From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You're listening to Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com. I'm John Gallagher. My guest today is Todd Caldecott.
Todd is a medical herbalist and practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine, author of the textbook, Ayurveda, the divine science of life, Food is Medicine, the theory and practice of food, and the editor of a text on Nepalese ethnobotany called Ayurveda in Nepal.
Todd teaches and practices in the Vancouver, BC area and works as a consultant in the natural products industry. Todd was also the director of clinical herbal studies at Wild Rose College and is a professional member of the American Herbalist Guild. Also, he is dad to three kids, and your oldest is sixteen, you said. Right, Todd?
That's right. Sixteen.
Sixteen.
And you can visit Todd at todd Caldecott dot com, c a l d e c o t t. Todd Caldecott dot com, and his site is jam packed with amazing free articles and videos. I got lost there. There was so much amazing, great information there. So, Todd, welcome.
Thank you. Thank you very much, John.
Well, you know, it was great spending time with you in line for coffee at the traditional at the traditional Traditions in Western Medicine com I mean, Herbalism Conference. So that was, that was fun. We were kind of, found ourselves a couple days in a row right behind each other in in line and and it was great because we got to set this interview up. Because you never know where I'm gonna meet people.
So and now you join us. So, Todd, there's lots of questions I wanna ask you.
As, you know, your life's been pretty fascinating. And on HerbMentor, folks are always love hearing about how herbalists got started, and their training and what they went through. So, how did you start on your path of herbal medicine, and what got you into that?
Well, that's a good question.
I was a film and television actor Mhmm. For about ten years right out of high school.
And I did that, for a number of years, but I I kind of got bored of it.
You know, it was a little bit of, an iconoclast and, a little eccentric as well.
I didn't usually dress appropriately to go to the auditions, and my agent wanted to send me to New York and, you know, get a role on the in the soaps, or move down to LA. And he wanted me to start working out of the gym and shave the little spaces between my eyebrows. And I just it just wasn't something I was that interested in.
Even though I enjoy theater, I enjoy the arts very much, it it wasn't something that really spoke to me on a deep level. And when I really thought about my life, I thought, you know, I I wanted to it demean something, and I wanted to, contribute something to the world.
And, so I went to India, and I spent a year traveling around there. And, I I got very sick because I was I was traveling on on the cheap. I think my budget for traveling in India, and this is in nineteen eighty nine, was about two thousand dollars So I was only surviving on a couple bucks a day, not even that.
And, yeah, I got bacillary and amoeba dysentery at two different times.
My health kinda recovered when I spent a month and a bit, up in Hunza, which is in northern Pakistan.
And, actually, it was an amazing experience just seeing how high quality food and glacial water was able to restore my health. But I did come back to Canada with a chronic GI issue, and I sought medical treatment, the help of, naturopaths and, Chinese medical doctors and, traditional medical doctors.
And nothing had really seemed to help until I met an Ayurvedic physician Mhmm.
Who was really the first to give me some practical guidelines on my diet.
Everyone else is sort of interested in giving me a remedy, a herbal remedy or a drug, these kind of complicated regimens in some some parts. You know, the naturopath had me on the caprylic acid, bentonite, psyllium combination with a bunch of other stuff and probiotics, and that didn't do anything. Mhmm.
And so it wasn't until I I spent time with this diabetic physician, and later he became my teacher, that I noticed a real turnaround in my health. And I was just fascinated with with that and also Ayurveda.
And so I was looking for places to study, and back then, there really wasn't anything, in my area except that a new college had opened up called the Coastal Mountain College of Healing Arts. Mhmm. And the dean of the college was Chanchal Cabrera. Uh-huh.
And it was also, supported by, Terry Willard who, practices and teaches in Calgary, but had expanded his his, clinic and college to to Vancouver. And and they happened to just at that time when I was looking, there was a a three and a half year full time clinical program that was, that was accredited and, that was eligible for student loans through the provincial, government. And so it was just very serendipitous, and I I was the I was the, among the first group to enroll in that program and the first to graduate. And, Unfortunately, that college no longer exists.
It has kinda since, morphed into the Boucher Institute of Naturopathic Medicine. It's quite a different school now than the the curriculum is very different, but that's that's where where the school went after, after it fizzled out.
So, yeah, I that was my training, as a as a medical clinical herbalist. And after that, I went to to India and studied at a hospital in the south of India called the Arya Vidya Chikitsalam, and I spent about a half year there.
And after that, I I I came back to Canada and began to practice.
And wow. And and you can practice, like, in in Canada.
See a lot of people are sometimes confused about, you know, what's licensed and not licensed. Is is is herbalism licensed in Canada?
No. It's it's much the same issue as the United States. It's an unlicensed, unregulated profession. Mhmm. And, so all of us practice outside of any kind of clear legal definition.
Mhmm.
And so the same kind of caveats, the same issues, in the United States are also found here in Canada.
I see. So that's, like, fascinating area. They say, oh, I just went to India and studied for half year. Like like, how do you get to do that? You know? Like, there's a BPO you met at the Coastal Mountain School, and, like, what was that experience like?
Well, one of my teachers here in Canada, a doctor Sukumaran, the fellow who, helped me with originally with my chronic GI issue I acquired in India.
It was through his contacts that I was able to find.
And, yeah, it was it was a pretty easy, connection.
And, actually, I went there, believe it or not, with my wife, who was six months pregnant and my thirteen month old son, and she also gave birth in India while we were there, which is also a pretty fascinating experience.
That is. Wow. And and so you also I I also saw that you the the work you've done in Nepal, did that come much later, or is that around the same time?
Yeah. That came later. That that was, through my contact with, Alan Tillotson, who is a herbalist and practitioner out of, Delaware. And, I met him in the late nineteen nineties, and we were were chatting about our love and fascination of Ayurveda and and traditional herbal medicine.
And he mentioned to me, that, he was working on a project with, his teacher who actually had passed away then.
He has since passed away, doctor Manabhadra Bajacharya, and he invited me to work on the project.
And so, I began to work on that project. And then two thousand nine, after doctor Manha had passed, I traveled to Nepal with my son, and I spent, five weeks with doctor Madhu, doctor Mana's son, going over the text and sitting with him in clinic and, visiting his, his pharmacy and observing, some of the traditional medicinals that they prepare in Nepal. So that was two thousand nine that I did that.
So on that track, you're in Nepal and and the things that you're noticing, what was really fascinating here is that I'm I'm seeing that when you were healing, you people are giving you various supplements or herbs, if you will, and kind of thinking of them like drugs. But then you find this form of medicine that's lifestyle and diet based medicine.
And when you are in Nepal, is you know, the the people who live there, is that just the way they always think about health and healing? Or you know what I'm saying? Like, is that just built into their life that way?
It was at one time. You know, I think that the the big issue that we're dealing with, not only in Nepal, but India, Africa, all over the world, in countries that we previously described as developing countries that are trying to emerge into being second world or maybe first world nation status, is that people are, rapidly, giving up their orientation towards, you know, traditional practices.
