PANCHAKARMA GUIDE » Ayurveda » Quality and Quantity - Practical Classification of Diet

By Dr. Herbert M. Shelton (USA)

1.The Building Diet
2.The Mature Diet - The diet of maintenance – adulthood
3 The Curative Diet-The diet of elimination

The Building Diet

That a diet of fruits, nuts and green vegetables, to the exclusion of all animal foods, will suffice to sustain life, health and growth in human beings after the suckling period is past admits of no doubt. Whole tribes have lived on such for generations and demonstrated this to be so.

The Mature Diet

It requires much material to construct and complete a building but after it is completed it may be kept in repair with but small amounts of materials. Just so it is with the human body.

After complete physical maturity is reached and growth has ceased, one’s food requirements are very different to what they were in youth. As age advances it is usually best to decrease the amount of food consumed daily.

The diet of maturity should then contain but little protein. The diet should contain an abundance of those food elements so essential to normal elimination and normal secretions – the organic salts. This is imperative if one is to maintain health, strength and youth. These keep the body sweet and clean and ward off those disagreeable and annoying symptoms and disorders that usually accompany ‘old age’.

Diet of Elimination

Orthodox science considers foods to be ‘nutritious’ and ‘non-nutritious’ according as they yield much or little nitrogenous, carbohydrate and hydrocarbon substances. In keeping with this idea foods are classified as (1) proteins, (2) carbohydrates and (3) hydrocarbons. Fruits and green vegetables are practically unclassified. The wonderful vitalizing acid (organic acids) and salts, which they contain, are relegated to the ‘ash’ column and practically ignored.

The conventional diet is more or less deficient in alkali elements due to the fact that it is made up largely of the concentrated proteins, carbohydrates and hydrocarbons, and to the further fact that these have usually been deprived of most of their alkaline elements in the process of manufacture and cooking. Practically all the ‘staple’ articles of food used today show a relative predominance of acid forming over base-forming elements.

In disease, the process of growth, development and repair are slackened or stopped altogether, indicating that the body is in no condition to properly care for the normal amounts of proteins, starches, etc. and we find by actual experience that when these are eliminated from the diet of the sick they immediately begin to improve in health. On the other hand those patients that consume the protein and carbohydrate foods always improve very slowly, if at all.

True eliminating diet is one that is rich in mineral salts and lacking in the acid forming proteins and carbohydrates. The base-forming elements must greatly predominate in such a diet.

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