Ayurveda claims that human digestive system has evolved from the caveman days and hence we shouldn't eat raw food. What is your opinion on Ayurveda ?
Short answer
"Nature's design of all life forms is complete".
"If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature's way." - Aristotle
I dont want to compare raw food with Ayurveda or Homeopathy or Chinese medicine e.t.c. One is a product of nature and others are products of human beings. Theories are just that , theories. Nature does not come with a user manual, so that we can verify if our theories are correct. I accept "nature is great" without explanations or doubt. I surrender to its greatness, to the extent feasible.
"Experiences" and "gut feel" are my only tools to verify nature. I have eaten raw food and experienced first hand its benefits. Please note that natural food of Human being is raw food. But that does not mean all raw food is Human beings natural food. We may never know what subset of the raw food is our food. We may be eating certain foods that cannot be consumed when raw but are consumable when processed, cooked for eg. We also need to note that nutrition is only one part of health.
I eat raw food when and if I choose to/can. Having said that, eating raw for a life time is extremely difficult for me, for two reasons.
- I have brain intelligence and am constantly satisfying my brain through my various senses. The brain intelligence has invented millions of new products that entertain my brain and I enjoy and get addicted to it. Cooked food is one such addiction. Web surfing is another. :-)
- We are social beings and want to be accepted. Living a "not so popular philosophy" is very difficult. So I eat what my fellow human beings eat. Fortunately, I now know the corrections I have to make to eat food that deviates from nature.
Long answer
Intelligence of life forms
All life forms have body intelligence, some of them have social behavior and only human being has advanced brain intelligence.- Only body intelligence: Eg, most life forms These life forms don't deviate from nature at all and live as per their instincts. They depend on other life forms with and without their direct involvement. They do get illness and recover from them. There may be cases of death from illness, though I am not sure how much of them is independent of human interference. Balance is maintained so long as there is no human interference.
- Body intelligence and social behavior: Eg bees, birds, Same as above case but these life forms need the active involvement of other members of their own species. The dependent behavior is expressed as part of their instincts. They dont complain or look for changing their life in any manner because they lack brain intelligence. For eg, worker bees slog and slog but dont complain that drones dont do any work. Since they dont have brain intelligence, they dont contemplate on building a robot to take over their work. Balance is maintained so long as there is no human interference.
- Body intelligence and social behavior and brain intelligence These life forms need the active involvement of other members of their own species. The dependent behavior is expressed as part of their instincts and also modified through the brain intelligence. Satisfying the brain also plays role in addition to satisfying the body.
Initially the brain was used just to understand the mysteries and secrets of nature. So long as brain intelligence was restricted to just "discoveries", we would have still been retaining the "balance" of nature. But we moved on to "inventions" , initially as an expression of our intelligence and gradually as a mechanism to conquer and beat nature. We soon became surrounded by more and more products of human intelligence and lost touch with nature. All these products greatly enhanced our brain pleasure and more and more (infact almost all) of human population embraced these inventions (either as ideas, concepts or physical products). Eventually, human beings have upset the natural balance tremendously.
Touch with instincts
I believe that our quality of life will be better if we are in touch with our instincts. However, today we have distanced ourselves from our real nature (physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual) and have lost touch with our true instincts. This is the reason we do not know "what is our real food". We may speculate at the best. I make a mention of Digestive Leukocytosis in my blog that proves that "raw food" is human being's natural food. However, it may not be true that ALL raw food is human being's food. I tend to think that raw grains and sweet-free fruits are not human food. How then did we get to eat bitter gourd or chilly for e.g.. Fruits are in an eatable state only when they are ripe. We perhaps tasted the fruits in ripe form, found them eatable and then decided that raw forms were edible too. Classical eg of this is Hachiya persimmon. Till it is ripe, it is very astringent. Once ripe, it is a heavenly fruit.We do not know in what ways even our physical bodies and physical functioning has deviated from the way nature designed us. I have already talked of this in the blog.
Expanded awareness with raw food
When I attempted to understand and appreciate raw food, it opened up a whole new door of awareness to the greatness of nature. It made me appreciate life in an incomprehensible way. Some examples.- When I eat a persimmon today, I eat it mindfully relishing every iota of the fruit and wondering about the greatness of nature. I feel how good not just my tongue feels but how my digestive tract feels with this fruit.
- When I see a green gram sprout, I just cant help wondering how did that little life emerge out of nothing (visible).
- I cant help appreciating the intelligence that is packed into a tiny seed that eventually grows into a 300 foot redwood tree and lives for thousands of years.
- When I see a pea in a pod or a banana, I cant help appreciating the packaging technology
- How did carbon, hydrogen, oxygen which are sort of invisible become a solid in the form of carbohydrates in a vegetable. How did this manifest as bitterness/sour/bland initially and how did this get converted into sweetness in a fruit.
- How did body decide that sperm and egg should have 1/2 the number of chromosomes while other cells have the 23 pairs of chromosomes ?
- How does a sperm which is a foreign body to female reproductive tract, know how to navigate itself?
- How do stem cells specialize to become organ cells
- How is it that every process in a body is cyclic
- How does body maintain the temperature irrespective of the external temperatures
- How does a baby grow from virtually invisible sperm and egg
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