And Nepal is a really good example of that. You know, the country kinda survives on foreign aid. I think fifty five percent of its gross domestic product is foreign aid, and the population has exploded over the last thirty years.
There's a flood of cheap Chinese products Mhmm.
Coming into the northern border, which is displacing, traditional handicrafts. And people are desperate to get a job and to support their family, and they don't see much economic opportunity in studying traditional herbal medicine the way it's been practiced in Nepal for thousands of years.
People are are not interested in, pursuing, you know, a traditional relationship with a teacher. Is something a model that's been practiced in India and Nepal for thousands of years. And if they want economic opportunity, they'll go just like a lot of folks here in the west, they'll go to university.
Now, unfortunately, the training that you'll get in university is very different than that of this kind of traditional time honored relationship. And my observation was that the practitioners who are who are trained in the in the college university system don't have the comprehensive, detailed, practical knowledge of these traditional physicians.
And so what you're seeing is a real rapid loss of traditional knowledge, within a generation in Nepal.
And this is part of the reason why I'm so passionate about this project because doctor, Madhu, who is the inheritor of his father's tradition and this is an eight hundred year old hereditary tradition. It's a patrilinear tradition, so it's it's passed down traditionally, you know, from father to son. Well, doctor Madhu doesn't have any sons, and his daughter I mean, even if you could pass it down to her, I mean, she's she's she's still a child.
Mhmm.
So she's not a candidate to receive this knowledge. So, basically, it all ends with him. So we're talking about eight hundred years of empirical, clinical, traditional knowledge.
The, Bajacarya lineage is a is a fascinating subject of study.
And, it comes from it comes from, India.
See, originally the, the Vajrayana tradition, which is a Buddhist, tradition, was current in Northern India around the tenth, eleventh centuries.
And there were successive ways of invasion from the west, from Turks, from the Persians, from the Arabs. And some of those invaders were ruthless.
And they were interested in just stamping out any vestige of, traditional Indian knowledge, and so they destroyed monasteries, they they they, killed monks, they destroyed temples.
And so the Vajrayana, monaster tradition went underground.
Mhmm.
It became part of this hereditary familial tradition that was passed on from father to son.
And, what happened was that, about eight to nine hundred years ago, the tradition moved up into Nepal, and, Doctor. Ahmad is the patriarch of the family, eight hundred years ago took up the consecration of Bajajarya, meaning that they became Buddhist priests. And they took on this tradition and basically began to offer free health care to the population as part of their commitment, as part of the consecration of being Bajajarya.
And they've been doing so for eight hundred years, so they've been offering free medical care in Nepal for for that long.
And One of the specialties of this particular tradition is that they also performed, some ritualistic roles.
So for example, in India, there are a class of of priests called Brahmins, and they officiate over weddings. They're involved in performing different rituals to ensure good crops, etcetera, etcetera. And, this is no different, for the Bajacarya lineage, except that they also because they had this kind of medical perspective, they were also involved in dealing with spiritual illness and spiritual disease. And so they used things like mantra, yantra, and and other kind of, spiritual techniques to treat essentially what we refer to as psychiatric or psychological disease.
Mhmm.
And, and so this is a part of their of their tradition, but that's but that's been lost. Now, for example, you know, people in Nepal nowadays, if they have a mental illness, they're not gonna go to a traditional Ayurvedic physician to receive mantra, to receive some special incense. They're going to go and get some kind of drug or they're going to be institutionalized according to the Western medical tradition.
And so, a very important role that these traditional physicians used to play in society is basically gone because the populace no longer believes in it. They don't have any faith in it. They they they, don't have any interest in it. They have the same kind of materialistic interests that we have. They want iPhones.
They want brand new Nikes.
You know, they want, you know, refrigerator. They want an SUV.
They don't want to burn incense and chant a bunch of mantras. And, you know, it's old fashioned, it's archaic, And this perspective is is is rapidly sweeping across the world, and it's it's it's not only is it, exceptionally sad for humanity that we're losing touch with our our our, our heritage, but we're also going to be missing out on, all of these practices, some of which still offer an enormous amount of value to us in terms of their their overall benefits. So what we're seeing is this tidal shift away from traditional medicine to modern medicine, and then leaving behind a huge amount of traditional knowledge in the dust.
And and because there aren't any people practicing it, it's just going to dissipate. It's just gonna be lost. And so we're seeing that in Nepal. This is one of the reasons why I have such a driving passion to publish all of, Doctor.
Amana's works, and he actually wrote forty seven books.
Oh my god.
The first the first book that we wrote, Ayurveda in Nepal, is just a summary of all of the clinical practices, and then each successive book, is a book on a on a particular specialty, in medicine. So cancer, neurological, psychiatric illness, etcetera, etcetera.
That's just amazing. And so, I mean, even the, like, foods as well, like, as far as, like, diets and herbs and and ways of cooking, is that also changing there in Nepal as well, do you see?
Absolutely. Not just Nepal, but all over the world.
Wow.
You know, when I was in and good example, this is not in Nepal, but I I practiced for a little while in Trinidad and Tobago.
And, you know, when I was there in two thousand and four, there are some parts of the island that only in the last ten years received electricity, and this is a pretty small island. So, there's been rapid changes to that culture. You know, previously, they they grew sugarcane and sugarcane industry collapsed, and then BP put in a big oil refinery. And then very rapidly, there's a lot of money in the economy.
People are, you know, buying Japanese imports and all have credit cards and wearing brand new running shoes even though they only have about ten years of oil left.
People are importing food from Mexico and Venezuela. They're not growing food anymore. And when I was there, about ninety percent of the people that I was seeing were suffering from the effects of uncontrolled diabetes. You know, so people that had diabetic gangrene and, retinal hemorrhage, this was this was exceptionally common.
And people just had lost had lost touch with how to connect with the land, how to connect with food. And so most of the time I spent counseling these folks was trying to correct their diet because they were now using all those industrial replicas of traditional foods just like we do. You know, like the Denny's Grand Slam breakfast that we, you know, that some people eat. You know what I mean?
You eat the the bacon and the eggs and the bread. I mean, that's that's that's a a breakfast that's kinda modeled on that early nineteen hundreds farm fresh breakfast. But, of course, it's nothing similar to that at all. It's just a replica.
It's an industrial, replica of what used to be traditional food. And so we see see the same things happening in Nepal.
Eating you know, their version of of fast foods. You know, they're not eating their traditional foods that they used to eat, and people rapidly are forgetting how to prepare them.
But are are there people I mean, you're saying especially what you're saying in Nepal, like, where maybe in where you were as well in the islands is that you have a generation where so quickly where this has happened. And now all these diseases are coming like diabetes. Are people may like, are people making the connections at all?
Like No.
They're not necessarily. You know, I I think the pendulum has to swing completely to one way before people go enough is enough. And I'd and you would you know, when does that happen? You know, what what what's the threshold?
