Do traditional systems of medicine align with modern understanding of disease? The one question on my mind has always been that a lot of the disorders and dysfunctions we see today are rather new, at least in their extent and prevalence. How do Ayurveda or Chinese Medicine provide us with answers?
Also, how far do we feel comfortable veering from traditional food practices, and moving away from foods like wheat and dairy, which were once considered nourishing?
KP Khalsa, herbalist, nutritionist, yoga teacher and educator answers these questions in this episode.
KP has an exclusive free gift for our listeners at
https://go.internationalintegrative.com/natural-solutions-for-autism/
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Disclaimer: The information in this Podcast is for educational purposes only. Vaishnavi Sarathy, Ph.D. is an educator, not a doctor, specifically not your child’s doctor. Please consult your physician before implementing any supplement or diet recommendations.
Audio Transcript:
Do traditional systems of medicine align with modern understanding of disease? The one question on my mind has always been, but a lot of the disorders and dysfunctions that we see today are rather new, at least in their extending in their prevalence. So how do I invade our Chinese medicine to provide us with answers to ailments that didn’t exist in the past? And also how far or how much do we feel comfortable veering from traditional food practices and moving away from foods like, honestly wheat and dairy that were once considered extremely nourishing? You are listening to Functional Nutrition and Learning for Kids, where today I am trying to see if I can get an understanding of how to tie in eastern and western food and medicine practices to support our kids dealing with gut issues, neurological issues, and dysregulation.
I’m your host Vaish and today I’m interviewing KP Khalsa, who is the first person in the U.S. to be professionally certified in both herbalism and Ayurveda he is president emeritus of the American herbalist Guild and Director Emeritus of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association. KP Khalsa is an herbalist nutritionist, yoga teacher, and educator who’s been making holistic health approaches palatable to the modern mind for over 45 years. And I am so grateful for his wisdom today. Thank you so much for joining this podcast. KP I’m actually very, very honored that you’re on the show. And I have so many questions for you. Thank you for being here.
Hopefully, I’ll have a few answers at least. Yeah.
Let’s kind of dive in deep as we get started, when you are working, let me back up a little bit. There are so many approaches to working with kids when you have a child that has focus issues, emotional dysregulation, and mood dysregulation, and a lot of people in this audience do. They have their primary care physicians’ perspectives. And if they’re listening to this podcast, they have a functional medicine doctor’s perspective, often, how is an Ayurvedic perspective different from these two?
In many ways, they’re very similar. Ayurveda is all about a functional approach, really, the main focus of it is to get to the root of the problem, not just treat the branch not just to be the symptoms. I think that there are many very well-trained functional practitioners be they medical doctors or naturopathic physicians or something out there in the world, but they’re also many people who have taken a weekend workshop. And now all of a sudden our functional medical doctors who you know tell you to take vitamin C and take a vacation and they’ve done now they’ve done functional medicine so it’s definitely become trendy.
Functional Medicine really was an outgrowth of nature, apathy, and the functional medicine folks just decided that that would be you know, a good title for it that people could relate to. So functional medicine typically uses a lot of nonherbal supplements, but that does not mean that they’re not using herbal supplements Ayurveda traditionally of course didn’t have things like tablets of vitamins and minerals. Now, we have that and those things are all available. You know, when someone asked me the question, what is Ayurveda?
My answer is well, what is not Ayurveda? You know, with people that were writing our Ayurvedic scriptures 2000 years ago, be willing to use tablets and vitamins and drugs and you know, modern approaches to diet and such these days, I expect so, so, from my perspective, everything is aggravated, all came from the universe and anything that we can integrate, so much the better. But generally speaking, Ayurveda has a very broad perspective. So we talked about sleeping the right time, the right way, eating a diet for your particular individual physiology, herbal medicine, a very sophisticated approach, to herbal medicine, and just about everything that you could imagine that people would deal with in their daily life is some aspect of Ayurveda, functional medicine usually is a little bit more oriented toward drug and supplement, you know, the application can that be?
