What Are the Six Tastes in Ayurveda?

Vaidya Jay, in his own words · lightly edited for clarity

This is a traditional Ayurvedic teaching, recorded in a live food class. It is education, not medical advice.

Namaste and let's invite healing into our heart. And now please repeat after me. Peace for my body. Peace in my mind. Peace always surrounding my soul. Thank you. My student said that I look like a vegetable vendor. So, it's so true. I added a word sophisticated. Sophisticated vegetable vendor. That's what. Otherwise, you'll be wearing a tank top. That'll be the down-to-earth vendor. All right. So, in the Ayurvedic meal planning, there is a core concept that we call as Shadrasa. Six tastes. Now, first of all, as a society that is affluent, we have brought in some affluence in our diet choices and taste choices as well.

Slowly, we have gravitated towards affluent sweet, affluent salty. So, these are the two tastes that have completely transformed our food. So, our choice of food is not how, yes, of course, how it looks, how it feels, all of that. But, finally, the bottom line is, how does it taste? Your ability to ingest totally depends on what your choice is in terms of taste. Right? So, when we talk about these two affluent tastes, which is sweet and salty, if you look at, there are a number of studies which show the connection between sweet, salty, and fat […] We only talk about calories, cut down calories, cut down calories.

Nobody talks about, think about the taste, look at the taste, what is the person eating? Nobody tastes that. That, I think, is the secret of Ayurvedic meal planning. Right? So, six tastes are not for just ticking, okay, I ticked off sweet, I ticked off salty, I ticked off bitter. No. It's all about bringing the ultimate satisfaction when you're done with food. Right? Because we just not eat with, you know, bodies. We are eating with our sense organs, with our mind. Right? So, all of them have to get satisfied. Otherwise, either your sense organ will have a little craving left out, or your mind and emotions may have a little craving that's left out.

And then after you finish a meal, you still are looking for something to eat. So, Ayurveda has recognized, hey, there is some, you know, deep connection to how we make our food satisfied with our taste. So, summer, the vegetables are abundant. Right? So, let me do this. I'm going to allow one more student here online. Okay. So, in here, I have vegetables that are of six tastes. You know, people may ask, oh my gosh, who has a time in the world to cook six tastes? But it is not that difficult.

Right? My point here is, our goal should be to make our diet as simple as possible. And how can we satisfy our body, mind, and spirit by adding all the six tastes. Okay? So, that's when our tissues get nourished. So, the doshas, the vata, pitta, and kapha get to their normal functional abilities. And then, the waste products gets moved out of the body. See? Because in Ayurveda, we think about what is coming in, how is its process, and how is it eliminated? Because nothing can stagnate in the body. Ultimately, everything has to work through, give us the energy and strength and immunity and vitality.

And it has to leave. Nothing can stay inside. Right? So, given that, the six tastes are something that Ayurveda has been talking for 5,000 years, if not even longer. So, let's look into and explore, summer being the time to have all kinds of vegetables. Can we make our meals with six tastes just from our vegetables? Okay? Some of them are going to be exotic. Okay? So, like this Jurassic-looking thing. This thing, which you are seeing here, which looks out of the world, coming from like an asteroid or something like that, is bitter melon.

This is exotic. Okay? At the same time, common ones like potatoes. Right? Potatoes are very common. We are looking at what do they taste like. Tomatoes. Right? Carrots. Right? We have, definitely, I'll keep asking you, what is this, what are these tastes? Ginger. Can you recognize what are these? Plantains. Yes. Raw bananas or, you know, vegetable bananas or even, you know, like plantains. But these are cooking type. So, again, this and this may be a little exotic. But at the same time, this is a semi-exotic one. This is a part of this bottle gourd.

Kind of a, kind of a, so I'm showing you what is available and how these can be, you know, used in making a meal plan. Okay? So, what are we going to do? Whenever we lack a taste, that is, we're making a meal, your biggest support, health support, will be taking spices. So, you can make anything taste slightly preferred taste by adding some specific type of spice into it. So, that's the secret. So, you have a vegetable and you want to dominate that with a specific taste. The way to do it is to add a little bit of extra spice.