You know, in India and Nepal, I mean, their rates of diabetes are by rocking. They may have the highest rates in the world right now, and I think it's, there's an increased awareness of this problem.
But because the solutions are all medical solutions, people aren't really getting to the cause. Because the medical solutions invariably aren't about prevention, they're about treatment. And they're about using, various drugs to control blood sugar, to control blood pressure, to reduce, hyperlipidemia.
They're not about actually addressing the underlying factors.
And there's some interesting cultural reasons why those areas have so much diabetes, and primarily that relates to the fact that sugar, which, you know, used to be prepared at a village level Mhmm.
And, you know, when people produced sugar, it was something that we that they call a goo or, you know, jaggery is another word for it. It's basically similar to Rapadura sugar. It is, you know, just solidified cane sugar juice. And it takes an amount of enormous amount of energy and time to extract this substance and was used traditionally in India, but it was took so much time and effort and energy to prepare that when people had it, it was treated as a form of of gold. And so when you came to visit someone, they might offer you some sweet as a way to honor you.
Mhmm.
Now, of course, in India, everyone has access to white sugar. Mhmm. That cultural tradition of of celebrating people and honoring them by giving them sweets is still there, but now sugar is much more ubiquitous. It's much more available.
So now people are eating sugar all the time with that cultural bias that, yes, you know, sugars and sweets are good things, but, you know, the context has been lost. Previously, it was it was a kind of valuable commodity that was treasured and was given to people as a form of respect. Now everyone has access to big bags of white sugar, And, you know, this is one of the reasons why India has such high rates of diabetes. There's this cultural ethos around elevating sugar as being, a wonderful food, but it's become too too available in in in the, marketplace.
And as a result, it's created all these diseases.
And there's so many people, and they're so like, that that that you'd need to edge that people would have to educate about that, and it's a cultural thing. And and, boy, that sure is tempting, that white sugar. It's it's a drug in itself. So I can see kind of that's a tough situation.
Yeah.
Boy. Well, good for you in in Nepal going and trying your best anyway in your power to, to try to at least document. So in the future, if the you know, I mean, you just hope that in the future at some point that, there's gonna be a, like you said, the pendulum swing in a way where there might be groups of of, you know, people interested in in natural medicine that might wanna say, hey. Wait a minute.
You know, look at the root of our problems here, and look. We can do this through through diet.
Yeah. And and, you know, the other the other aspect, the, you know, the the tradition that the bhaj chayas are famous for, the the spiritual medicine, is really interesting. And there's a there's a real strong interest here in the West because, of course, we've been through decades of modern psychiatry and psychology, and we know well the effects of these interventions. And people are very much interested in looking for more holistic measures to address these issues.
And, you know, Nepal and India are inheritors of this ancient tradition of treating mental illness in a very different way that, you know, uses, imagery and icons as well as the support of community, has a much more kind of spiritual perspective, something everyone here in the West is hungering for but we don't really have. And so we're looking to them for inspiration, for education and knowledge. Wow. And their attitude towards it is like, well, that stuff is just all old. Why are you interested in that stuff? That stuff is like a bunch of superstition.
So, you know, it's gonna take our interest, our western interest, in these kinds of interventions and practices in many ways to help reinspire people in Indian Nepal to rekindle this knowledge and and and and and maintain that tradition. But it's getting close to the wire because we're talking about the difference of, like, one or two generations before it just disappear disappears completely.
Because it's because it's in that with the elders and the and so much to it. You have a a tightly woven tapestry of a culture of art and spirituality and diet and music and everything. It just makes up the entire cultural basket. Right?
Absolutely.
Yeah. Wow.
So the, so those there's folks listening who may not actually be familiar because in HerbVenture, we because, well, you know, it's not like we have many people on there that are are knowledgeable. We haven't, taught really anything on there about Ayurveda.
But I but, I mean, her mentor, for many people, is just one of many places people learn from, so I know people might know from other places. But can you describe, like, you know, so when you give someone a talk, say, hey, Ayurveda is this. Could you describe what exactly this medicine is?
Well, Ayurveda is the traditional system of medicine from ancient India. So it's not unlike traditional Chinese medicine in the sense that it's just the traditional medicine that evolved in India and actually expanded beyond India very early in its development. So, you know, we think about India, We have to include the countries around there, including, Bangladesh and Bhutan, Thailand, Tibet, Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran.
All those countries were heavily influenced by, the type of medicine that evolved in the Indian subcontinent. And, there's actually also evidence that early Greek medicine, early Greek humoral medicine drew a lot of inspiration and knowledge from wandering, physicians that came, from India and wandered across Western Asia into into Southern Europe. So we're talking about a system of medicine that's been around for a very, very long time, and is a very comprehensive approach to health and wellness and encompasses a broad range a broad range of practice from general internal medicine to pediatrics to the treatment of spiritual illness and psychological psychiatric illness.
Surgery was also a major part of Ayurveda and when the, British physicians came to India in the, nineteenth century, they actually learned of many different surgical techniques, including rhinoplasty, cataract surgery. They learned some of these techniques from traditional Ayurvedic physicians.
I mean, there's evidence in the traditional literature of India that they were performing gastrointestinal surgery, they were even injecting medications, subdermally, using reeds that were very finely sharpened to a point as early as the Buddhist period in India, and that's basically going back about twenty five hundred years. So a very advanced system of medicine was practiced in India for a very long time.
And, it is was the inspiration for, I think, for, aspects of Greek medicine, also aspects of Unani medicine. The Arabs learned a lot of stuff from the Indians, and some of the, traditional Indian texts were transcribed into Arabic and then later made their way in various parts and forms to to Europe as well. So Ayurvedic medicine is this ancient system of medicine. The word itself, Ayurveda, comes from two Sanskrit words, ayus, which means life, and then veda, which means knowledge or divine knowledge.
It's believed that Ayurveda was divinely inspired. It was received from the gods and passed down to humanity. So it has this sort of divine, aspect ascribed to it traditionally. So it's, it's, as the science of life, it encompasses not just the treatment of disease, but also the prevention of disease, and also how we orientate ourselves and our lives in the natural world.
So it encompasses, you know, food, medicine, our environment, the place that we live in, all the ways in which we relate to the natural world, Ayurveda is there to help us discover how we can best relate to it so we can support our health and promote happiness and long life.
And it's amazing that we all just don't wanna all practice this because it sounds amazing.
Well, you know what, John? I I've I've, one of the things I recently presented at the Traditions in Western Herbal Medicine Conference was, discussing a link between Ayurvedic medicine and the traditional system of medicine that evolved here in North America in the, early nineteenth century physio medicalism.
And what's fascinating to me is just how similar these two systems are. In fact, they seem to draw on the same inspiration, which is the understanding of the vital force, and using, honing our five senses to help us navigate our way through the natural world and our relationship to medicines and disease. And what's fascinating to me is that of the Physiomedical System in in North America, Samuel Thompson, developed a system, an approach to health care that he, you know, he he he patented patented as a system of cures.
