1. Turmeric
The number one supplement that you need in your life is nothing but turmeric.
You may have heard people saying, especially people in the west, talking about having turmeric in the form of teas, in the form of turmeric lattes, or sometimes even in the form of supplements.
You don’t need all of these pills and supplements to get your adequate amount of turmeric to help with all the benefits that it is going to give us.
Our traditional Indian way of cooking where we add the good fats and the spices, along with that we add turmeric, that is the most bioavailable form of turmeric and that helps with better digestion, better absorption, and better assimilation of all the good things that turmeric has to give us.
Now let us understand what turmeric does in our body. For this we have to understand what the properties of turmeric are as per Ayurveda.
Ayurveda says every food has certain properties, like there is a specific taste to a particular food item, a particular post-digestive taste.
Ayurveda also talks about a property called Prabhava or special characteristic.
One special characteristic or Prabhava of turmeric is that it is antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory.
For example, somebody is having a viral condition like chickenpox, we ask our patients to take shower with water boiled with turmeric because it is antimicrobial.
When it comes to food poisoning, if you consume more of turmeric paste throughout the day, you are helping your body to reduce inflammation.
Even if you have acne, you can use turmeric boiled water to wash your face because of its antimicrobial properties, you don’t need any antibacterial face washes.
All bitter tasting herbs are good for your liver. So, if you want to detoxify your liver, don’t go for supplements and medicines that detoxify your liver. Instead, just add a little bit more turmeric to your diet.
Adding turmeric to your dishes can help you improve your digestive fire, reduce gas, and bloating.
If you have children at home who constantly get bronchitis, cough, cold, fever, etc., turmeric helps you to improve their immunity. Make sure that you add turmeric to your cooking every day.
Even in traditional Indian cooking, we have so many dishes like haldi chawal, haldi doodh, haldi ka achar, turmeric lettuce soup. All of these are very good for improving your digestive system.
2. Dry Ginger
Number two is dry ginger.
I am talking about dry ginger and not wet ginger. Wet ginger is extremely heating, extremely pitta increasing. Dry ginger is also warm; it is much less heating compared to wet ginger.
When you buy ginger, make sure that you leave it outside and don’t keep it in the fridge so that it gets a little dry and then you can use it for cooking.
Just like how we said turmeric was anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory because of its prabhava, ginger also has a prabhava.
And what is that?
Dry ginger is anti-emetic. That means if somebody feels like vomiting, dry ginger is what we give.
It’s also good for improving digestion, absorption, and assimilation of food. It helps in reducing gas and bloating. It helps in subsiding Vata gently.
Just like how I told you about turmeric, don’t take dry ginger as a pill or a supplement. Instead, make sure that you have dry ginger in a cooked form along with other spices and good fats.
I personally add dry ginger every day to my cooking. However, one special indulgence that I really love doing is to have dry ginger wali masala chai.
After heavy meals, if for example, you had a biryani and you’re now feeling very heavy, very bloated, or you have this guilt feeling that you shouldn’t have had it because you can’t even think of the digestive problems that may come, then have dry ginger powder mixed with a little bit of rock salt, add a little bit of water and consume it.
That will help you subside the gas and bloating. It will also help you improve the digestion.
And if you’re somebody who feels constipation, you can have a glass of dry ginger water in the morning.
Make sure that you add two glasses of water, add one piece of dry ginger and reduce to one glass to get the maximum essence of dry ginger. And drink this water. This can ease your bowel movements.
3. Amla
This one is my favorite.
If you don’t want to have any supplement at all in this world, then one supplement that you need in your life is amla or amla powder.
This is something that you must include in your life.
Whether it is in the form of amla powder, amla juice, as amla murabba, amla candy, whatever it is, amla has to go into your system every single day.
Every house should have some form of amla ready to be served every day because amla helps in a lot of ways beyond what you can imagine.
There is a particular practice in Ayurveda. We call it as Kuti Pravishika. It is for people who want to reverse aging. It is a complete process. And the one thing that is given to people who wants to reverse their aging is Amla.
Amla has rejuvenating or anti-aging properties which can actually reverse your aging.
It is amazing for your skin, amazing for your heart, amazing for your hair, amazing for your digestive system, your liver, your intestine, and it’s good for your eyes.
So, if you want to take that one supplement every day, take Amla.
How can you consume Amla?
You can have Amla juice. Again, Amla juice, don’t have it as a whole one glass of Amla juice. Have it as a single shot, like a 30 ml, 35 ml of Amla juice. Take it as a shot in the morning.
You can add turmeric powder. You can add dry ginger to it. Absolutely fine. Have it.
If you don’t have access to fresh Amla, you have to get organic, very good quality dry Amla powder. Mix it with a little bit of ghee and have one teaspoon of it before you have lunch or after you have lunch.
Every day make sure that you have at least one teaspoon of Amla going into your diet.
When I was small, my grandmother used to say, one Amla if you drink, you will have one more additional drop of blood. I don’t know how true that is, but I used to believe it, and I still believe that even if she didn’t know much about your health and science and Ayurveda and all of that, she maybe saying this because Amla is actually a blood purifier.
Even if you don’t have to have the Acais of the world and the Noni juices of the world to purify your blood, you just have to have Amla every day.
Some people may have very low iron level. Some people may have these skin conditions where they have this constant redness or whatever exposure they have, even if it’s a little bit of sun exposure, just because the blood is not pure. So that taking Amla every day can increase the purity of your blood.
Coming to Acai, you know, Acai is considered a superfood because it has a lot of vitamins. But do you know that Amla has more vitamin C than Acai?
And however, our noble, humble little Amla doesn’t have so much of popularity as Acai. But it’s much more potent superfood than acai.
4. Rock Salt
Now, the fourth one is rock salt or Himalayan pink salt or sendha namak.
Make sure that you add this every day to your diet because it is anti-inflammatory.
Don’t add Himalayan pink salt entirely to your diet. Make sure that you have a mix of pink salt and normal sea salt because what you get from pink salt, you may not get from sea salt and vice versa.
Rock salt is digestive and carminative. It clears the respiratory pathways and reduces phlegm. It maintains the electrolyte balance and prevents dehydration.
It also helps in reducing inflammation, pain and helps in detoxifying our body.
So, every day if you are having Amla in your diet, make sure that you are also adding rock salt to your diet because these two go together.
5. Cumin (Jeera)
Last but not the least is cumin or jeera.
Cumin is a digestive stimulant. That means if somebody’s digestion is sluggish or not up to the mark or you are not able to digest food properly, cumin optimizes your digestive fire, turns on that fire and helps improve your digestion.
And when digestion is better, everything is better. Your overall health is better and also your mind is better.
If you have kids at home, make sure that you add cumin every day to the diet because not only it improves the digestion but also helps their immunity against respiratory conditions like cough, cold, bronchitis, etc.
If you are a lactating mother, make sure that you add a lot of jeera to your diet because that can increase your milk production.
Indian traditional cooking has one recipe which doesn’t have an alternate. And that is jeera rice cooked in ghee.
What a beautiful combination is that.
Rice is easy to digest, very light. You are adding ghee which promotes digestion and also helps in the breakdown of the food. Then you are adding cumin to it. Cumin helps in optimizing that digestive fire.
So overall, it’s a complete meal and try it, you will not get gas, bloating, acidity, acid reflux. None of this if you eat jeera rice cooked in ghee.
These are the five natural supplements that you can easily add to your everyday diet instead of looking out for superfoods and supplements.
Our traditional Indian cooking already has so much wisdom in it, when we use the right spices, good fats and simple ingredients in the correct way, food itself becomes medicine.