And the spice gives you not only the flavor, but also that taste that you are looking for. So, let's go. Let's quiz ourselves here. What do you think zucchini's taste is? Nowadays, I'm really obsessed with zucchini. And when I'm just driving, this song comes into my mind. Zook, zook, zook, like that. So, if somebody... So, sweet and bitter, sweet and... Remember, the vegetables change their taste when you cook them. So, originally, these are actually astringent and slightly bitter. Astringent and bitter. So, what happens is, when you cook them, they slightly turn into a sweet...

That's why you'll say, oh, zucchini like cucumber, it's slightly sweet, but astringent. Many people, we have actually forgotten what is astringent taste. Let's define what does it feel like. If you eat something, your mouth completely dries out and it feels like your mouth got sucked. It's like puckering your mouth. That's astringent. Remember that. Nobody will say, oh, astringent, what is this taste? Because we have moved so far and away from these tastes because the food revolution, revolution of food is adding more sugar, more salty. Sugar and salty. And the astringent is a taste that actually cleanses us, right?

Many a times, if you take astringent as a taste, best example is black tea, green tea. What happens, even coffee to some extent is a little bit of bitter and astringent. Remember, we don't drink coffee or tea for its taste. We either drink coffee or tea for its flavor and how it makes us feel, right? That's why it's important that we recognize vegetables that have these tastes and incorporate them in our meal planning, okay? So, zucchini, definitely astringent, slightly bitter, cooked when it is sweet. Now, of course, bitter melons are bitter.

I don't have to tell you. So, if you want to get a bitter melon, either you need to go to an Indian store or Vietnamese store or an Asian store like, you know, Chinese 99 Ranch Markets. They will have bitter melon for you. So, you can try it out. Now, other bitter-taste vegetables. Can you give me some examples here? Arugula. Okay, I love that. Arugula as a green is slightly bitter. Yes, then. Anything else? Radicchio. Oh, yeah. Radicchio. Radicchio is such crisp bitter. That's what I call it. Crisp bitter. That and to some extent, if you want to add escarole.

The, the, the, yes. Escarole. Then, if you want to say even endives, to some extent are bitter. Now, ask me how many people are crazy about radicchio or arugula, right? Me. I like that. No. Thank you. So, bitter taste is also a cleansing taste. So, what we are missing out in our meal planning is the gunk, gunk cleaning tastes, right? Gunk cleaning means astringent and bitter are cleaning the gunk out of our body, right? We never think about them as these satisfying tastes. We think, oh, they are so nasty. I can't stomach them.

So, people stay away from them, right? So, if you see the ancient cultures where health is a little more important than the taste, you still see they have been incorporated. Like, if you go to Chinese cuisine, there is pork with, with bitter melon, right? If you come to India, we have bitter melon vegetable. Pretty much throughout the summer, we'll have bitter melon. At least three or four times a week, we'll have this. So, then I want to ask you, of course, carrots. What do you think? Sweet. Sweet. How about this?

The raw banana. Exactly. That's why I chose some tastes that are astringent because when you're in summer, what happens is you sweat a lot. When you sweat a lot, the blood and lymph become more and more concentrated. When they get concentrated, […] So, our vegetable choices like this, like this, is to make sure that we help the water and fluid to retain a little bit inside the body by astringent, right? By astringent, you also achieve another goal. That is, you try to bring the fluids from the periphery towards the urinary system because urine gets concentrated.

Urine becomes more yellow when you pee in summer because it has got more concentrated urine and that puts strain on the kidneys. So, what are you doing? You're eating astringent food to stop the fluids from constantly evaporating from the skin, bringing into the gut and then bringing into, not gut, but into the circulation and bringing it to the urinary system. By doing that, you have less concentrated fluids in the body, right? So, that's very important. Otherwise, people, if they don't eat like this in near the, you know, equator, if they don't eat astringent, if they don't eat bitter, […] because they have to, you know, keep their urinary system hydrated, right?

So, that's why we have these vegetables which are excellent to keep them. So, again, in my garden, we go grow most of the, you know, this is not from my garden, by the way, but this is from my garden, right? So, so, bottle gourd can be grown anywhere. So, this is also sweet astringent, right? Hmm. So, tomatoes, sour, sweet, sour, sweet, sour, sweet, sour, sweet, right? And the secret of another, you know, Ayurvedic meal planning or any ethical meal planning used to have timely introduction of herbs. So, they have, they have spices, they have herbs to enhance the metabolic process because ultimately, as we talked about this, you know, every meal should be focused on keeping our metabolism intact, clean, working to its best capacities, right?

