My name is Sophie Hawkins and I've been a practitioner of all your VEDA for about 12 years now and I got my your Vedic practitioner certificate from the Gerson Center in New York. But I certainly had some in home intensive training with my ex partner who is an Ayurvedic doctor and we ran. He was also a naturopath. We ran a naturopathic time massage clinic for 10 years and have a home in the village. And I taught I've been teaching cooking classes now for over 10 years and started out in a very small little kitchen where I easily pack 10 people in once in that kitchen and on Adelaide Street. And, and so my knowledge and my experience has has really changed to who I am and how I live my life.

When I first started with your VEDA, I was quite cold and dry. And I had just finished yoga teacher training. I met my ex and within six months people didn't recognize me. So I had worked for a woman for three years, I was her only employee in a bookstore. And I met her and she said, I know the face but I can't quite place you and I can't remember your name. And I said, Joan, it's me, Sophy.

Right. So and even the people that had gone to yoga teacher training with we had a reunion after about a year, and they were looking out the window saying, Who's that coming in. So that's how much I or VEDA can shift how you look and how you feel. But it has to be done. consistently over time, and part of the, the thing that has to happen is we have to educate our palates. So we almost become like chefs where we start to taste things in a different way once we have the knowledge about what it is we're supposed to be tasting.

And so when I go out to eat now I'm always tasting a meal. And I can identify which tastes are missing. And so often I'm not satisfied when I go out for dinner. There are very few places that I can say that I would go and usually they're more Asian, like Korean, Vietnamese, that kind of cooking they have, but they use the six tastes in their cooking. They have that knowledge, and it comes from India, and has spread to other parts of Asia, Indonesia. My mother was a sugar addict I grew up on Twinkies, and oh, you name any of those vashaun cakes that that was my daily fare.

So I had quite a strong sugar addiction for quite a long time that I could not check no matter what. And when my lovely daughter was born, I was very interested in wanting to feed her a healthy diet. I had been a vegetarian at that time for probably six years and knew that I needed to feed her a you know, a good diet if she was going to be raised as a vegetarian and the first chance she got to eat meat, she ate meat. She said mama and I need to eat meat and she was right. So I'm no longer vegetarian, but I would say that close to 90% my diet is plant based. So that's going to be grains, beans, vegetables, those kinds of foods and with very good quality, meats and, and animal based fats.

So those were added into my diet when I first had my first your Vedic assessment. I was too cold to dry, too weak, and the weakness was from not enough animal proteins, particularly living in a cold climate like we do here in Canada. I have had a number of health issues of starting very young, with most of my thyroid being removed when I was 11 years old with macro prebiotics. This is very interesting. I grew that thyroid back. And one of the things that is key and central in macrobiotics is sea vegetables.

And sea vegetables feed the thyroid. So when I was 30 years old, I had an ultrasound and the woman said, you didn't have your thyroid out. It's all here was functioning normally. Well, I grew that back through food. So food is medicine. And medicine is without food without diet being proper medicine is of no use.

So always the diet has to be right. And what that diets going to be, is going to be different for each person depending on their constitution and their particular makeup. So we can't say this one diet for every person. But generally speaking, we can look at the Vedic principles and what should guide us To the most healthy diet for ourselves, and that will change as as we grow in age. It's different for children than it will be for when we're older and aging, so the diet needs to change today, so, sis IO VEDA This is a disclaimer that I or VEDA is a whole entire system of medicine from India that's over easily over 5000 years old DLC 3000 that's a Christian dating based on their view of the world, but it was written 5000 years ago. So to have a written system in medicine that evolved, you're going to have to go back further to have that.

You know, that that kind of depth of knowledge at that point in time. VEDA consists of psychiatry, pediatrics, general medicine, rejuvenation therapies, wonderful rejuvenation therapies. There's ears, nose, throat, EMT. There's also aphrodisiacs, fertility, whole treaties on all of these toxicology and surgery, though, what you're going to get today is a taste six tastes of the basis of educating our own palate. So glad we can start to use our own bodies to tell us what we need. And I'll give you a good example of this ever since coming back from India, which of course I was there for nine months, and it was a very vegetarian diet.

I came back fairly anemic and often on I'm still struggling with it. And part of that is I'm at heart a vegetarian. And so I don't. I'm just looking for, oh, I must have dropped it down, that's fine. I don't, I don't probably eat as much meat as I should. So every once in a while I get iron deficient.