It's very similar to the traditional Indian system of Panchakarma.
They're both this kind of detoxification protocol that involved, inducing vomiting and using purgation and making the patient sweat.
The system that's used in India is far more sophisticated, but they're very similar.
And so when you compare the two systems, you find that, they're very similar and they have the same kind of inspiration, which is really trying to relate to the natural world and understand natural rhythms and cycles. And so while the semantics are different, you know, we're using Sanskrit terms and we've got such a rich tradition of literature to to to utilize when we're talking about Ayurveda, from India and Nepal, in fact, I think that what the Western herbalists are doing here in North America is basically the same thing. It's just that the term terminology is different, the practices are different. Perhaps it's not always as sophisticated because the tradition isn't as long, and we don't have the same kind of empirical evidence behind it. But I think that the two the two systems are the same. I mean, it's not like our relationship with the plants change just because we use different words.
Right.
You know? Right. Oh, still maintain that relationship to the plants in in the same way. And I think there's an enormous amount that we can learn from each other.
I think fundamentally though, like, when you're saying with that, I mean, I'm a I'm a practitioner of five MLM acupuncture and and what and what I see is, like, what you exactly what you said is that cycles and rhythms of nature. Seems like when you remove the person from from nature, whether it's, practices or the lifestyle through the seasons and acknowledging that, eating or living locally and, you know, using foods that aren't overprocessed and things like that. Like, the more you take a person away from the natural rhythms and cycles where they live, it seems like the sicker that they get and, you know, and doesn't, you know, that seems to be basically what you're saying because that's what I see in my own patient.
Absolutely.
You know, I, You know, my my son was suffering from insomnia, and, you know, he was just fourteen years old.
You know, every night, I would say, you know, good night and turn off his light, and I'd head upstairs. And, of course, you know, after I left, he'd flip the light back on and start reading again. And sometimes he'd be up until one or two o'clock in the morning. Well, I took him with me to Nepal, and, he ended up living in a Nepalese village.
And in Nepal, the sun sets about six thirty in the evening, and they finish up with their evening meal, and then they burn a twenty rupee candle, and they sit around and they chat for a little while and kinda hang out, and the candle burns down, and the eyelids get droopy, and everyone starts yawning, and then finally the candle burns out. They're not gonna burn another twenty rupee candle. It's about eight thirty at night. It's pitch black outside.
Everyone goes to bed. Right. So his insomnia was cured the first day he was in Nepal.
He didn't have insomnia anymore, it was gone. You know, and so you look about the the impacts about, you know, things like electricity.
You know, electricity is a boom in many ways, but look how dramatically it affects something as simple as sleep. I mean, we've been able to get enough sleep, you know, for this last two and a half million years of our evolution.
But with the advent of electricity and not really knowing how to develop a a a wise proper relationship with this very powerful tool that we've developed, we've ended up creating a whole host of other issues such that people aren't getting enough sleep nowadays.
And people are suffering from depression and exhaustion as a result of not getting enough sleep, because they're not able to follow these natural rhythms and cycles. And and so electricity is just one small example of the impact of our modern technology on our lives and how it's removed us from following and integrating ourselves with these natural rhythms and cycles. And I think what we need to do now is develop a higher awareness and, you know, accept the boom that these modern technologies provide us, but at the same time, look to see how we can reintegrate them back into an observation of natural rhythms and cycles. And I think traditional systems of medicine like Ayurveda can assist in this process.
Right. Because there's, a lot of, you know it's connected to a culture that for that that a lot of people I mean, there's there's there's elders and knowledge and wisdom and people have been practicing in lineages that are intact still in the world that we can learn from. So it's not like we're having to totally reinvent the wheel. But it's interesting. I mean, you're saying that Ayurveda influenced so much medicine, like, all all over the east, all over, you know, into the the huge part of the world anyway. And so it can, in a sense, really influence and teach and inspire traditional Western herbalism too, can't it?
Absolutely. And as I said, that was the main focus of my recent, lecture at the Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference, was looking at how we can integrate, the two systems and really capitalize upon all that traditional knowledge that's there in Ayurveda. Some of it needs to be kind of translated for a Western context. But as I said, our fundamental relationship to the Earth, to the plants, doesn't really change.
You know, one of my teachers in India told me that there's no such thing as an Ayurvedic herb. There's only a herb that we use with the intent of Ayurveda. And he fully encouraged me to, explore and understand the plants in my local area in the context of Ayurveda. And so that's really been been one of my major focuses is using local plants, but trying to understand them within that Ayurvedic context.
And it's been my big hope to share this knowledge to Western herbalists, not to not diminish the valuable contribution that Western herbalists have made, but really we're a global culture. You know, I mean, I think we need to get past this dichotomy of East and West. I live here in Vancouver, and, you know, I grew up eating Chinese food and Indian food, and I traveled all over the world. I didn't even know what West is anymore, or East. It's all seems to be coming together as a fusion of cultures. And I don't see why that also shouldn't influence the development of Western herbal medicine as well. There's so much that we can learn from each other.
And likewise, I think there are many Ayurvedic physicians that would be able to learn an enormous amount from some of the Western Earth centered herbalists that really do understand and have that very powerful connection to the earth. Because in some places in India in India, Ayurveda has kinda turned into being very much of an intellectual exercise. And part of the reason for that is just that, there's been this movement away from this traditional guru disciple relationship, which was developed over decades, to now people going to university and studying for four years and thinking that after four years they understand Ayurveda.
Ayurveda was never taught like that.
So you're seeing a shift there as well. I guess the sort of similarity might be, say, herbalists that apprentice and in the field and spend decades acquiring their knowledge, and then, say, a naturopath There's no comparison in terms of the practical knowledge between those two groups. Not to take any away from either of them, but the knowledge isn't the same. Right. And so I think that, the herbalists that we have here in the West that are really committed to this lifestyle also have a lot to share. And I I think that the opportunity here is is that we can really all learn from each other.
And is this and is this what inspired, your book Food Is Medicine?
Well, what inspired my book Food is Medicine was, saying the same thing over and over and over to this to my to my patients and really wishing that I could just give them a book and say, here, just read page one twenty six, one forty five, and, you know, and and have a real simple approach. It's a it's a book that I've had, in my mind to write, really since I began practicing fifteen, sixteen years ago, but just never got around to doing it. So it was written, even though it does have a lot of references, it's got over two hundred and seventy seven references, and it's very concise, and it's it's quite a dense text in many ways, but it was it's meant to be very practical text to really provide people with the knowledge that they need to navigate all the information that they get on diet that could be so confusing and so overwhelming to people.
So it was to help present an energetic framework or approach to diet that actually matches the way people experience food. You know when you when you look at your plate, you don't look at your plate and go, well yeah, look there's like two hundred and twenty seven calories of brown rice there and another three hundred and seventy five calories of chicken and Mhmm. You know, people don't relate to their food when they're eating it, when they're experiencing it as calories, as macronutrients, as micronutrients.
