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 and 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 the sweet builds tissue, so that's why a lot of foods for babies are sweet out 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 Cook 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 it 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. So it's sour is stimulating. I try not to jump around too much but I get on a 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 Remember I said I was too cool to dry that tendency of someone with more air constitution. Now I don't my Constitution itself is more try dosha is 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 cheery 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 fuels 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. 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, sour is 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 eye or VEDA, 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? 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 radio, you're always paying attention to your stool, the color of your urine 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 and 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, it can cause water retention, which can be a good thing if you are to shut 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 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.

Too much salt is a is an issue if it gets out of balance, you're going to get things like gray hair, or think of all dry shriveled right. So the skin is going to get to dry out baldness and it will contribute to bleeding disorders. Where too much sweet. So it is going to cause too much trouble That tissue, right? So and then you're going to go towards things like diabetes, that's too much sweet. So if anyone who's going towards diabetes, my ex 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 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 access. So the body is always intelligent and always trying to help you out if you listen. It, it depends.

You can't just say what about kaleidos who has the cleitus right? This is about to person with cola As a QA person or a picture person with clients, 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 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 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. so salty is more water and fire so it's stimulating digestion as well. It's helping if you have a food that's not salty enough it's bland. Right? What is bland tastes like? Yeah, right bland.

A lot of British cooking traditional British boil the freakin vegetables to happen. Don't put anything on them. You know just just bland bland. What does a stringent do And it's cleansing because it will. It scrapes fat and it helps heal wounds. So if you think of anything that's kind of pissy bloating, astringent is going to help with that.

So today we have a cold damp day. This is going into the introduction to how your beta, but the last thing I would serve I yesterday I was thinking about making a rate which is yogurt with some raw vege and spices in as a little condiment to the meal that we're going to have today. yesterday that would have been perfect because it was a warm, sunny day. Today. We've got cold damp. The last thing I would serve today would be yogurt because it's cold and damp.

So it's going to increase mucus and phlegm and anyone who's already mucus and Flemmi and take anyone who's close to get in the cold into getting cold. So we're not having Rita yogurt today where we're going to have if if you can take it a little bit of a sour tamarind chutney along with the meal so that'll that little more sour and salty. Anything that increases mucus in the body is going to is going to increase damp usually. So breads, breads would fall into that category pasture. Even though pasture would be categorized as sweet It's also damp so it It's a it's a little more complicated but with we're talking more about cooking rather than categorizing foods in the more Earth fire water as stringent heals wounds, scrapes, fats can help avert coughs and if we look at bitter bitter is also very cleansing. Bitter is cooling.

So better is air and ether anything that's air and ether is more cooling. Anything that has fire, of course is more warming. Anything that has Earth a pungent again will be fire. Have you ever eaten a clove of raw garlic? Oh, it's hot. It burns.

It can like oh, it can really rot in your gut. If you don't have a Good strong digestion, I used to be able to eat raw garlic really easily. And because of a certain thing that's happened recently, I can't do that now. So I know my digestion has taken a bit of a hit, it needs different foods until it gets strengthened again. So if you have excess heat in your body, you're feeling hot and bothered bitters where you want to go. A lovely bitter is Aloe Vera, aloe vera gel.

So I always keep aloe vera gel on hand, particularly in the summer, if I get too hot and bothered. coulier right down, it grows in the desert, right? It's there for us in the desert when we're dehydrated, it's also he magnifying so it'll cool you down but also hydrate yourself. If you're dry. Perfect, then it grows in the in the desert. So when we start to think about, okay, where does this food grow?

You think about one of the first things that come In the spring the Chromecast saffron those little tiny What do they call the pistols pistol stamens one of the pistols are set forget. Those are so heating that if you have too much saffron you can bleed to death. It will cause internal bleeding. But you start to think about that comes up in with the snow that pretty little flower comes up in the snow with those little red. Little Red stamens in there. Well that's pretty intense.

It's an intense little flower. And then we look at pungent, pungent is fire and air. So it is warming. Warming with the fire. But what do you think areas? You ever have a fan blowing on?

