The Ayurvedic Approach to Balancing Blood Cholesterol

THE AYURVEDA PERSPECTIVE ON CHOLESTEROL

Ayurveda is the extraordinary mind-body medicine of India. With its great yogic tradition, offers a tremendous resource for bringing wholeness to all levels of our existence. It is one of the world’s oldest and most complete systems of natural healing, containing great wisdom for all humanity, that all of us should know about. 

Ayurveda has a unique perspective on achieving healthy cholesterol levels, one that is holistic and rooted in diet and lifestyle.  

This article sheds light on the reasons cholesterol can become imbalanced so easily, and the best Ayurvedic advice for balancing blood cholesterol. 

The Ayurveda view of the mind and body and how it functions is based on a combination of the following:

• The three primal qualities (gunas), namely sattvas, rajas, tamas.
• The five elemental qualities (panchabhutas)
• The fundamental governing physiological principles (doshas). There are three doshas, namely, Vata, Pitta and Kapha.
• The seven tissue elements that support and sustain the body (dhatus). These are nutritive fluid (rasa dhatu), blood plasma (rakta dhatu), flesh and muscle (mamsa dhatu), fat (meda dhatu), bone (asthi dhatu), bone marrow (majja dhatu), and reproductive tissue (shukra dhatu).
• Metabolic impurities (malas), namely the body’s wastes of urine, faeces, and sweat.
• The different functions of awareness through consciousness, intelligence, mind, ego and self.

Therapies are twofold: outer and inner. Outer therapies are linked with physical modalities, such as diet, herbs and massage. Inner therapies work through subtle impressions such as light (colour), aroma, taste, and sound (mantra) healing therapies.

In the Ayurvedic tradition, cholesterol itself is not mentioned, but rather the Ayurvedic texts discuss lipid tissue (meda dhatu) and explain how to maintain a healthy quantity and quality of fat tissue in the body. 

Fat tissue (meda dhatu), is one of the seven body tissues (dhatus). 

Balanced and healthy meda dhatu subsequently helps to maintain balanced cholesterol.

BALANCE: THE KEY TO HEALTHY DIGESTION AND CHOLESTEROL 

To understand how to maintain healthy fat tissue (meda dhatu), you first need to understand that balance is the main principle of Ayurveda. 

A moderate lifestyle, diet and daily routine upholds balanced functioning of the body, mind and senses, and spills over into every aspect of life, such as maintaining peacefulness in the mind, having a blissful consciousness, and balanced control over the senses.  These are all so vital for a person’s overall wellbeing.

The principle factor behind balance in the body is having a balanced digestive fire (Agni). Digestion is quite literally the basis for good health in every part of the body.

The creation of healthy body tissue (dhatu) requires a brightly-burning digestive fire, namely, the metabolic process. A strong agni is equally important for maintaining balance in the doshas, the body tissues (dhatus) and metabolic wastes (malas).Thus, when digestion, assimilation and elimination are balanced, the tissues, including fat tissue and cholesterol will also be balanced.

It is important to understand that fat tissue in itself is not bad, and is actually essential for the body to function properly. When digestion is balanced and healthy, then the body produces the right amount of cholesterol, in the right proportion to nourish the body. 

HOW CHOLESTEROL BECOMES UNBALANCED

Digestion depends on the strength of the digestive fire (agni). The digestive fire is sustained with the fuel of wholesome foods and drinks. If we eat too little, or if we consume unwholesome food and drinks, the digestive fire dwindles.

There are 13 agnis that work together in the digestive process.:

• First, the food is metabolised by the main digestive fire (jathar-agni), located in the stomach and duodenum. The main digestive fire, Jathara agni helps to break down food. 
• Next it is metabolised by the five elemental fires located in the liver (bhuta-agnis).
• Finally, it is metabolised by the seven dhatu-agnis, located in the seven tissues. 

These 13 types of fires form the metabolism and digestive system in the body.

Thus, when we consume fatty or oily food, it is also metabolised by these 13 fires, in a sequential process. 

• The main digestive fire, Jathara agni helps to break down the food. 
• The elemental fires, bhuta agnis help to screen toxins and ensure that the food is transformed into healthy, good-quality body tissue. 
• The tissue fires, dhatu agnis help transform the food into their respective tissues.

So the strength of the various digestive fires is needed for all the tissues to be formed properly, including the fat tissue. 

When the production of fatty tissue (meda dhatu) is disturbed, the quantity (amount and proportion) and quality (contents) of meda dhatu are also disturbed. In other words, because cholesterol is one of the contents of lipid tissue, the production of cholesterol becomes imbalanced when meda dhatu is imbalanced.