They relate to it like it tastes good or it doesn't taste good, it's too hot, it's too cold, it feels too heavy in their bodies, or it makes them feel too light. That's the way they relate to food. And so we need to have a model of food that actually matches the way we experience it. And that's the big disconnect I think in modern nutrition is just that we've got this objective tool of science, of clinical nutrition to measure the impact of food, except that it's counterintuitive. It doesn't match the way we experience food and so it doesn't really work. It's more or less a disaster.
I know.
So we need to come up with a method or approach to food that actually matches the way we interact with food on a day to day basis. And it's not that complicated, and Ayurveda has a model to do that. So what I've done is I've woven in this model of Ayurveda and its approach to food to give people a qualitative approach to understanding diet instead of this quantitative one which relies on measurement as being the chief measure, or sorry, the chief criteria of how we understand food. You know, measuring calories or macronutrients or antioxidants.
I think there's another way we can approach food and look at it that really matches the way we experience it.
Wow. And you also, I mean, that's great because I remember taking a nutrition class and we had to do this exercise for a week where we recorded all the food we ate and all the different calories and this and that and all the different types of of micronutrients that were in it and all this. And I was like, this is just stupid. You know?
Like Well, who's gonna do that? I mean, you have to have a, you know, at least a four year degree in clinical nutrition to even make heads or tails of it.
Right.
And and then it's who has the time to do that?
I think I think the main purpose of that is if, like, a naturopath or somebody has somebody do that, it's like then they can come to the realization like, wow, I really am eating crap.
Right. You know, I mean, there are a lot of different dietary therapies out there. And recently, I I blogged on this difference between the high fat diet advocated by the Weston a Price Foundation and Atkins and and other groups to advocate these, you know, high fat diet, these traditional fats like butter and and coconut oil. And then the other spectrum, you've got the doctor Dean Ornish groups, and advocates, the the the raw food vegans and vegetarians that advocate this low fat diet.
And yet, you know, both you know, people in both groups are seeing improvements in their overall health, and some people, those diets don't do well for, you know, and so then you get arguments and disputes between these two groups about which position is right or wrong. But the thing that both the groups advocate is that they say, well, just avoid all those modern industrial foods, you know, stop eating junk food and and so much of my diet is involved, that's what it involves, you know, is getting people to go back to eating whole foods.
And that has such a dramatic effect on both your overall health. I mean, right there, you'll get a fifty to sixty percent improvement in someone's health issue if they just stop eating all that modern industrial junk.
That's it. Because I I I this is a great conversation because I love your opinion because I sometimes feel that when people take on something like a raw food diet or veganism or some kind of or even if it's a spectrum of, like, oh, I'm all Atkins or I'm all this, that it's all like it seems to me a bit extremist.
And I use that word meaning that they get religious over it. Like, this is the way it's gotta be. And and I just have a hard time with that way of thinking in general. Like, if anything, this is the way it's gotta be.
So what's your opinion on all That's a loaded question and you can say whatever you want and I know it's a hot topic. And I don't mind pushing people's buttons here, you know, but I'm just saying that like I don't know. Like, it just seems like it's when you go extreme, like, oh, one well, I'm only gonna eat raw food or I'm only gonna eat meat. Like, there's gotta be something not so smart about that.
Is that right? What do you think about all that?
Well, it's it is a complex question primarily because the traditional human diet has a lot of variability depending on factors like climate. I mean, if you're living in the far north, if you're living in the Arctic, you're eating a lot of meat. Mhmm. And there's nothing else to eat.
Mhmm.
Right? And And if you're living in the tropics, there's abundant vegetation pretty much all year round, and so your diet obviously is gonna be much higher in vegetation. There's always this cost benefit ratio, how much energy does it take for you to acquire that food energy?
As well as digest it. And so we have to factor in things like that. You know, Ayurveda has a very broad approach when we look at diet, and so we can reconcile that dietary spectrum from the, you know, the low fat vegetarian diet all the way to the high fat meat diet. You know, all those diets are potentially appropriate for different people in different places, different times in their lives, and I think that we need to have a much more flexible, nuanced, sophisticated approach when looking at these different dietary therapies.
You know, something like a raw food vegan diet can be very helpful for some people for a relatively short period of time, you know, certainly nothing longer than a year, and that even might be extreme for some people, and there's definitely some people that should not, you know, be on a on a raw food diet at all, especially children, especially women, especially if they're pregnant or they're lactating, older folks as well, I would definitely counsel them not to eat that kind of diet because it's a very depleting diet. The term that we use in Ayurveda is called Langana. Longana means like to lighten the body, to diminish the body, to take away from the body, and so for people who are suffering diseases of excess, and let's face it, our culture suffers mostly from diseases of excess.
Mhmm. People eat too much, they don't get enough exercise, and so they could use some lightning, you know, they could use some diminishing therapy.
But at the same time, you know, life is a battle of acquiring enough energy to stay healthy and provide your body with enough energy to maintain all the different functions including reproduction.
And so that you don't wanna go overboard with that kind of depleting, you know, diminishing therapy. It's good for a period of time, but then you need to get back to eating a diet which really nourishes and supports your vitality. And so all of these diets are appropriate at different times, in your life depending on what issue you're dealing with.
You know, for people suffering from immune deficiency or weight loss or you know, women who have problems with amenorrhea or absent menstruation, you know, I definitely would not recommend that they go on a raw food vegan diet. I would put tend to put them on a high fat, higher protein diet. And remember also that when we're talking about a high fat, high protein diet, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a low vegetable diet. You know, I encourage everyone that eats animal fats and proteins to, you know, fill their plate up at least half full with steamed or stir fried veggies. And these don't provide you with a lot in terms of calories, but they certainly provide you with a lot in terms of minerals and antioxidants and fibers. And perhaps that's just my bias as a herbalist, but I do think that we need to be eating a lot of vegetation even if it doesn't contain a lot of carbohydrates like root vegetables or or or cereals or legumes.
Mhmm. Okay. So so then, you know, because sometimes I just think that some people in our culture just get a little too obsessed about their diet. Like, they take it a little too overboard as far as, like, especially when when there's so much abundance in the supermarkets, you know, and it's like, you know, I'm like, lighten up. Just have a whole foods diet, you know. Just eat real just eat food. Like, you know, if it's got ingredients, it's not food.
Yeah. I I think I think it's the key thing. I mean, it's it's there's this there's been this, nutritional distortion in our diet that's occurred over the last one hundred years, and it has such a huge role in our health. I don't think, you know, as a practicing herbalist, that I'm gonna get many results if my patients aren't making these shifts in their diet.
And when they do, regardless of whether they make that shift towards a vegetarian whole foods diet or, you know, high fat, you know, high animal protein diet, they will tend to get better.
And then for me, my goal is to help fine tune that so that I can help them develop an approach to diet which really meets their needs. I mean, there are just some people out there that just don't need to eat a lot of fat.
