In this article, Gabriel Cousens shares on the types of doshas and how to learn what are the best foods for you specifically. Gabriel Cousens is am author, holistic physician and family therapist.
Kevin: When you talk about the science of living foods, to me it seems vitally important to be able to compare the scientific evidence to help influence other people. Where have you found holes that need to be filled?
Gabriel: Well, I mean one hole was “there’s one diet for everybody.” From Gibbon’s point of view the people that developed these diets are talking about a diet that works for them and therefore it’s a, “If it works for me it must work for everybody.” So you have the mycosis diet for example. That’s interesting and it’s a good diet if you’re a kapha because kapha people are people who tend to have lots of mucus, but if you’re a vata it’s a disaster because your body really needs to have a certain amount of mucus to balance. So once we get the idea of individualization you begin to appreciate how all these diet breakthroughs happen. So and so who has a particular, what we call dosha, develops it from that.
OK, here’s another example, in the 60s people did a lot of drugs. Well what got really popular then? Macrobiotics, because macrobiotics is the best diet for balancing vata – sweet, salt, sour. Sweet meaning grains, salty, very important for balancing vata, and sour. So those tastes which is macrobiotics was the optimal diet. So it rises to the conditions, you see? So once we understand that diets apply to your constitutional type and the cultural imbalances that are happening, like use of drugs it’s like, whoa!
Of course we can balance vata with live foods very, very well once we understand what we’re doing. It’s really easy. With vata foods you’re going to have vata imbalance…I’m not explaining all these things….it’s just the idea. You need more oily foods, you need a little bit heavier foods, you have your low-glycemic fruits, berries and cherries and you have your sprouted grains and it could be 100% live food to completely balance that. Bee pollen…there are different things that are really good. Your seed milks, nut milks, all those, and your hydrated nuts and seeds, nuts and seeds. You’re going to balance that. There’s no problem with that if you understand what you’re doing. So we can use our live food to truly balance any condition a person has once we understand the other forces that are happening.
Kevin: And with the different doshas is that…that probably isn’t finite either? The different types of eating–
Gabriel: Well there’s nine basic doshas. Life is more complex than that. Even with nine you have variations with it. But nine is a lot and then we have the fast oxidizer, the slow oxidizer and the parasympathetic, sympathetic and in that spectrum some people can be fruitarian, you know?
OK. It depends on your constitutional type. A lot of people…high sugar isn’t so good these days. I don’t care if it’s fruit sugar or not, it really is associated with a variety of problems, obviously diabetes. You see diabetics just go off the deep end if they have a little fruit before they’re healed. You can’t do that. When you’re healed, you come back to normal physiology, then you can have the low-glycemic cherries and berries and citrus, but not until then. But there’s some people who have the right constitution and what it is is that they metabolize sugar very slowly. Fast oxidizers metabolize very fast and you get these spikes, where slow oxidizers…and again you have the spectrum. So there are lots of diets out there. They have to apply to your medical condition and your type.
Kevin: How does someone find out the type? What’s the best way to do it?
Gabriel: The simple approach is we have a 30 question questionnaire and you can check it out and you add up and find out what you are. You could be 50/50, which means you’re right in the middle and we call it mixed oxidizer, or you’re fast, that part’s high, the other part’s low.
But basically, the reason we have 30 questions is most people aren’t conscious enough to understand what they’re doing. Seriously. So if you just had three questions “What kind of food do you like? Are you a person who really likes a lot of nuts and seeds, a lot of protein?” Then probably you’re a fast oxidizer or you’re parasympathetic. The person who just, you have a buffet in front of you and you just go for the salad, you’re most likely a slow oxidizer or a sympathetic. So the next question is, “What gives you the most energy at the time and two hours later how much energy do you have you as a result of that?” So you can have, as a fast oxidizer, sugar and you go up but then you crash so we’re always looking at the two or three hour mark down the line. OK, you felt good then, that’s good. Now how do you feel two or three hours later? Have you crashed or are you steady? Third thing is, fast oxidizers, parasympathetics, really need to eat more frequent, every two to three hours. Slow oxidizers, sympathetic, you eat six hours later, you may be hungry, you may not be hungry, because you’re moving a lot slower in terms of how you’re metabolizing. So that’s another clue.
So those are the three or four questions that pretty much give you a clue.