Yeah, what starts to happen? You start to Yeah, yeah, it's warming and drying. In the winter time. We're now going into central heating in our homes and so we have to guard against drying quite a bit right so we want a few magnifying foods we want to put an oil up our noses on our bodies from humidifiers the ones that are on our furnace are not good enough pungent eliminates stagnation. So if you're trying to lose weight, if you have excess weight on you stagnation is part of the picture because when there's excess weight, including just around the internal organs, someone with a big belly or excess weight anywhere in the body. It's often will be it's a stagnant right even cellulite.

There's an accumulation digested foods that get deposited that makes cellulite so all the Twinkies, all the mash on cakes that I growing up, what would help take that away is things that are pungent, things like radishes, garlic, those kinds of dispersing things that will disperse fat right in the handout, it's also going to talk about what happens when you have an excess and we've kind of touched on that a little bit. But what will happen if you have an excess of astringent an excess of bitter excess of pungent sweet and salty and sour, so too much sour, you're going to get sensitivity in the teeth ears eyes drying of mucus. Too much sour will destroy semen will cause acne xima psoriasis, diarrhea edema dampness in lungs and wet cough So, too much sour in the diet, you can start to get some of these. So if you've ever drank a lot of red wine and your teeth start to hurt, some people can't drink red wine.

The teeth hurt that. Too much sour. Their general diet is probably too sour, too much astringent, you're going to get drying choking spasms gripping in the intestines. emaciation. So you see a lot of people on these raw food diets. That's a very stringent diet.

It's very, it's wonderful for someone who has an excess in their body for a very short period of time. It can be very, because it's very cleansing, but it's not nourishing enough, especially up here in a cold northern climate. You do a raw food, low fat diet up here. You're going to get into trouble pretty quickly and what we'll see start to happen is the hair starts falling out the teeth, they start getting a lot of dental issues, because it'll affect the bones for strength, it's going to go to the bones that body will start to take nutrients and minerals out of the bones because you're not feeding nourishing enough. Both iron VEDA and Chinese medicine specifically recommend against too much raw food. Raw Food is a very small amount, both in Chinese cooking and Aveda cooking little tiny bit on the side of otherwise, very well cooked foods.

So this is a fad. I always say to people, they say, Oh, this diet that I'm on trying this diet, I said so what's the system of medicine that goes along with that? What happens when you get sick on that diet? Do they have a method anything there? There's nothing right? So all of these diets can be very good for certain people at certain times, but not for the long term, long term you need balance.

Vents too much sweet eventually will drive the fire from the gut out of the body it will just dampens the digestive fire. And so the person's becomes more and more unable to have a hearty digestion. And so the treatment really has to be about building back that digestive fire, swollen lymph nodes, fungal infections, obesity. pungent too much pungent drying, kills the sperm, burning choking hiccups, skin conditions, inflammation. It's heating right so excess thirst ulcers. Too much pungent can be cancer causing and too much bitter cold.

Dryness roughness, serious deficiencies so bitter is really a medicinal quality, you're not going to have a lot of binner. Right? So what even when we have a salad with grains, we need to make sure that the dressing has enough of the other tastes to satisfy that bitter. You don't want to have a dressing that doesn't have oil in it, for example, because bitter is drying, right? So you need a lot of oil with a bitter food. There's a wonderful treatment for diabetes, which is bitter gourd in iron VEDA.

And in fact, if you're a diabetic and you start taking bitter gourd and there's a way to cook it so that makes it the bulk because otherwise it's not so that bitter. You have to really watch your insulin levels because it will lower your need for insulin quite effectively for today. to diabetes we're talking about. Okay, so let's turn the page and have a look at the tongue. We taste with our tongue and our tongue. There's a whole system of diagnosis in iron VEDA that looks at the tongue.

So often when you go to an out your Vedic doctor, they're going to look at your tongue and what's going on there. The salty as we talked about is related to the kidneys, and we're going to taste that on the back sides either side of our tongue, astringent taught defies our intestinal tract. If the intestinal tract has this pumping action, right to move the food through it towards elimination, if there's not enough astringent in the diet that can get kind of sluggish and the person won't be able to To eliminate