Healthy Foods to Eat - Eat Right for Your Type

The Tastes & Qualities of Healthy Foods to Eat

When you are ready to get more specific, you can start eating Ayurvedic diet according to your Ayurveda Body Type. Certain tastes and qualities pacify certain doshas and others aggravate them. The following tables are very helpful as a general guideline on what are healthy foods to eat for each body type.


The tastes & qualities of food are even more important than the individual food items that you eat. For example, sour orange is not good food for pitta, whereas sweet orange is. Sweet flavor is balancing for pitta dosha, whereas sour will bring pitta out of balance. The sweet quality of the orange is more important than the item 'orange.'

So, keep the following tastes & qualities in mind as you determine what are the healthy foods to eat for your ayurveda body type.

Warm oatmeal cooked with milk and spiced up with cinnamon and cardamom is a wonderful breakfast choice for Vata dosha. You can also add a tsp of home made clarified butter on top, then you have all three qualities of warm, oily and heavy ;-)

On the other hand, raw oats with cold soy milk right from the fridge would be the worst choice for Vata dosha.

Do you see the idea? Since Vata dosha is light, dry and mobile, we want to balance it with opposite qualities. Heavy, oily and warm foods are healthy foods to eat for Vata dosha.

Pitta dosha would be ok with dry baby oats with room temperature soy milk (none of us should eat or drink anything right from the fridge) for breakfast.

Pitta dosha doesn't have to have everything cooked. In general, when the digestive fire is weak, cooked food is also better for Pitta (anything cooked is pre-digested), but when pitta's digestive fire is functioning properly, pitta dosha can handle the most raw foods from all three doshas.

Buckwheat cooked in water with some fresh or powdered ginger would be a great breakfast choice for Kapha dosha. Buckwheat is much lighter and drier than oats and the ginger adds a nice hot quality to the whole meal.

So, as you look through the following list, please do keep the above qualities in mind. As they really are more important than the specific food items.

Click here to read or print the Food Guidelines for Each of the Ayurveda Body Types as a PDF in your browser, or right-click to download it.

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