MAIN CAUSES OF IMBALANCED DIGESTION

The causes of imbalanced digestion fall into three categories, namely: mental, physical and environmental. 

Mental causes include too much mental activity or pressure at work, home or socially, as well as emotional factors such as jealousy, competitiveness, anger, worry, sorrow, or greed.

Physical causes include eating too much (above one’s digestive capacity), eating too little (below one’s digestive capacity), or eating incompatible food (against one’s digestive capacity). Other physical causes include eating before the previous meal has been digested; eating irregular amounts at irregular times of the day; eating while suffering from indigestion; suppressing natural urges; constipation; and emaciation.

Environmental causes include eating the wrong foods for the climate or season, as well as eating foods polluted with toxins.

THE LIVER’S ROLE

The liver plays a pivotal role in keeping fat tissue healthy and balancing cholesterol. It is important to understand that the liver not only produces cholesterol, but it is also an integral part of the digestive system. It is the place where toxins are screened before they enter the bloodstream. If the liver becomes overloaded with toxins, arising from certain mental, physical and environmental factors, its functioning can become impaired. 

When this happens, it disturbs the 13 types of digestive fires (agnis). This results in one of three types of imbalances: 

• An increase in fatty tissue (meda dhatu)
• A decrease of fatty tissue (meda dhatu)
• Fatty tissue (meda dhatu) mixed with toxins (ama) 

When fatty tissue (meda dhatu) mixes with toxins (ama), it changes the quality of the fat tissue and the quality of cholesterol, making it unhealthy rather than healthy. This mixing of ama with fat tissue is the main cause of imbalanced cholesterol. And it is the liver (yakrit) that is responsible for qualitative digestion, i.e. the quality, or purity, of the fat tissue and hence the quality of the cholesterol that is being produced.

HOW TOXINS AFFECT DIGESTION

Digestion

Your digestion can be 

– balanced (sama agni).

– irregular i.e. erratic (vishama agni)

– hyper-metabolism i.e. hot and sharp (tiksna agni)

– hypo-metabolism i.e. slow and heavy (manda agni) 

Ayurveda distinguishes three kinds of toxins, namely ama, amavisha amd garavisha. 

Toxicity, Ama is a sticky, foul-smelling waste product from improper or incomplete digestion that builds up in the digestive tract when your digestion is either weak or overloaded with the wrong foods. It is caused by a dull, slow digestion or by eating foods which are too heavy and difficult to digest for your constitution, such as those that are packaged, frozen, canned, fried, fatty, or leftover foods.

Ama settles first in the digestive tract and, if it continues to accumulate, mixes with the nutritive fluid (rasa) and travels throughout the body, settling in weak areas of the body.

Amavisha is a more reactive, dangerous type of ama, created when ama is present for a very long time and is not flushed out of the system and is sent to the digestive tract for more complete digestion, which includes elimination. It is the product of ama’s spread throughout the body and it’s interaction with subdoshas, or tissues (dhatus), and the waste products  (malas) of the body, causing more chronic problems which may have disastrous consequences 

If amavisha mixes with the fatty tissue, and at the same time one continues to engage in an unhealthy lifestyle or diet, it can cause an imbalance and disease in the lipid tissues. These lifestyle errors include:

Lack of exercise

Sleeping during the day 

Eating excessive amounts of fatty foods

Indulging in alcoholic drinks

For instance, imbalanced fatty tissue (meda dhatu) can distort the cardiovascular veins, called the raktavaha srotas. When they become stiff and clogged, it causes high blood pressure. If amavisha mixes with the blood and fatty tissue, it can distort and damage the channels that carry fluids of various sorts throughout the body (srotas), narrowing the veins, as in atherosclerosis.

So ama can cause all of the problems that are associated with impure lipid tissue, which in turn are associated with high cholesterol, even though it’s not the cholesterol itself that causes these problems.

Toxins also enter the body from the environment, with exposure to lead and other heavy metals, or from water or air pollution. These environmental toxins are called garvisha in Ayurveda, which translates roughly as ‘environmental pollution’. It is associated with the bioaccumulation of environmental toxins, and is the third type of toxin. 

Eating food that is grown using chemical fertilisers and pesticides, or food that is prepared with chemicals, additives, or preservatives, can also add to the toxic overload of the liver and result in disturbances to lipid metabolism.

TOXIC ACCUMULATION IN THE LIVER AND FAT TISSUE

To understand why ama accumulates in the liver and fat tissue, we need to look at how the seven tissues (dhatus) in the body are formed. 