So a lot of times when parents start and they’re not necessarily some of them are starting with dietary changes, but some of them, as you said, is starting with, depending on who they talk to are starting with like, an arsenal of supplements because this supplement will boost your child’s focus in five days and so on. Is that from an Ayurvedic approach that you think could be disruptive to a child to start on several supplements?
Well, of course, if we’re talking about autism, one of the most notorious characteristics is difficulty with change. So all of a sudden, you know, they’re eating only white food or only, you know, fish crackers or you know, whatever it is that they do. They go for and all of a sudden, they’re being asked to chow down a whole bunch of new kinds of things, it’d be very difficult. So it’s a matter of deciding how necessary it is to get some kind of symptom improvement fairly quickly. Versus the long term, I really, in particular, defines itself as dealing with both very famous Vedic scripture that says that the purpose of Ayurveda is to preserve the health of the healthy and treat the suffering of the sick. So both are a part of that. And so symptomatic treatment is definitely available.
These are really tough situations autism adds to and other similar overlapping kinds of mental and behavioral and developmental situations. So they’re all very different in their approach and different people. But it’s not going to be something that’s going to respond to something overnight, you know, increase your child’s focus in five days, that might happen, you’d be very lucky if that were to happen, probably five years would be better. But very often, with these changes, we can see some nice changes within a few months, let’s say, and slowly things change over time, and we can get great results. And that takes me to kind of two different questions I’m gonna ask the first one is, are these we have a lot of, you know, modern disorders are these mentioned in the scriptures in the RV the corruptions at all?
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, they are, but it’s really vague. There’s a general category called goon Mata, which just is translated as insanity. And in this case, the wound means upwards. So in other words, things in the upper part of the body, that head, the brain, and there are a lot of things discussed that. But they don’t necessarily comport very well, with modern understanding. spirit possession, for example, is something that was discussed and modern people may or may not believe in that, coming back to some of the root causes. And you were talking about similarities between different forms of traditional medicine and functional medicine. I think that perhaps the one similarity is this understanding that all disease begins in the gut and we know that we know that over 80% of children who are autistic have gut inflammation and neuroinflammation. What would be the first place to start from either an herbal or Vedic perspective? Or anything from what is it that you would like to share that a parent could, you know, start right away?
Well, I read a is a complex science and but that doesn’t mean there are certain things that you can’t learn. So you have to understand from the Ayurvedic or energetic perspective, what’s going on with the child I read, it doesn’t treat named diseases, specifically, Ayurveda does name diseases, but only for the convenience of discussing them. So there’s going to be individual, if we could use the term vata, that’s one of the doses of Ayurveda. And almost all these conditions are high vada conditions, ultimately, but of course, with inflammation, that’s a Pitta condition. So most of these kids have all three doshas having problems some way somewhere in the body, and we have to carefully begin to treat all those things. If you look at autism, for example, it’s, it’s not an entity, it’s not a thing. It’s something that human beings have developed a concept and given it a name, but hey, this is via interjecting a comment here, I would interpret KPS talking about the medical model of autism, of course, from a person’s neurological and social experience, their autism is very much a complete thing, or rather very much a full experience.
It’s called the autism spectrum for good reason because you can meet 10 People with a diagnosis and all of them are as different as anybody could be in behavior, personality, and internal functioning, including digestion, but very often they have bowel irregularities very often constipation. So from the Arabic perspective, as you said, there’s great emphasis on the digestive tract and especially the large intestine, that’s thought to be the home of vata from the Vedic perspective, and usually, causes constipation. So very often, these kids have behavioral issues with constipation, it doesn’t feel good, to go to the bathroom, they have to go through laborious you know, potty training, and then if they have constipation, it’s painful and such things like that. So making sure that that’s regulated, often is tremendously helpful. That reduces all the dysfunction in the gut. And then, over time, that radiates out into the rest of the body and things go better. That’s a good starting point for many people.