And so I have a liquid iron supplement. When I'm iron deficient, and I take that supplement, I can't taste the iron in it at all. It tastes sweet to me. As I keep taking it, I start to taste the iron and at some point, it's like, oh, that's like too much. I know. I've had enough.

I know my iron levels are good. So that's how we use taste. When we pay attention to start knowing what our bodies need. When we experience cravings and binge eating, the only time I've ever been able, I bought you know, I've got many Decades on the planet now, hopefully few more to go. But up until my 40th birthday, I was still having trouble managing binge eating, and I would go for sweet all the time. And I wasn't able to manage that.

I mean, I don't even think about it anymore. It's not something I do anymore because I'm cooking with the six tastes. So once you start to understand why that's so important, and we're going to go through that today. Then you can start choosing foods and combining foods using the six chase so that when you have a meal, you're satisfied you satisfied every taste bug by the on your tongue, and your body will be nourished. But until you can cook that way and it doesn't have to take a lot of time I can have meal ready In 20 minutes, and I'll show you a handy gadget that's just great for helping with that. But you should be able to cook a dinner and have enough left over for your lunch the next day, you've got a healthy lunch, a healthy dinner, you just need to deal with your breakfast stone.

Maybe you cook up some kimchi, which we're going to make today. You can have a batch of that and have that for three, three breakfasts in a row, it should be pretty easy. You should be able to do it within half an hour once you have some skills, and some easy techniques. I don't even cook with recipes anymore. So I'll look at recipes and I'll often see what's missing. I'll add that and then I'm going by taste.

And once you have some basic chef techniques and you cook like a chef, they don't use recipes. So they're they're looking at what's around them what's in season. They have techniques that they use, and that's how they cook So let's get started. And I'm going to be turning my back to you a little bit but I'll come back and you're going to get the handout with this chart. So don't worry about that and I'll hand it out after we go through it because if I handed out now you're going to be looking and it's going to be a bit overwhelming. So what are the six tastes?

Somebody just yelled them out? Oh, there's one that often people will not get but Sherry's in the know. So bitter? Yes. Sweet. Yeah, sure.

Obviously. Okay, so yeah, I put that one. salty. Yes. Yes, you read the article. All right, good for you as stringent that's often one that people at my writing will get missing.

And that's okay. We deal with it. Alright, and one more. Spike. Yeah, the spices are in that. But the classification and this is a this is kind of when you can't decide where something goes, it usually goes in this category.

So spicy is right, but there's another word that they use. It's pungent. Yeah. So the Western diet is pretty much sweet, sour, salty. So when we're bingeing and craving we're going to go back and forth usually we'll go for sweet and then we'll want some salty and then maybe we some people will go for sour. You know, I always I was either going for sugar, something sweet or sour.

Salt and vinegar chips. So I was getting the salt the salty and sour in those salt vinegar chips and then I go back to sweet right. And you're gonna continue to do that until you bring in pungent bitter and astringent. So let's talk a little fill in first. What foods would fall under sweet so, and we're not talking junk foods here. So junk food is not food it doesn't classify as food.

So we're talking real food. what's real sweet food? Chocolate Chocolate on its own is actually take the sugar out of it. What What is? Yeah, and what is what taste is that? there?

That's right. Yeah. Oh no, I put it in the wrong place. Yep, so real chocolate without sugar. Bitter good. So sweet.

Yep, lots of fruits are sweet. Some aren't but most are. Yeah, sweet fruits. carrots. Carrots. Yep.

Just yell them out. Honey. Yeah, maple syrup. Sugar. sugarcane is a real food. And when it's not bleached and stripped of its minerals, it can be used in small amounts in cooking for a very good effect, along with all the other tastes and we have to have sweet and beets.

Yep, beets are sweet squashes. Sorry. No, no. While they can be if you roast them, they can take on the sweetness. Yeah, when you roast them, but where would brussel sprouts fall? Don't be afraid to be wrong.

I've been wrong lots. I continue to be wrong sometimes. So, I say sometimes but so brussel sprouts, where would they fall? In the I don't know category. There's, there's sulfurous right? So there's some What?

I'm just gonna double check this because brussel sprouts are a bit weird. Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put them in here for sure. But they're also astringent. So anything that is going to help you lose weight is going to go in this astringent category. But they're also sulfurous. So they have some pungency.

