You can eat right, exercise regularly, take vitamins and herbal supplements, even meditate to get rid of stress—but in our modern industrial age, this still may not be enough to stay healthy. More and more, research suggests that reducing environmental toxins is a necessity. Hazardous industrial chemicals absorbed by the body have been linked to…

Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition that affects an estimated 10 million people, mostly women, in the United States alone. It is characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain, concentration issues, fatigue, sleep problems and mood swings. The severity of the symptoms varies from person to person. People who suffer from fibromyalgia are not actually more sensitive to stimulus…

When you sit down to eat, slowly savoring the blends of spices and sauces in your freshly cooked meal, instantaneous messages from your taste buds prepare your stomach for digestion. Tasting and smelling food triggers our salivary glands and digestive “juices”. Without them, our stomachs wouldn’t be ready for food, and we’d have trouble digesting…

During the heat of the summer, most people can benefit from a skin care approach that pacifies Pitta dosha. The exception is for those who find themselves with excessively oily skin all year: they may benefit from a Kapha pacifying approach, even in the summer months. KNOWING YOUR SKIN TYPE Vata Vata skin is generally…

Meditation, Yoga and other “mind-body interventions” (MBIs) has been shown to reverse the damaging effects of stress and anxiety on the level of our DNA. When our body becomes stressed, our sympathetic nervous system (SNS) goes into survival mode and tells our body to increase the production of a molecule called Nuclear Factor kappa B,…

According to Ayurveda, the eyes are the seat Alochaka Pitta, one of the five subdoshas of Pitta. Pitta governs heat, metabolism and transformation. Whenever our eyes are open, they are involved in the complex process of transforming light into ideas: distilling foreground from background, recognizing objects presented in a wide range of orientations, and accurately interpreting…

Menopause occurs when the ovaries stop producing large amounts of estrogen and progesterone, two hormones intimately involved with the menstrual cycle. Modern medicine tends to view this process as an unhealthy state of deficiency. This is because certain diseases have been shown to be related to the lack of hormones in a woman’s body. For…

With the fullness of summer comes bustling farmers’ markets and overflowing shelves in the fruit and vegetable sections of our grocery stores. It is the time of the year when the availability of local produce is at its peak. Indulge! Studies have shown that eating seven or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day…

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among American men. In addition, prostate enlargement is found in 50 percent of American men in their sixties, and up to 90 percent of men in their seventies and eighties. While modern science claims that the specific cause of prostate cancer is unknown, the traditional view from Ayurveda…

Ayurveda complements the modern medical approach to migraine, cluster and tension headaches by introducing subtle techniques for determining the root imbalance at the basis of headaches and providing natural approaches to removing those imbalances. There is a general agreement as to what physiological changes in the brain create headache pain. In every case there must…