And if you haven’t picked up my constipation toolkit, you can do that at functional nutrition for kids.com forward slash constipation toolkit. From my very rudimentary knowledge, I read that there are three doshas which are Pitta and Kapha It’s roughly translated as air fire and earth would that be a decent approximation? So one of the things that I’ve been kind of interested in as, as I’ve just like, you know, kind of stepped into very barely stepped into the world of AI Veda is that a lot of the functional approaches seem to be very contraindicated, even though they’re aimed at healing the digestive tract, it seems like every one of them is about aggravating because we’re literally going from rice to cauliflower from, you know, you know, removing the foods that have, like wheat and dairy that have traditionally, I think, have been known to have been thought of as being more stabilizing, what is your take on that?
Well, we have to determine which foods are causing problems.
For people either digestive problems, it gives them a tummy ache or causes loose stool or constipation or whatever, then aggravates their conditions. So if you determine that eating cauliflower causes gas, and then when the child has gas, they don’t feel well or behave as well, then we have to get that out. Anyway, whatever it may be. So there’s great emphasis on gluten and cow milk products, of course, and many people try that and most people don’t find that it makes much difference, although some small percentage find that it makes a tremendous difference. So everybody is individual, you have to try some things. You know, like that, from the IVF. Perspective. milk products and wheat are very much the basis of a healthy diet generally. But we have to remember that the wheat that they were talking about 2000 years ago is different than the wheat that we’re growing today. And likewise, in India, the animal that we would call a cow in English, is not even the same animal.
It’s a zebu, which is a cousin of a cow. They’re in the same family with water buffalo and bison, and some others. And they produce a little bit type different types of milk. So many people who go to India and drink the milk from the so-called Indian cow, a bunch of their symptoms disappears, and they think great, I’m you know, it’s solved, then they come back and have, you know, milking their tea and their nose runs, or whatever. So we have to consider so many different possibilities about what a system that was developed 1000s of years ago, in another culture and a different world, a different society has to offer and use the things that clearly are effective, and not get too excited about the things that don’t work.
We want to reduce gas, Vata is instability, basically. And it dysregulation of the nervous system. And so that is clearly what we’re dealing with here. Right. But the gut, you know, if it’s inflamed, we have to deal with that. So it’s, it’s quite the dance. It’s like, you know, herding cats on a tightrope to figure out details, and gradually pull them together. But you’re right, many of the indications for a healthy gut from today’s functional medicine understanding are the things that are not so widely used from the antibiotic perspective. So I like what you said about the dance in the end. So the two things that I’m taking from what you said, are that a lot of people are resistant to changes in the diet because traditionally, these were not changed.
These were not things that were ever indicated, especially for a lot of Indian clients, I work with just removing wheat and dairy, which is kind of ridiculous. feels ridiculous to many people. But that the idea, as you said, is that that wheat and that dairy is not this week and this dairy. But having said that, the second thing you said is that we’re balancing between the inflammation and increasing the water. How do you how do people know how to do this balance? Because it seems like when people are working, are making changes, and most of them are doing so from a functional model. And what they’re doing is they’re balancing the inflammation. And when you look at even, actually any diet that I look at is, seems to be full of cruciferous vegetables and cauliflower as if you’re trying to eat vegetarian, otherwise, it’s like cancer meat. So it just, it just feels very imbalanced to me from whatever I know of an Ayurvedic perspective, how do you do this dance? How do you know what to do when?
Right? Well, for parents, there, there’s needs to be some study involved. So either they can see a practitioner understands these ideas, or they can take some kind of a course my website offers some courses on autism, and ADHD that are pre-recorded, they can go there and they come from a very wide perspective, not just from your data, otherwise, reading some books. So somehow to get educated. I read vocabulary is a little arcane. And so for people to get into that they have to start to learn some of these basic principles as we’ve barely scratched the surface here today. So either they have to become sort of, you know, they’re already the biggest experts on whatever’s going on with their child on autism or whatever it is.