It depends how you cook them. It really does. But we're going to put them in a stringent because that's where it is in my some things will have two things. So let's go with a stringent what else is a stringent? Anything that makes your mouth pucker? There's going to be a stringent line.

Yep, limes, lemons sour. It's also sour. Yep. Which one did I put that in? It, it will do that too. Yeah, I would say grapefruits are going to go here but we also put them in sour.

Lemons are sour, too. Yeah. And they're also stringent. So some things will have to to taste together, usually lemons are going to go under the the more sour because they're kind of heating. Okay, so let's go with more stringent. Okay, beans, lentils so this is why beans and lentils are such great diet food because they're if you just cook them and eat them on their own they'll have a chalky tech kind of mouthfeel so chalky puckering.

That's all astringent tastes. Spinach. Yep. Yeah, raw spinach. more bitter. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, let's put that in here. So see how when when we're thinking even though These foods were tasting them with our minds right? We're trying to recall what does that taste like really and starting to do that when I first started learning I your VEDA I would eat a meal with my with my accent and it would be okay what do you taste? And and we play this game and what what it tastes like what's the other qualities because our body doesn't look at food under a microscope. Our body goes by the quality set it takes in we're made up of all the elements that we see around us earth, water, fire, air and ether which is more like space, desire or requires more. Most of our foods are gonna fall into the sweet category including a lot of meat.

Now, astringent meats, anyone know what an astringent meat? What's that? What's something that's recommended on diets tuna, tuna and white chicken meat both of those will have more stringency to it than say the dark chicken meat. But most meats are categorized as sweet. Some will have a bit more pungent like gay. So when you say something's gamey deer moose that will have lamb will have more of a pungent taste to it.

But if you chew beef, if you chew a piece of beef until it's almost liquid, if not liquid, which is what we're supposed to do not swallow big chunks. But if you do that you will taste how it becomes sweet if you keep tuning in, so that does have an Aveda quality. food in three categories. It's the effect in the mouth, the effect in the gut and the post digestive effect. So there is a very detailed as to what each food will do for the body. Okay, so I'm going to move us along what's pungent that can be the difficult.

Mushrooms are pungent. Yep. And Sherry said chilies earlier and that's right. And without pungent onions, yeah. Garlic. I don't hear that well so yellow and green peppers.

Peppers are astringent depends how you crop them to so this is where cooking can change. things right. But if this is often This is also why peppers are recommended for people with arthritis. So if you're going towards dry arthritis, this is not a good category for you. You don't want to have a lot of astringent in your diet. Because if you ever bite into a green pepper, and you know that kind of Krispies spritzee kind of feeling in the mouth, it does that quality will do the same thing in your joints.

So if your joints are already drying out, you've got cold dry arthritis, there's three kinds of arthritis, if you have the cold dry according to Ayurveda is very different than modern medicine. And this is why some medications will work for one group of people with that disease, but not for a whole other group of people. So It's treating you know more about arthritis. That's due to too much stringency in the diet. Not enough sweet oiliness in the food in the cooking. So peppers have that a stringent quality to them.

They're very good for someone who has excess in the body who wants to disperse accumulated fats, right. So that's where stringent is very, very helpful if you're wanting to lose some weight. Let's Okay, so let's keep going with pungent we have let's think about spices here. Close, under pungent and you're going to get introduced today if you don't know it is Assa Fujita. That's another very very pungent paprika falls in here. Yeah.

The girl looks in here for sure. Okay. So salty. Let's do salty. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And hopefully sea salt. Not the table salt that's been bleached in and stripped of its minerals. So Oh yeah. It could be. I would think charge is going to go a little more in the bitter though. Most of your greens are going to go down here in bitter so kale, charge.

Dandelions, dandelion. Yeah. And we'll talk about what all these tastes do. For the body, but of course bitters as often medicine is bitter. Right? Because we've gone too far in these other directions usually sweet, salty, sour.

So bitter is what will bring us back into balance the Chinese have pill that's called the six tastes pill. And when someone's gone out into balance in any one of these directions, or if it's early on, they'll be given that six taste pill to bring them back. Okay, so with bitter we also have a plant is in here. One vegetable that I'm yet found a recipe that I like, What's something that most of us do every day? That is better? Yes.

