Vata Recipes
In this collection of blogs, we'll explore the best recipes for following a vata diet. These vata-balancing recipes use ingredients and cooking methods that are great for preserving moisture, maintaining internal warmth, and supporting proper digestion and elimination.
Vata and Digestion
Vata is one of the three doshas of Ayurveda—energetic life forces that make up the universe and everything in it, including the human body. The elements that vata corresponds with are air and ether (space), and so vata dosha handles many important functions in the body—including the flow of breath, movement, nerve impulses, creative thoughts, and much more.
As it is with each Ayurvedic dosha, diet plays an integral role in balancing vata. Ayurveda teaches that vata dosha in the body resides primarily within the colon. Because of this, excess or imbalanced vata can often manifest in that area, leading to feelings of internal dryness and digestive discomfort.
The time of year when vata is most likely to go out of balance is during what Ayurveda calls “vata season” (fall through early winter). As a result, you'll see many fall or winter recipes among these articles. That said, vata can go out of balance at other times as well, so we'll also share vata recipes for summer and other seasons as well.
Vata-Balancing Cooking Ideas
Vata-balancing meals have warm, grounding, nourishing ingredients that help counteract this airy dosha's cold, dry, mobile, flighty nature. Think freshly cooked, whole foods—soft in texture—that the body can digest with ease.
Forgetting to eat is oftentimes a common trait of vata dosha. The vata breakfast, lunch, and dinner recipes shared here can help you not only balance vata through warm spices, nourishing oils, and other helpful ingredients, but can also give you something fun to look forward to with your meals, which can, in turn, help you remember not to skip.
Here are some additional vata-balancing tips:
Favor Vata-Balancing Tastes. Ayurveda teaches that taste is an incredibly important part of the digestive process. Tastes like the following can help balance vata right from the start.
- Eat sweet foods like grains, fruits, squashes, root veggies, and fresh dairy products
- Enjoy the sour taste through foods like pickles, lemon juice, and grapefruits
- Incorporate more natural mineral salt or sea salt into your diet to reap the benefits of the salty taste.
Avoid Tastes that Aggravate Vata.
- Avoid the pungent taste, taking care with spicy foods like chilies, radishes, raw garlic, raw onion, and exceptionally hot spices.
- Minimize your intake of the bitter taste and proceed with caution around greens like kale, dandelion, and collards, and with bitter foods like chocolate or coffee.
- Cut down on foods that have an astringent taste, such as green bananas and pomegranates.
It's also important to focus on foods that can bring their warming and soothing qualities to balance the dry and cold qualities of vata. Perhaps foremost in this regard are oils and healthy fats, which supply the unctuous quality so often absent when excess vata has accumulated in the body.
We hope that you enjoy these recipes as much as we have, and that they motivate you to get cooking-and get balanced!