Vaidya Manohar Palakurthi is a highly respected ayurvedic expert in the western world and India. He has been practicing ayurveda for 33 years.
Here, he talks about the relationship between food, mood, and digestion.
Q: How does food affect our moods?
Vaidya Manohar: The food we eat has a significant influence on our minds and hearts. You could even say that the nature of our mind and feelings depends on the food we have eaten.
And conversely, the state of our mind, emotions, intellect and senses — and our overall state of contentment — all these, in turn, affect the digestion, absorption and elimination of the food we have eaten.
According to Maharishi Ayurveda, the digestive enzymes and metabolic processes are likened to a fire, called kaya agni in Sanskrit. How well we digest the food depends on the strength of our agni. And because kaya agni also influences the agni (metabolism) in the tissues and cells of the body, any disruption in digestion affects our entire physiology.