Ding ding ding winder there all right coffee. Tomato punching. Well, here depends on the tomato they're often going up here and sour. Mm hmm yeah, that that right. There used to be sweet. They used to have more sweet sour to them, but they bred them for looks rather than taste.

Unfortunately our farmers have done a grave disservice to us in except for lovely organic farmers one think of anything else it's salty. What did I What did you used to eat by the paper? sheets of paper when you write? Yeah, which is a seaweed? Yeah. So my daughter grew up on lots of seaweed.

Choose to eat sheets Nori, like first snack. She was rarely rarely, rarely sick. Hardly ever. I thought she missed much except the chicken pox that went in there. Yeah, that was the only time I used to give her a day off school every once in a while because she never had one off for being sick. Salty tuna is also going to fall in here.

Too stringent but salty soy sauce which is a fermented traditionally it's a fermented food. Oh, cottage cheese falls in here. Strangely enough. Yeah. And of course, there's cheeses that are salty, right. sour cherries.

Yep. sour cherries. Yeah. So we have some fruits that are going to come into here. Sour apples. Yogurt, yes.

Okay. Okay, pickles, sell fermented foods are often a bit or sour off also sometimes pungent, right? wine vinegar. Okay, so there's some more on here that you'll get in your handout. And this is a great chart for you to start to identify and when you have a food you can say oh yeah, now I can start to taste that sweet. As also ghee is in there, which we'll be making today.

And cinnamon. I had a very unbalanced one of the first unbalanced Vietnamese dishes. The singer Singapore noodles and had so much cinnamon in it that it was just sickening sweet. So I went and asked for some lines so I could squeeze them Over to balance the dish a bit, you know, so I could eat it but cinnamon is also has some pungency to it has some heat to it. Yeah. But it will.

So when we're tasting things, we're kind of what is its main flavor, what is its main quality? But there's there's often secondary. Yeah, you're right. The sweet taste is classified as Earth water and will because it builds body tissue. So anything that's kind of, they'll have, it'll have some dampness to it. It has moisture, and it has building quality, nourishing quality for the body.

So here we have identified examples of the different tastes. And here we're looking at what those tastes actually do for the body. So This suite builds tissue so that's why a lot of foods for babies are sweet. A lot of your greens are going to fall in here as well. So often the first food that babies have will be softly cooked grains softly cooked sweet vegetables right? You're not going to feed a baby something sour.

In fact, I remember the first time that my daughter took a piece of lemon at a restaurant and put it in her mouth and she made this face that was like and their eyes open like this right? so sour wakes you up. And that's why for a long time I will go for the sour taste and I cooked too much with the tastes was too much sour. Because with the with the thyroid issues, that sour taste kind of wakes me up, right. So It's sour is stimulating. I try not to jump around too much but I get on the tangent I have Vata temperament I learned quickly I forget easily that's why I consult and also the bottom will tend to jump around a little bit and the Vata is related more to air and astringent air and ether.

So, too much stringent, too much sour you start to will go towards more Vata imbalances and arthritis is one of those. So to call Remember I said I was too cool to dry, that tendency of someone with more air constitution. Now, I don't mind Constitution itself is more try dosha because all three but my condition got to be more excess air because of food and lifestyle. Sour. What do you think sour is? So we have the elements of Earth.

Fire water. We've got Earth and water. We have air and ether. What do you think sour is? Yep. Why would you say that Sherry fire because it would like the acidity volume.

Mm hmm yeah. creaky Yep, that's exactly. So when you take something sour and it it's heating. If you've ever had a real sour lemonade, you might notice that you have a little bit of sweat here. You have any foods that are to swap too much sour. Just notice that you start to feel warm.

And so it's classified as fire and also as earth because it will also build tissue. It's stimulating it feels the appetite. So that's how it This builds tissue by giving nourishment. This will build tissue by stimulating the appetite and making eat more. So I once made some borscht when I was first from a recipe and it was too sour. And I couldn't stop eating.

Because number one, I love beets. But because it wasn't balanced enough, it was too sour. I just couldn't eat it need it need it was like I can't stop eating this. And my ex tasted it and he said it's too sour. No wonder you can't stop eating it. That didn't have enough sweet to it.

Add some sweet and then it became oh now I'm satisfied okay sours also anti flatulent. So it will and part of that is because it stimulates digestion. So anything that stimulates digestion is going to help increase the enzymatic action in your gut. Right. And so it will help you to digest and and therefore you won't have as much gaff. So often an Ayurveda a little squeeze a lemon on things at the end or a little squeeze, align that your astringent and your sour and that will help to balance a dish that otherwise it's just going to be sweet and salty.