They Googled every night for hours for years. learning what the internet has to say. But they’re not necessarily experts on the treatments, and they don’t know which treatments will apply to which child. So if you, if you read, you know, 50 blogs on autism, you’re going to find every theory that anybody ever has about it. And, you know, sometimes any given one is going to work for a child and another won’t.
And your website is international integrative.com Is that the website parents can go to? Okay. Can we talk about the dreaded gluten because generally in the, in the, I mean, as you know, in this world, in the functional world, the idea is, you can’t get anywhere if you eat gluten or dairy. Right. So I mean, like most practitioners won’t even see you. I used to be like that at all, at one point where, if there’s no point, even talking about the next step, if you’re eating gluten and dairy, I can do anything. What do you think? Do you think that gut healing is actually possible in the presence of gluten?
Well, yes, it’s all it’s all individuals. So again, it depends on you know, all wheat has gluten. But it’s a question of the other kinds of proteins that are in there, and what type of gluten and how much. So sometimes, kids with developmental delay are not connected to gluten whatsoever, likewise, to milk products. So I think that saying that that’s a universal thing is not very helpful. So there’s plenty of information that sometimes under certain circumstances, some type of gluten is not good for certain kids. And likewise, with dairy, and there’s a lot of information about how those things are irrelevant, and you don’t need to change them. So there are a bunch of sophisticated tests that can be done. Or you can just try it. So one could leave one or both of those things out of a child’s diet for let’s say, a month. And then if there’s an improvement, great, if not, try some other version might take a year to dial all that in.
One of the challenges is that many of these kids are sensitive to many different kinds of food. So let’s say that it’s not unusual to find 50 Different kinds of food that they’re sensitive to those, each of those foods aggravates the gut, and the fact that the gut is aggravated is one of the reasons that they’re sensitive to that. So it’s a reciprocal kind of thing. So if a child has sensitive, allergic, or some of their sensitivity to 50 things and you take out two of them, you often don’t notice the difference whatsoever. So the gold standard is to use some kind of a hypoallergenic diet. It’s often called an oligo antigenic diet, illegal means just a few. So you have them eat for, let’s say, a month, maybe five things that are known to almost never cause sensitivity in people. And then you find out what happens and often people respond remarkably, but you can’t keep them on that kind of restricted diet forever. But then you can start adding things back one at a time and find out if it has an effect.
Sometimes it’s really obvious, you know, you put them on a limited diet like that, which would not include wheat and milk, and then numerous other things. And they, they do remarkably better. And then that will give you sort of a clearer picture of their baseline underlying issues. And then you can add those back one at a time. That’s a long, tedious process, but it’s the gold standard for figuring out what’s going on with food.
Site comment. By the way, there are now a number of studies measuring the efficacy of an illegal antigenic diet on ADHD specifically, and at least one study says that over a third of children with ADHD show almost a 40% or more symptom reduction on an illegal antigenic diet and that those are pretty high numbers. You can stay tuned to this podcast to learn a little bit more about illegal antigenic diets in future episodes. Or you can actually go to PubMed right now and look up the keywords an illegal Oh ally, geo antigenic diet, and ADHD if you’re curious, and I would say that gluten and casein are likely offenders but not necessarily true with every single person and that again, it depends on the type.
So in terms of foods that people are sensitive, sensitive to what is the long goal with it that is it is a building up the digestive fire so that everybody can digest everything or in some people, these foods have to be eliminated long term. It’s the first basically yeah, building up a digestive function, of course reducing inflammation, but enhancing the digestive capability in the gut so that they fully digest everything that they’re eating, and though As nutrients can go into the blood, and things that aren’t suitable can then just go out of the body. So that would be the ultimate ideal. I’m not sure if we could say that. It, the goal is for everybody to be able to eat everything that’s probably a little bit too extreme. But generally, yes, in that, in that direction, we’ve seen some from some practices of some people that they don’t relate to this, this gluten-encasing thing at all. And they work on the digestive tract, and people are able to digest those things and do fine and progress and have great development. So I would say there’s a lot of skepticism and, you know, just disagreement about those kinds of ideas. It’s not an established truth at all that those things are problematic.