You know, they tend to accumulate weight very easily, They tend to be, you know, you know, in Ayurveda, we call them the Kapha body types.
And we all know these people. They just look at a plate of food and they put on five pounds. They don't need, you know, a high nutrient value diet. They obviously need good nutrition. Everyone does. But they tend to suffer from the effects of overnutrition.
And so, you know, they could get by with eating much less fat, much less protein, and more vegetable based foods. But then on the other end of the spectrum, you have those people that just don't put on weight no matter what they do. And primarily, it's because they have a very hard time holding and containing energy in their body. Partly, it's because their brains just move too quickly.
In Ayurveda, we call these the Vata body type. And they really do need to eat much more fat, much more animal protein in their diet to stay balanced, to stay healthy. And so we need to have more of a nuanced, more sophisticated subtle perspective when it comes to diet and these different body types, and then also how the diet would change according to the seasons. Like, what you'd be eating in February would be very different from what you're eating, say, in August.
You know, and in large part that's just reflected in our relationship with nature and what nature is providing to us during those times.
What I really like about this book is that you do describe in the beginning, great introduction, you describe these different doshas, the kapha, pitta, vata, and, in relation to the things that you're talking about here. And then when I'm kind of going through it, a nice blend with scientific things, but also lots of recipes and foods that, you know, aren't all things that you would just see in a strict Ayurvedic Indian recipe book, but, foods we're all familiar with and can and cooking styles we're all familiar with.
Right. You know, I I think the the the key thing, I think, for a lot of people who are approaching Ayurveda, they see this connection between Ayurveda and yoga and, you know, and then yoga and vegetarianism. Mhmm. And, you know, traditionally, there was no, you know, real connection between yoga and Ayurveda. You know, yoga, as the literal, you know, meaning of the word, you know, union, it's a it's a meditative spiritual, exercise wherein you're trying to connect your consciousness to a higher consciousness.
That's not the goal of Ayurveda. The goal of Ayurveda is to promote a happy, healthy, long life. It's not there to help support your, your spiritual endeavor. It's not to say that they're mutually incompatible, they're not, they can be compatible, but the goals are different. Yoga's oriented towards helping people achieve spiritual liberation.
Ayurveda is helping to support healthy families, including moms and babies and grandmas and everybody. They have different goals.
But because of the connection between them and and also because in India, there's been this shift away from this traditional guru disciple relationship towards people studying in universities.
Some of this traditional knowledge has been lost, and the real big shift has been that the higher echelon of the classes in India are the ones that tend to go to university. They tend to be Brahmins. Brahmins traditionally are vegetarians, and as a result, they're necessarily kind of espousing this vegetarian ideal, but that never was even really a part of Ayurveda. So I find it disturbing that Wow. A lot of Ayurvedic physicians recommend vegetarianism as the goal of Ayurveda, but it's not. I mean, if if you actually look at the classical texts of Ayurveda, the Chaka Samhita, the Sushruta Samhita, you don't find any mention of vegetarianism in there. You know, in fact, almost every every single disease that I've ever encountered usually requires the the use of some kind of animal product to treat it, you know, it could be something like a milk decoction or, more often it's a meat soup, you know, to treat various different disorders.
And, I I think a great injustice has been done to Ayurveda by heavily promoting this vegetarian perspective.
It doesn't do justice to the system and it also fragments it.
And it causes damage to the integrity of Ayurveda. Ayurveda is exceptionally practical, well grounded system.
And so I think one of my goals for this book was to really blow that whole notion apart. People can choose to be vegetarian, and in the book, I tell you exactly how Indians have been, you know, healthy vegetarians for centuries. I don't think that raw food veganism is a part of a sustainable vegetarian lifestyle, I think you can do it for some time for a particular purpose, but not for years. You know, it's just for a very limited kind of therapeutic detoxification protocol. But one of my purposes of writing this book has been to kind of reintegrate Ayurveda, within its traditional framework and really discuss all the different foods including animal products that were used in Ayurveda to support health. It's really important to me to make sure that people have a well grounded, understanding of the broad scope that Ayurveda offers?
That's, you know, honestly, my only exposure to Ayurveda has has been through people who have been vegetarian, so I never really thought about it too much, you know? And so going through your book and and here listening to you speak, it's I I'll tell you that for me, it it definitely blew that wide open for me. I went, oh, of course. This they just you know, when something resonates and just makes sense, I was like, oh, yeah.
Of course. You know, that that that's that's great. You know, so thank you for for for, you know, for doing this and and and, you know, and it's a very all encompassing book. And, you know, something else that's a little, another little controversial, area, you know?
So, you know, you were talking about misunderstandings about how people might look at certain diets or certain things or maybe even Ayurveda and meat eating versus vegetarian.
Something else that I think that people getting into natural health kind of confuse, a lot is the whole notion of, detoxification, fasting, that kind of stuff because that's another polarizing type of topic that I've seen that a peep some people go, oh, you know, you we're we're all dirty inside, you have to keep detoxing us. And other people are like, well, we're just, you know, we're not dirty. We just are these beings of bacteria and we have to nourish ourselves. And by nourishing ourselves and keeping ourselves healthy with good nourishing foods, our body's natural functions will do all the detoxing and eliminations and things that they need. So, where are you on that and, as far as detoxing and fasting and and, you know, in in that spectrum? Like, because I'm interested because you have a section about that in here, and I wanted to ask you about that.
Yeah. Absolutely.
You know, there are I think there are two distinct issues that we need to deal with.
The first issue is a very troubling one, and that is that, in the last hundred years, we've been exposed to a whole host of environmental toxins, pollutants in our environment that we've never been exposed to before.
Right.
And quite frankly, as a herbalist, I don't know how to deal with them because there is no traditional empirical knowledge in how to address it. So you think about all the xenoestrogens that are in the environment, all the other toxins that are in our food, that we're that, that are in our air, that are in our water. You know, we've never been exposed to these kinds of poisons before. So how do we deal with it? It's a challenging question. It's something that we're gonna gain a lot more experience of dealing with, in decades to come. And I'm not really sure how, you know, traditional medical perspectives like Ayurveda, what they have to say about that kind of level of toxicity.
I think Ayurveda's got all these, you know, very specific protocols to deal with detoxification and and therapeutic detoxification.
I'm not sure necessarily how applicable they are to this whole host of of toxins that are we're being exposed to in our modern world. So that's one issue, and I think that's a separate issue, and I think that we don't wanna confuse that issue with the traditional concept of toxicity, which is more related to kind of a metabolic residue that gets created when the eliminatory functions in the body are impaired, when our digestion is weak. And I think that's something separate.
You know, a lot of companies out there sell all these, you know, detoxification products and play upon all the fears of all these industrial toxins in our environment, but all the solutions and strategies that they offer in a very, you know, very simplistic kind of way are using herbal remedies that have been traditionally used to deal with this kind of metabolic residue. I don't necessarily think that they they can be equated. I'm not sure, I think there's an area of research there that needs to be explored, but I think we need to keep those two things separate, at least conceptually, so we can understand that we're that when we're dealing with, toxicity, that we're talking about two different things here.
