So what is the best diet for health and peace? In my last blog, I wrote about how food follows the person’s mindset. A dull person will want to eat a diet that produces a dull state of mind. This diet is called “tamasic”, and it consists of foods that are stale, overripe, rotten, burned, have too much oil, are too heavy, and hard to digest. Although not actually food items, we can also include drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, using marijuana, and other drugs as tamasic.
Foods that overstimulate the mind are considered “rajasic”, and are liked by people who are passionate by nature. In this sense, “passionate” is used in a negative way to denote being driven to action by selfish desires. Although better than the dull state of the tamasic people, rajasic people are still considered somewhat limited because sometimes our passions bring us up and sometimes down. Rajasic foods include overly-spiced food, too much salt, too sour, too much hot spice, as well as any form of caffeine like coffee and black tea. Eating in a hurry can be considered rajasic as well.
The best diet for health and peace is a “sattvic” one. Fresh vegetables, legumes (beans), grains, high-quality oils (non-hydrogenated), and all dairy products like milk, yogurt, cheese, butter, ghee, etc. are considered sattvic. However, many people prefer to eat a “vegan” diet, which means also no dairy products, sometimes because of non-tolerance to milk, etc., and sometimes because of the mistreatment of cows in the modern dairy industry. Whatever your choice, you can improve your awareness of foods through Hatha Yoga, as I explained at length in my first blog on diet.
Author: Swami_Pranavananda
Swami Pranavananda, hails from the USA, and has been a Yoga and Meditation teacher since 1995 in the US and abroad. He teaches mainly the Hatha Yoga and Anatomy sections for the TTC courses. He was the director of the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers in Los Angeles, CA and San Francisco, CA for a few years. Currently he is serving in Vietnam and Japan teaching in the Hochiminh center and Tokyo center. He enjoys taking classes to learn Vietnamese.