So that gluten causes leaky gut and everybody, you’re saying, is that not an asset? Which is generally considered to be the case these days? But yeah, yeah. Yeah, thank you for that. And this is, this is something I hear a lot in our VEDA about increasing the army increasing the digestive fire, can we get a little concrete on that? Is there what can parents do to get, you know, to build up their child’s digestion?
Right? Well, one thing is to not eat things that strain the capacity of the digestive tract. And so back to the wheat and milk, those are relatively heavy foods, it takes a fair amount of digestive juices to digest those, and then there would be numerous other things that might be stressful for the digestive tract. So using things that are very well digested, one could look at the stool of the child, and if there’s undigested food there, then they’re eating things that either are too heavy for the digestive tract, or the digestive tract doesn’t have adequate juices. So otherwise, we would use things that promote the production of those digestive juices, and many of them are mildly warming, culinary, spices, cinnamon, clove, coriander, those kinds of things that are very, very common. And often that makes a big difference. Right away, but we can’t use things that are too hot, because there’s inflammation in the gut. So yeah, it’s a matter of slowly working our way into all these things.
So so the two things you said were to reduce the load on the digestive system. So do not use foods that you know, they’re sensitive to or you know, that is, they’re likely to be sensitive to, for example, we dairy and, and this and the second thing is to keep the food lightly warming in terms of the spices, it contains also the temperature, or just the spices, like also the temperature of the food itself, that has really relatively little to do with it, we don’t eat ice cold food. So food straight out of the refrigerator, or iced beverages and things like that reduced to just a digestive capacity a little bit. So those would be discouraged and warm-in-temperature food, probably, again, a little bit of an effect in that direction. So one of the things that we see a lot is that people have been trained to think that salad is the perfect food for everybody. I talked to so many people who very proudly say, you know, my lunch is always a big salad. But for people who produce a lot of gas, and don’t adjust that very well, that’s not a good thing to be eating. So again, limiting and that’s broad with anyone with emotional dysregulation, probably not right? Yeah.
My next question was that related was the is Agni or digestive fire the same thing as saying stomach acid bile. And, whatever pancreatic enzymes are that that’s exactly okay. Right? So it is a one-to-one model, okay, the sum total of all those things, right? So again, the just means fire. And it’s generally when we use that term, it describes the digestive juices that are in those areas. So there are some more things than that. I mean, there are enzymes in the stomach, for example, but all of that, that adjustive juice is coming out from the stomach, the small intestine, the liver, and the pancreas all meet right at the beginning of the small intestine, and that’s Agni, basically. So we can nail down each of those specifically and treat them but the term generally means just all those things together.
I see okay, that’s helpful to know that you can start building a sort of model or a one-to-one correlation between whatever you know, physiologically and the Ayurvedic. I don’t know if I should use the word metaphors, but whatever the words are used for that. That’s a great term to use, but I use that term all the time because some of these things are not factual in terms of the way we understand modern physiology, I Aveda is one giant story about the way the body works based on things that were known 2000 years ago with some updating, but not all of them match the things we understand. That’s okay though, if you stay within the paradigm, then you can do very, very well. I’m not worried about whether these things are physiologically accurate. I’m worried about the results. And so we had 5000 years to experiment with generation after generation and gradually hone the metaphor, exactly the model the understanding up till today, it works very, very well.
