”. If you are a light eater you will be welcomed by all wherever you go. If you are a very heavy eater, well, your host will be put to difficulties.
Do everything moderately and you will be happy and holy. Moderation is the true parent of health and longevity. Eat moderately and if you do not over work your system, the metabolic rate will not rise up. There will be no tension within you and you will be happy throughout the life and you will not become old biologically, if you eat a little. Eat only twice a day. If you are hungerless, do not eat even once.
How long a meal would take to get digested? There are only 24 hours. No one has more and we cannot engage the digestive system all the twenty four hours. We must give it some rest also. Otherwise it will not work properly. So we must give to it the right type of work, and also rest. We must ensure both. We cannot work all the 24 hours inside.
Then, how many meals can be taken in a day? One meal. Meal means some rice or chappathi, pulses, vegetable, ghee, whatever goes into the ordinary meal. I am referring to the ordinary meal.
A meal takes 18 hours. When you take a meal, it goes into the digestive canal and reaches the stomach. The food that we take into the stomach, takes 5 to 6 hours, provided your digestion is good, and 8 to 10 hours, if the digestion is not good. It requires 6 to 7 hours to do the work in the small intestine. In all it takes about 12 hours. Then the digested part of the food is passed on to the blood stream and from there goes to various tissues. Then undigested part of the food is passed on to the large intestine. The digestion is not complete till this is thrown out. Otherwise we will feel heavy. Thus it requires 12 hours for the digestion and six hours for the elimination. It takes 18 hours to deal with the food. There are only 24 hours. You cannot help it.
Suppose you take three meals a day – a fairly good breakfast, a sumptuous lunch and a heavy dinner. The breakfast at 0800 hrs, the lunch by 1300 hrs and the dinner at 20.00 hrs and in between there are always snacks to oblige us. Now, what happens to you by 2200 hrs? The stomach contains dinner just taken, the small intestine will contain the lunch and the large intestine will contain the breakfast. No part will be empty. From the stomach down to the end, the whole thing will be full. No part is empty and no part can contract. When you get up early morning, you will feel restless within because you never gave rest to the system, and this restlessness manifests as digestive disorders, what are known as flatulence, acidity, peptic ulcer, gastro-enteritis, jaundice etc. All these are caused because we do not give rest to any part of digestive canal at any time in the 24 hours. Suppose you take only two meals a day, out of the three parts, one will take rest in turn and there is scope for some rest for all the three parts, and the individual can lead a fairly, comfortable life. Suppose there is an individual who takes only one meal a day, then one out of the three will be working and the others will be resting. Thus there is a greater scope for rest. There is a proverb, ‘A man who takes on meal a day is a yogi, one who takes 2 meals a day is a bhogi and one who takes three meals a ‘rogi’. This is also 100% correct scientifically. Those who over eat, must know that they over eat at the cost of rest to their internal organs.
Take only two meals a day. One in the day and the other in the night. When you get up in the morning, it is meant for work and not for eating. You will feel rested. If you have to work, you should allow hunger to mature and take your meal somewhere between 1100 hrs and 1300 hrs. Do not take breakfast – The No Breakfast plan must be adopted by everyone. If you miss your breakfast, 90% of the disease will immediately vanish. No healthy person will feel hungry early in the morning. If a false sensation of hunger is felt, it is mere pathological symptom. It is more a desire and not hunger. Breakfast is not the first thing that is needed. In the good old days, people never used to eat in the early morning. If you do that we shall digest whatever we eat. In other words, there will be no indigestion.
Lesser eating means greater energy and fasting will not produce any weakness unless you are mentally broke. If on the fasting day your mind is crying for food, you cannot be healthy. There are some people who are fasting for other’s sake. “Well, tomorrow is ekadashi, I do not take food”. The man is a pandit. He is doing it for outward show. But inwardly he is cautioning his wife. “Tomorrow is ekadshi. By 5 am everything should be ready; ghee should be there; payasam should be there, this should be there, that should be there etc”. Because the mind is always on food. That is not fasting. Not for exhibition sake, but real fasting where you understand that you are fasting or a holiday for you internally. It gives rest within. If you do it that way, you will never suffer.
Energy is given to you by the Lord, by communion and by prayer. The more philosophical you are, he more religious you are really religious, not ritualistic, the more you rely on God, the less food you need. It is ungodly people who require 3500 calories a day. So if you are godly, if you are leading a godly life [you need not take sanyas – be godly – have faith in God], God sustains you. Fasting will never weaken anyone. Sensible fasting will not weaken. But there is a limit to fasting. Each one has got a capacity upto which one can fast. Little by little improvethe capacity of fasting and Iask you intentionally to increase the capacity of fasting.
A very high official of the Government of India had high blood pressure about 20 years ago. He was an additional secretary. He tried all possible sources to become normal. Everybody diagnosed his disease as high blood pressure, and drugs were prescribed. But he was not becoming normal. Having plenty of resources, he was eating all the time. At last, he sent for me. I am a little blunt. I told him, ‘Sir, you are not having high blood pressure but you are having food pressure. High food pressure is the cause and the high blood pressure is the consequence. So unless you reduce eating, you cannot become normal. You must give up drugs and you must eat less. Eat less does not mean starve but only eat to the extent needed. There is no need in eating more than what you really require. It is not a bank where the more you deposit, the greater will be the savings’.
The officer got annoyed and said, ‘I must eat to keep my health’. I said, ‘Sir, are you having gas trouble’? ‘Yes’. ‘Are you digesting your food?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you having constipation?’ ‘Yes’. ‘Then what is the use of eating more when you are not digesting it?’. It is just like giving more work to a very inefficient person.
Most people eat more than what they really require under the delusion that they are supplying energy to the body. A small quantity of food in the day and a small quantity of food in the evening is enough to sustain the body. You would not need more. When you are eating more, you are unnecessarily agitating you body and thereby you get into trouble.
What I eat is so small that I am no burden to my host. Like the other guests, I do not require 4 courses a day. “Prepare this and prepare that”. If you are a light eater you will be welcomed by all wherever you go. If you are a very heavy eater, well, your host will be put to difficulties.
Do everything moderately and you will be happy and holy. Moderation is the true parent of health and longevity. Eat moderately and if you do not over work your system, the metabolic rate will not rise up. There will be no tension within you and you will be happy throughout the life and you will not become old biologically, if you eat a little. Eat only twice a day. If you are hungerless, do not eat even once.
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