Now, when it comes to dealing with the the sort of metabolic residue, Ayurveda's got a name for this. It's called ama, and ama literally means undigested food. And so, what Ayurveda says is that when we eat food and the food is improper, or we're chewing too fast, we're we're not we're not eating very mindfully, the combinations are poor, the the the food itself isn't very good for us, our digestion's weak, it creates this metabolic residue called ama.
And ama, is undigested food. Traditionally, it was described that it passes into circulation, it gets deposited in different tissues of the body, and then aggravates the doshas. So first, it initiates congestion which relates to kapha, so you get swelling and edema or just poor circulation in that area. Then the body tries to cook or remove that poison from that area so that relates to pitta, and that relates to inflammation and heat.
And then if that Ama is being continuously produced and you're not stopping it, eventually that cooking away at the tissue weakens and damages and as results in degeneration of that tissue. And that and Ayurveda relates to Vata. So you have this cycle of congestion, inflammation, and degeneration, and the origin of it is this metabolic residue called Ama. So in Ayurveda, it's really important that we address this issue of Ama by making sure that, we have good digestion and that we are able to eliminate this from our bodies.
So Ayurveda, like a lot of traditional systems of medicine, is concerned with this idea of toxicity and certainly recommends detoxification as a method to address it. However, it's not something that you undergo continuously.
It's a it's a course of therapy that's implemented over a specific period of time Mhmm.
Typically at certain times of the year, and then you return back to a normal healthy balanced diet.
Right. And and I think that within the spectrum of cleansing and detoxification too, one of the things I talk about in the book is there's different approaches. You know, there's it ranges anywhere from just following a simple diet for a little while. Like for so many people, that's not all that's required is just to remove a lot of the complexity out of their diet and go back to eating really simple food, spice in a very simple way or not even spice at all, just really simple.
You know, because sometimes, you know, if you're a bit of a foodie and you enjoy cooking, you make all this delightfully tasting food and sometimes you end up overeating.
You eat more than you really need to because it just tastes so good.
Right.
Well, you know, if you just eat steamed vegetables and you know, really simple foods, you'll get all your dietary needs met, but maybe you won't eat so much. And so you eat like that for a few weeks just to kinda reset your appetite, reset your digestion.
Mhmm.
And it has a very balancing effect. So I call that like a simple diet type detoxification.
That's makes sense.
Yeah, but that can range from that kind of dietary approach, which I think is sustainable for most people living busy, hectic lives that have jobs and families, you know, to, you know, if you if you go on a retreat or you go up to the cabin for a little while, you know, and it's a time to go within, you remove some of your responsibilities, you can do something like a juice fast or a water fast. And there are other benefits to doing this kind of detoxification, but I wouldn't recommend those kinds of protocols in everyday life. They're just, for most people, they're just too much. You know,
it's a time to kinda go within, and, you know, our body needs energy, and if we're not able to kinda shift that energy balance in our body and reduce our activity and our mental stimulation, then you know, we can't do these more intensive types of fast and detoxifications. They're really best done in kind of a retreat type environment. And that's the way they're traditionally done in in in India, in Ayurveda. Wow.
See, this all makes sense because, see, you're speaking through the context of a culture, you know, of a cultural system. And and and so when I look I can get that when I'm looking through this book and looking at everything, and that really comes through. Because just like, you know, when I first got interested in eating, you know, quote, unquote healthier natural things or whatever, people were like, oh, no. You gotta do a fast, and you just have to drink this with the lemon juice and put a little cayenne pepper in it and you have to just, you know, and I and I remember just like, you know, and I had it in no context. So I said, oh, this is what you're supposed to do because groovy, natural people do this. And so I went and I, you know, and I did this, and I just got myself so sick, sicker than I've ever been. And it took me about two months to recover And, because I just shocked my system.
And Yeah. There was in no context, you know? And and I think that more extremist type things like that or certain that, you know, diets that that like raw food or this or that that are, like, very different than what you're used to doing need to be done in a context.
And that's what I'm getting from what all you're saying. So you're very inclusive in all that you're saying, but at the same time, what I think that weaves it all together is your, experience and studies into, cultural medicine.
Yeah. I I think context is exceptionally important. And I think it's good too to understand the basis of the rationale that you have when you're approaching these different therapies. I a lot of what I'm practicing is bolstered by traditional empirical knowledge.
Mhmm. And it's not necessarily scientific, but it's been around for a very long time, and it just remains for science to validate it. You know, often science is more interested in innovation than it is in tradition. So, it can be some time before these traditional methods end up being validated.
But demonstrably they're true, I mean they've been practiced for thousands of years, there's enormous amount of empirical evidence behind their practice, and when you understand their system of use, you can understand the logic there. That's different than a diet say for example like the raw food diet that has a lot of reasons that you should support it, but none of them are founded in any tradition and often use pseudo scientific theories to support them. Like for example, the enzyme theory, you know, that's one that a lot of you know, raw food vegans will say. We'll say, well you know, you need to eat raw food because it contains all the enzymes that is necessary for digestion.
And this discounts sorry.
This discounts the fact that our bodies produce over five liters of digestive fluids on a daily basis and you produce far more enzymes in your digestive fluids than you actually consume in your food. And this is apart from the fact that enzymes themselves are proteins and if your digestion is good, those proteins should be broken down in your stomach into individual peptides and amino acids.
So they don't really have a dramatic effect upon digestion. And so you have this theory, this enzyme theory which is central to raw food veganism, which is entirely unscientific.
But it's the one that people espouse when they're trying to advocate for that particular dietary choice. But it isn't founded on any tradition.
It's not doesn't have any really good science behind it. It's this kind of pseudoscience that ends up being, validated simply because a lot of people just repeat it.
Right.
And I think, you know, we need to understand too where where our knowledge comes from. I mean, if it comes from science, let's use the science properly. You know, let's really use the science properly and really understand it and probably we'll find that the science doesn't give us a definitive answer, but it gives us some really good ideas and clues around something.
Or let's use a traditional model that has been validated empirically over thousands of years of practice and then let's see them. Let's let's look at both of those paradigms and find, you know, a happy marriage between them. But not, you know, something like raw food veganism, it doesn't really rely on any of those. It has its own kind of internal theory, which is based more on pseudoscience and a person's fantasy of what they hope is true as opposed to what is true.
Wow. Okay. You know, this has been amazing. Do you do you have time for a couple of questions?
Absolutely.
Okay. Great. Because, we've are, you know, I I kinda threw out my script in the first ten minutes. I just got so enthralled in this whole conversation that, I don't even I'm looking at all these notes and none of them match up with what else could ask.
I love that. I think we all covered it, although in our own flowing way. So I had to ask some members if you wanted to submit some questions.
I can probably squeeze a couple in here.