And that that word that you use the paradigm, I think, is great, because otherwise, people get too fixated on why you’re, you’re saying Wind and Fire and stuff like that, right? So because I think it’s like, I like what you said about the story. And the paradigm is, in terms of the order in which you work on things. I know that the first thing I read a one-on-one, anybody who’s like Googled a little bit of either generally immediately has done a quiz on their doshas. And usually, people know that at the minimum people like me know what, Vata, Pitta and Kapha are, and we can talk our way about the three doshas, but is, when you’re working with a child, you talk, you gave us some pointers on how to work on their digestive fire, is it important to look at what their doshas are, and kind of fine-tune that before working on the digestive prior, would this be a priority, I will do the same thing because from this point of view of everything in the body, is regulated by those three primal metabolic forces.
They have good and bad aspects. So when they escape from doing what they’re supposed to do, due to mistakes in lifestyle, diet, sleep, all those things, then they start to cause problems. So we want to figure out the proportion of those things and bring them back into balance. One thing that’s often confusing for people is that we talk about the doshas in two ways. One is the underlying blueprint for your body, we call that your constitution. And that’s something that is established by the time you’re born. And it basically sets the stage for how other things are going to work in your body.
That’s great to know over the course of a lifetime. So to keep nudging yourself back into the middle and realizing that, you know, if you have high pitta, for example, which is metabolic transformations, you’re not going to do well eating a lot of hot spices, for example. And so you learn that when you’re young, and you adjust your diet, and you keep nudging yourself so that you’re in the middle path. And things are going well, you don’t have symptoms, however, that has little to do with actually what’s going on with disease today. So the other reason is the current balance of the doshas. So usually, that’s pretty consistent with your constitution, but it can be radically different.
When people go to those websites and take those tests, what they’re learning about is their underlying genetics and the things that happened during gestation, in other words, the body that they were born with. So autism, and you know, add Down syndrome, this whole package of these things, has genetic connections. And so we’re not going to change those, but we might change the expression of the genes by using certain kinds of nutrients, like folate, for example, is a vitamin that’s known to suppress a whole bunch of genes. So there’s a genetic component to that.
We have to be aware of how to manage that over the course of a lifetime. And then there’s what’s happening right now, like, inflamed, done. So we, from the Vedic metaphor, treat the dosha, that’s most in excess. So that would be what we call pitta, dosha, or fire element, inflamed in the gut, for example, if that’s the most predominant thing that’s causing the body to veer off in the wrong direction, we would treat that first and then just treat them in priority order. We can also though just treat specific symptoms of constipation I mentioned as an example. That’s something that’s easy to treat very quickly. And often it makes a huge difference in the way people feel.
What you said helped me connect some dots right away. So So you said you were talking about the blueprint of doshas that you were born with and what you’re having now, and I think you also used the word so what the blueprint be genetics and what you’re expressing now be epigenetics. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Epigenetics. You’re just talking about the result of whatever you’ve done since you’re born, whatever you’ve done, or whatever has been done to you, of course, in the case of kids. So the Constitution is not just genetics. It’s also what happened in the intrauterine environment during pregnancy. So there are still some things that can happen.
Some kids have autism and add because of injuries that happen to them. intrauterine Down syndrome is a straightforward genetic situation and doesn’t involve gestation. But anyway, all those things that happen added up give you the body that now you have to live in for the rest of your life, it’s more or less permanent. But some of those things, the expression of those things can be changed. And then also you can make mistakes as you’re living, most of us didn’t know when we were growing up what to do to stay healthy. And so people just go in the same direction that they were sort of programmed to, and they end up with very predictable kinds of problems.
Those are the things that we know, that we noticed, there’s an underlying genetic issue. And then kids eat the wrong foods, you know, I was talking about, you know, a child that will only eat white food or most of their diet is those you know, fish crackers, or, you know, whatever it happens, they tend to be generally picky eaters. And that’s not a balanced diet. So they’re going to develop nutrient deficiencies, for sure. Eating like that. And then the nervous system can’t get nourished and develop properly and such. So all these things go together, there’s no one on-off switch for any of these things.