Right. Okay, so bye Sour Gasper Yeah, that's Um, well, and a lot of, we're going to do a lot of digestive spices today too. So if you're having gas, you got to pay attention to that because that's a sign that you're not digesting your food well. And that's going to lead to disease in overtime. So every once in a while you might eat something that doesn't sit well and you have some gas, but you shouldn't be farting all day long. So people here think that that's normal.

Bloating, gas is not normal. It's a sign of digestive problems. And and most chronic diseases start with a change in digestion, a problem with elimination, right? So in all your VEDA, you're always paying attention to your stool. The color Your urine and how things are digesting. If you can't digest it something doesn't matter how healthy it is, you shouldn't be that.

You got to figure out either how to cook that food with digestive spices so that you can eat it. Or you need to avoid it until your digestion is stronger. So there's a lot going on now with gluten free, dairy free, take this out of the diet bad out of the diet. This is bad. No food is bad. Every real food is going to be therapeutic for someone's condition just depends who you are.

But nothing is good for you if you can't digest it. So that's a great gift that we have from India is all these digestive spices like cumin, coriander, fennel, fenugreek. All of those spices are very helpful especially when you're going to eat a lot of beans. lentils, beans without cumin are basically in digestible. So we want to use those therapeutically. So we can easily digest those foods because they're very good for us if we can digest them.

Okay, so let's look at what the salty taste does. Who's ever had too much salt? And what happens if you had too much salt? Yeah, yeah. So it can cause water retention, which can be a good thing if you are to shout it out. Yep, to dry.

Yep. So salty is good there. We require salt. The heart needs salt. For every drop of urine that you secrete. There's a molecule of sodium that goes with with it.

So most people in home cooking will not use enough salt, because they're afraid of it because of high blood pressure and crazy things like that. If you're using table salt then yeah, be afraid. So get yourself some good quality sea salt. Some Himalayan sea salt is lovely. There's lots of good quality sea salts on the market. But if you've got table salt, I mean that could be good for cleaning something.

Otherwise get rid of it. Don't put it in your body. It's been bleached the minerals have been taken out of it. And that's what's causing a lot of the problems with salt. Is it improve bone density. It has a specific action on the kidney.

So it stimulates kidney function. It's also somewhat building to the body like without salt There's essential functions of the heart, that's just not going to work well. So everything affects bone density. A lack of balance will affect bone density, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So for sure. Too much salt is a is an issue. If it gets out of the balance, you're going to get things like gray hair. Or think of all dry shriveled. Right? So the skin's gonna get to dry out baldness and it will contribute to bleeding disorders.

Where too much sweet. So it is going to cause too much buildup of tissue, right? So and then you're going to go towards things like diabetes that's too much sweet. So if anyone is Who's going towards diabetes? my axe always used to say never let the sweet taste stay in your mouth. If you've got a sweet taste in your mouth You better get rid of it somehow.

So you got to take something that's balancing to that either more salty and preferably you want to go for better. So when my mother was about to go into diabetic coma, she started eating the peels of grapefruit. Now how bitter that is, and then credibly credibly bitter so she was making a last ditch attempt to try to balance herself when she was in extreme excess. So the body is always intelligent and always trying to help you out. If you listen. kaleidos with increasing sour, be very beneficial.

Probably not. It. It depends. You can't just say what about kaleidos who has The client is right. This is about to person with kaleidos a cough a person or a pitch a person with politeness. 333 different.

Three different causes three different approaches. And then you have to also look, you can never just look at diet, you also have to look at the person what's going on in the noggin, and the lifestyle of the person as well right. So you have a Vata a person who's very light and dry and nervous, and they schedule themselves to the hilt and run around like a chicken with their head cut off and then they end up with kaleidos. You can't address that without addressing how they live their life. So and how they breathe. I've seen irritable bowel kaleidos a lot of a lot of digestive issues.

Get better with proper breathing. Most people aren't doing that most people it's up here all day. Right? The the there's a very damaging way to breathe for the body. So you get you get start letting the diaphragm descend getting movement through the whole digestive tract all day long. That's a very different way to be in the body and be connected with the body then this rabbit fight or flight breathing that most people are doing in in our culture.