One person, here, Amber, actually went to your class at Traditions and Western Herbalism Conference down there in New Mexico a few weeks back. And you were talking about detoxing with, oil and a steam bath. And, she was wondering, how to do this at home. And she asked, will a water bath work for those who don't have access to a sauna?
Right. So this therapy that's used prior to the Panchakarma, which is a fairly intensive system of purification that involves therapeutic vomiting, therapeutic purgation, etcetera.
So the initial therapy, the the oil massage and the the steam bath therapy isn't a profound system of detox ification. It's used in conjunction with this other system. But nonetheless, it does have this ability to promote detoxification.
When you oil your body, traditionally Ayurveda, the oil gets absorbed into the body. And demonstrably, it does. I mean, a lot of people say that you can't really absorb all that much from your skin. You know, the skin has got this keratinized protein, which repels water.
But in fact our skin is, you know, it does allow lipid soluble materials to pass through it, and so oil is one way to provide medication to the body. And they've been using this method in Ayurveda for a very long time of applying medications topically. Sometimes they'll use up to a liter of oil in a single session, and a lot of it does get absorbed into the body. And what it does is it goes into the body, it permeates all the tissues, and it loosens up this ama, these toxins in the body, and then the person is then steamed.
They're put into a special chamber where they're then steamed, and then through sweat, some of these toxins are liberated and eliminated from the body. Now it's it's oil and steam that's traditionally used in Ayurveda.
A bath doesn't work the same way.
The closest thing that you could do would probably be a shower.
And I would recommend that as being part of a daily regimen anyway. In Ayurveda, there's a there's a a daily regimen called Dina Charya, and as part of the daily regimen, we're meant to actually oil our bodies every day. Mhmm. Oil oil has the quality of bringing abundance abundance and nourishment to the body.
And so our aim to suggest that in order to maintain the youthfulness of the skin, the suppleness of the tissues, and the health of the body, we should oil our bodies on a daily basis. And it can be just a quick oil massage just starting with your ears, neck, shoulders, just move your way down your torso to your feet. Just a quick oil massage, and then traditionally Ayurveda recommends a little bit of exercise, you know, you could do a little bit of weight bearing exercise, and then, you know, just jump in the shower. And then traditionally, instead of using soap, what they use in Ayurveda is they use bean powder.
They would use something like chickpea or chana bean powder or mung bean powder and just use that instead of the soap to remove the excessive oil and it leaves a nice kind of sheen on the skin that doesn't feel greasy, that helps to nourish the skin and and really, you know, one of the side effects of it, in Ayurveda, it's used to balance the nervous system. So when you do that, you come out of that and you feel very calm, very relaxed, and very grounded. And so it's a very good approach to maintain general health on a daily basis. Mhmm.
But in terms of its specific benefits and detoxification without the other protocols, I don't think it has a profound effect, but it certainly has some effect.
Okay. And, okay. So next question is, in your book, you say you talk about fermenting rice and legumes before cooking them, and you share a method of making fermented water to soak them in. And she wants to know, will it work just to soak them in whey, or does it have to be this other ferment?
You could soak them in whey. Okay. You could certainly soak them in whey. That wasn't the way, the rice was traditionally fermented. Mhmm.
It was using just, you know, the wild bacteria and yeasts.
But if you wanna introduce a culture, you can certainly do that as well, and that will also help to speed it up.
Okay. Great. And, good foods for, liver support? And how about lymph support? Lymph and liver support?
Well, I think for you know, foods are are really important to play here, but we also need to make sure that we're you know, exercise is really key. You know, the lymphatic system is dependent upon the regular contraction of muscles Right. To pump lymph through the body. So just taking herbs without exercise would seem to me to be counterproductive.
So but I mean, there there are so many. Of course, we've got lots of good lymphogogs in the Western herbal tradition. Everything that's from red clover and cleavers as a very mild, lymphogogs to red root and poke root on the, more powerful end of the spectrum.
Mhmm.
And then once you move lymph, of course, you know, you wanna make sure that you're marshaling it out of the body. So you also need to use herbs to help support the liver. There are so many useful herbs in India, one of the more important herbs that they use is called Guduchi, which is a very useful herb.
A herb that I use a lot, in my practice is Oregon Grape Root, one of my favorite herbs. And in India's name is Daru Haridra, they use this very similar herb, they use it in Nepal for almost the same types of indications, very good blood cleanser, very good colo gog to help, to remove these toxins from the body.
Okay.
And, pretty much if you just go through and make all the recipes that are in your book, I think you'd probably be eating pretty healthy. There's your answer right there. All kinds of soups, stocks, and soups, and stews, and meat, poultry, fish recipe, fermented vegetables, fats and oils, nuts and seeds, grains and legumes, and you even have a little section on snacks and sweets and libations.
That's Right. Well, that that last section has, a couple recipes there, which are used to help support health. You know, I'm I I can't I don't find myself recommending that people eat dessert all that often, you know.
However, you know, in the in the sort of European, tradition of the the sanatoriums where they would have people come and, you know, eat fairly clean food, you know, seven days a week, on a Sunday evening, they still would have a big traditional meal and have dessert. And in the same way, I still, you know, allow people or encourage my patients to have a a balanced approach. I mean, there's times to celebrate, and one of the ways that we celebrate is by eating tasty food, but we need to make sure we we do it on a limited basis. And I best the the best way to do that is to do it on a very conscious basis.
So you're consciously deciding to eat well and have a great dessert and, and have a wonderful time doing that, and then the rest of the time, making sure that you're eating relatively healthy. So I don't have a lot of recipes that are sweets per se. They're they they tend to be kinda more medicinal in their focus. But but but yeah.
But I gotta try your hot toddy recipe because it's kinda like, you know, I learned about it when I was living in Ireland for a year. But this is kinda like where hot toddy meets chai.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's great. So I'm looking forward to trying this.
It's like the whiskey and rum whiskey or rum along with, like, cardamom and cloves Yeah.
And nutmeg and all your favorite herbs. So, Todd, this has been really awesome and I appreciate you spending time with us. And Food is Medicine, the theory and practice of food, available at toddcalvacott dot com. I encourage you to go there.
They can purchase it through the stat site. Right?
Actually, the, the website to get Food is Medicine, the theory of practice food is food as medicine dot c a. Oh, that's Dot c a because it's a Canadian website, so we use dot c c a up here.
Oh, okay.
It's all it's also available on Amazon dot com as well.
Oh, great. And, and also but make sure you go to ToddCaldegott.com because I really enjoyed going through, many of the articles well laid out. I have some great videos on there, and, the food is medicine area is really well described. Different ways of cooking, different types of diets, just very clearly explained. I learned a lot just, spending a couple of hours going through that.
So, bookmark that for sure and visit it often. And and, and like I said, Food Is Medicine, other books. You can go to Amazon or you can go to, you can go to his website or for this one, foodismmedicine.
Ca. So, Todd Caldecott, thank you very much for joining us on Herb Mentor Radio.
John, thank you so much for having me.
I'd love to have you back sometime, so take care.
You too. Take care. Bye.
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