What about sugar? So it is, in the past, I’ve heard about sugar as being used beneficially in Vedic medicines, as you know, I believe, and pardon me if I’m wrong there, but it helps the absorption of some nutrients, perhaps was what I’d heard from an Ayurvedic physician long ago. But sugar is very vilified in our culture now. And we know that. I mean, we already know that it’s nowhere near used in moderation. What is the role of sweet foods and sugar in our VEDA?
Well, let me just say that, in general, in our culture now, sugar, is good that it’s vilified. There’s no question about it, it’s a source of calories, but it’s empty calories, it’s pro-inflammatory people eat way too much, as you said, That’s very different than the situation in India until very recently, now there’s a sugar epidemic in India, just like anywhere else. But that’s the last, you know, 1015 years. So most people in India were living a rural life until very recently, but now maybe they moved to Bangalore and work for a tech company or something, and they’re eating while you’re talking to him on the phone, they’re eating Cheetos, and drinking Coca Cola, living rurally. And working on a lentil farm never saw sugar.
Sugar comes from India, and sugar cane is native to India. And they figured out how to make sugar. In fact, they figure out how to make white sugar Long, long ago, a couple of 1000 years ago, but it was so labor intensive, that it wasn’t worth doing it. And so they didn’t focus on it. And so people had very little sugar in their diet, you know, maybe a sugar candy, you know, on some kind of a festival day or something twice a year. And that was it. So they didn’t have the overwhelm of sugar that created the wobbliness of the blood sugar regulation mechanism as we have here. And so it was used much more as medicine. So there are some traditional medicines that include a little bit of sugar. But people not using Ayurveda would not support using half a pound a day, which is our per capita average here. So yeah, I don’t want people eating sugar, you know, whatsoever. And in fact, even those medicines that contain some sugar from Ayurveda, there are very specific kinds of purposes. For them. Sugar is cooling in the digestive tract, but of course, then pro-inflammatory when it hits the cells, but it’s pro-inflammatory when we eat those huge quantities a little bit in some medicine, not a big deal.
Okay, and I think that you have shown that that is the that’s, that’s the general theme that permeates the whatever, as we’re talking about gluten, dairy, of course, sugar is, is both gluten and sugar are done way and access now and very differently than they have ever been done. And you said that’s the case for daily too. And I think you’ve I was going to ask you the question of this, you know, everybody’s going grain free. And that’s the way to heal your garden. I know that either places a lot of emphasis on some greens and perhaps is it in the same tone that we’re gonna talk about that as well.
Yeah, exactly. So it’s all about the individual and there are certain foods that are sort of inherently difficult in some way. So again, I Aveda is thought of you know, as the medical system of milk or something people have the idea that you know, people are living on milk but most people even in India today consume an average of about three ounces a day of milk production and that’s almost always mainly yogurt. So you know, grandma has a little bit of milk in your tea in the morning. And you know, that kind of thing that’s about it. But most people have a little bit of yogurt every day, but it’s a very reasonable amount.
They’re not eating, you know, a cheese sandwich, ice cream, macaroni and cheese for lunch, all of that. So the cheese itself is different and The drastic overconsumption. So I really don’t focus on that. doesn’t recommend that at all those mild, mild quantities as long as you can digest them, for most people are fine, but they are inherently challenging. It just doesn’t mean it. The meat just doesn’t mean that needs to be forbidden completely, just depends on the person.
Thank you for that. And I think just to reiterate, when I grew up in India, the first time I had cheese was when I was in 12th grade, I think I was 16 or 17. At the time, that was even funnier, which is like the Indian cheese because I’m from South India, that wasn’t a thing there that actually never had any form of cheese until I was in 12th grade. I didn’t know that was a thing. But anyway, so and that’s when pizzas made their grand entry into India. Well, thank you so much. I think there’s there’s so much clarity and for me a lot of food for thought. I’ll put the link to Katie’s website in the show notes. So you can go check out the courses that he offers and take a deeper dive into either if you like, Thank you for your time.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me. And that was episode 101. Thank you for listening. This time. I hope to see you back in exactly one week with episode 102. Bye.
