It’s time for me to forget everything I’ve ever learned about stomachaches and surgery. For most of the next week, I will be spending time observing the way things are done, especially relating to nutrition, at Rajiv Gandhi Ayurvedic College. Don’t know anything about Ayurvedic medicine? Me neither. This morning, I left for my meeting with Dr. Y.K. Sharma, the principal-dean of the college, to see what kind of work or studies I could do in about a week. I thought that I would be able to get a crash course in Ayurvedic medicine and learn a little bit about everything there is to know in that time.
Couldn’t have been more wrong. I didn’t understand a thing about Ayurveda, so I wouldn’t have known that it’s an entirely different science and system of medicine that we really don’t encounter at all in the western world. It’s like somebody who spent 13 years of standard American education, but no science classes at all, asking to become a doctor. It just doesn’t work that way. At the Ayurvedic College, only 5-year degrees are available. That’s even more than the standard 3 years of med school that our doctors have to take. It really is a vast branch of knowledge, and I felt like a complete idiot when I realized that I didn’t know a thing about it.
Nonetheless, I picked up a couple of things by asking the right questions. Basically, Ayurveda teaches that humans are made up of the five elements in combinations unique to each individual: earth, water, air, fire and ether. These elements have to be in balance, and if they are not, they cause disease, anything from a headache to cancer. Ayurvedic teaches how to correct the imbalances in order to cure the disease, and there are a variety of ways to do that. Yoga, massage, herbal medicine and spiritual chanting are ways to do that, but so is surgery, just in a different way. It’s completely different from Western medicine.
Nutrition is the backbone of Ayurveda, and once I realized that I couldn’t learn about a completely different branch of science in a week, I decided to focus on that. I was introduced to Dr. Gupta, a female dietician instructor and the warden for the girl’s hostel on campus (two hostels are for girls, and one is for boys, but I’ll get to that later). The first thing that struck me about Dr. Gupta was how healthy she looked compared to everybody else. She was elderly, and that much was noticeable from wrinkles and hair color, but aside from that, she had a physique of a much younger woman. Compared to all the woman I see here, who are either stick-thin or obese, her weight was right where it should be. She looked neither thin nor chubby, neither well-built nor sickly; the essence of balance. She and Dr. Sharma gave me a quick intro on Ayurvedic dietetics, which I cannot wait to continue.
Foods and eating in Ayurveda is not broken down numerically into calories and grams like we are used to. Instead, foods are classified on a scale of being either easy or hard to digest. They are given values as such, and each person is also classified as having either a strong or weak digestion. They should eat foods that match with their appropriate metabolism. In addition, I learned that Ayurveda teaches that nature provides the correct diet for people according to their area. For example, people living in cold areas should eat more oil and heavy foods like meat and potatoes, while people living in warm areas should consume fruits, juices and light grains or vegetables. Out of the entire day, this struck me as making the most sense out of anything that I’ve heard in a long time. Why not? If life gives you lemons, make lemonade if you want, but be sure to eat them somehow.
Oh, and there’s another cool thing that I learned: Ayurveda teaches 6 tastes. Western science teaches sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Many Asian countries, like China and Japan, add a fifth called umamai, or savory. Ayurveda holds on to sweet, sour and salty, but divides bitter into two categories (which I still didn’t fully understand, even after it was taught to me), and adds astringent, the feeling when a food dries up your mucus membranes. Who would’ve thought?
For the rest of the week, I have two goals. First, I will be spending more time with Dr. Gupta learning about the nutrition aspect. By reading some literature and (hopefully) being allowed to shadow some doctors at the hospital, I want to learn more specifically about how both foods and people are classified under the Ayurvedic system. What is it that makes a food heavy, and what about a person tells the doctor that they have more fire in their system than air? Secondly, I will be taking some data from the hostels at the college in order to compare it with the data I’ve collected from KLB’s hostel. I’m not sure yet whether I will be even able to complete a full nutritional analysis of the same caliber, but any data that I can get can be compared in some way, even if it’s just a superficial analysis.
One more thing I should add is that I may not be going to KLB this week, which means that I may not have internet access to regularly post on the blog. Surely I will be writing about my experiences every day, but until I get an internet connection, you won’t hear about them. Guess you’ll just have to be patient. In the meantime, I’ll try to forget about every science class I’ve ever taken.
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