All of the tissues are formed through a sequence of metabolic transformations, and the health and strength of each type of tissue is based on the previous one. 

As previously mentioned, one of the seven tissues (dhatus) is fat tissue (meda dhatu).

Food that you eat is converted into the nutritive fluid (rasa) and from there is transformed into blood plasma (rakta), and in a sequence converts to the flesh and muscle (mamsa), fat (meda), bone (asthi), bone marrow (majja), and finally, reproductive fluid (shukra).

If ama has accumulated in the nutritive fluid (rasa), blood plasma (rakta) or the muscle tissue (mamsa), which are all the raw materials for forming fat tissue (meda), then that ama will also be present in the fat tissue. So, this is one reason for ama in the fatty tissue: an accumulation of ama in the rasa, rakta or mamsa tissues.

A second reason is eating unhealthy types of fat, which do not nourish the body but rather create ama. 

Unhealthy fat is fat that is difficult to digest. This includes saturated fats found in meat, butter and vegetable oils. Worse types of fats which are virtually indigestible, are the trans fats, or hydrogenated vegetable oils, that are found in almost all packaged, processed and fast foods. Another type of unhealthy fat is rancid or overheated fat. (Some healthy foods contain fats which have a propensity towards rancidity more than others such as coconut and walnuts).

It’s obvious why you should not eat fats that are spoilt., however, overheating fats is just as bad. Most polyunsaturated vegetable oils (corn, sunflower, safflower, sesame) are processed with chemicals or heat, and their nutritional value is destroyed. They end up creating free radicals, contributing to oxidised fats, or cholesterol, in the body. This can happen even if you use cold-pressed oils for frying or cooking foods.

A third reason is just eating too much fat overall, even if it’s the good kind of fat. While all of these factors can cause high cholesterol, the most dangerous combination is eating large quantities of unhealthy fat, which can happen easily if you eat fast food or processed, packeted foods on a regular basis.

HOW YOUR BODY PROCESSES FAT AND TOXINS

There are two sub-doshas of Pitta, namely Pachaka Pitta and Ranjaka Pitta, that govern digestion. 

Pachaka Pitta governs the breakdown of the food in the stomach and small intestine. Ranjaka Pitta supports the five elemental fires (bhuta agnis) in the liver to effectively process fat and prevent imbalanced qualities in the body’s lipids (meda dhatu). If the fat is unhealthy, then each of these elemental fires, bhuta agnis, must scan and take care of the toxins, too.

– If it’s simple ama, the elemental fires (bhuta agnis) burn it, because heat purifies ama. 

– If it’s amavisha, the elemental fires, bhuta agni must first neutralise it, and then eliminate it from the nutritive fluid (rasa) so it doesn’t get passed on to the body tissues. 

– For the third type of toxin, garvisha, which includes toxins from chemicals, pesticides, or some other environmental causes, the elemental fires, bhuta agnis, scan and identify garvisha, and if they find it they store it elsewhere in the liver.

If the liver is functioning in a healthy way, the elemental fires, bhuta agnis, do not let these toxins pass into the body. If the liver is overloaded with too many toxins over a period of time, then it loses its ability to screen and eliminate toxins. If the garvisha (environmental toxins such as pesticides) cross the scanning barrier, they often collect in the fat tissue, leading to diseases such as breast cancer.

The body/liver acts in a very intelligent way, which is why just increasing the bile (or fuel for the agni) is not enough to lower the cholesterol, as is often thought in Western medicine. Yes, while it’s important to increase bile production, it is also important to enhance the intelligence of the liver so it can scan the foods better and eliminate toxins. Ayurveda, in balancing cholesterol, not only enhances bile production but also increases the ability of the liver to intelligently scan and eliminate toxins.

Let’s float the possibility that everything has gone fine, and ama, amavisha and garvisha are scanned and eliminated by the five elemental fires, the bhuta agnis. Then the next step is the domain of the tissue fires, the dhatu agnis, which sequentially convert the food into body tissue.

It is possible that the digestive fires of the nutrient fluid, blood plasma and muscle tissue (rasa, rakta, and mamsa dhatu agnis) will do their job, and then the digestive fire of the fatty tissue (meda dhatu agni), which converts muscle tissue into fat tissue, must perform its function next. If however, the digestive fire in the fatty tissue (meda dhatu agni) is low or out of balance, or is overloaded, then too much fat or too little fat can be created. 

Whilst current studies provide controversial conclusions regarding dietary fat intake and its associated increased risks, it is important to eat the beneficial kind of fat, and in the appropriate quantities, so the five elemental fires (bhuta agnis) and the fatty tissue digestive fire (meda agni) are not overloaded.