Most of us, what we do after eating, we don't care for what our metabolism is doing. We just eat because it's time to eat, right? We have to move on. We have to graduate from, yeah, I'm eating just I'm hungry. No, that's more like an animal behavior. We have to evolve to humans and then to superhumans, right? By choosing, by looking at what our meal is. Now, there is something that is a little more exotic here. What is this? What is it? I can't see. I can't see. Yes. Tamarind. Tamarind is.

Oh, tamarind. Yes. Sour. Again. Yes. And sweet. A little. A little bit. When you, when you harvest it in the beginning, if it is not, if it is not dark like this, it'll be sweet. When it's brownish. When it is brownish. When it becomes dark, it'll become sour. It's more sour. Okay. So we have that. And then I also have some jaggery, which is sweet. So I'm going to show you how we incorporate all six tastes in a meal plan. Okay. So six tastes enhanced with, oh, I also have something to show you.

I have rice flour. I have the chickpea flour. Rice flour is sweet. Chickpea flour is astringent. Yeah. Right. We can combine them in different ways while making a preparation. I'm going to use some of it. And also sometimes we talk about, here I have examples of flax. Flax is sweet astringent, whereas buckwheat, which is also a grain, is sweet astringent as well. Okay. So all of these are excellent for us to know what taste I'm eating, how much quantity is appropriate in what season. Right. So different sweeteners. You have honey.

Honey. You have brown sugar. You have coconut sugar. You also have regular sugar. When to use them, how much to use them, also plays a role. So we do in Ayurveda honor all tastes. Right. It is not preference to one or two tastes. Let me tell you this. What happens if one eats sweet and salty in their meal as a preferred taste? And they don't have much of astringent or sour, bitter or even pungent. What happens? Guess. What happens when you're eating? Mind tricks them. And it tells, hey, you're eating only two tastes and I'm missing out on four tastes.

Add, add, take more of the, add more of these tastes. Consume excess of sweet. Consume excess of salt. To make up for lacking taste. Can you believe that? Right. That's what happens. So try this out. Make a meal. Take, don't, don't presume that whatever Vaidya Jay is saying, great. No. Take it out. And you will say that this is definitely something that you have never thought about. Okay. So you can also add. Yes, yes, yes. […] go ahead. [Student:] So when we are discussing taste, like for bitter melon, we know exactly it is bitter.

But for a thing like plantain, we cannot taste it raw. So how do we determine the taste of that fruit? And also, how do we know the vipaka of a certain vegetable or a fruit? [Vaidya Jay:] So the taste, ideally, you should take a small piece of it before, when you cut the vegetable, before cooking. Usually Indian mothers do this. Yeah. They take one piece and then they'll throw it away. Wash their hand and then say, okay, the vegetable is this taste. How much, how much spice she should put on will be decided by, mentally, by just tasting a bite of what vegetable is being cooked.

So that's a must. If you don't know what that taste is, just cut a small piece of it, taste it. Now, what happens after it is digested in the body? What happens to the taste? It depends on next day what happened to your bowel. If you went after eating certain vegetable, wow, that bowel movement was great, means that taste in it is somewhat lightly salty, sweet, or sour. If you say, oh my gosh, I'm so constipated, means you took more of astringent taste. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it's, as I said, it has to be what the, what it did to the body after going through the digestive system.

Okay. So your body will tell you everything. You don't have to worry. Whatever you ate, your body will tell you next day, provided you go next day. It's more than the time, people don't go next day. They are struggling, but I'm 100% sure when you take a six-taste meal, it's like a clockwork. It works because all the gut does is to secrete right amount of mucus, right amount of digestive juices, right amount of hydrochloric acid, right? The gut bacteria get really proliferant. They're happy. They're partying. Then comes the poop. Healthy, healthy.

Okay. So here is just an overall thing. Even throughout the year, meal planning in the sense, this is not breakfast, by the way. You can't make a six meal, six-taste meal for breakfast. It's usually for lunch. Okay. Lunch in Ayurveda, lunch is the biggest meal. And we say that, yes, you need to do this for a meal. How about breakfast? We'll talk about another day. Okay. So, any questions at this point? [Student:] Vaidya ji asked a question that, I think I missed it. Were you saying that if we don't include all the six tastes, we may crave that taste afterwards?

Or is it just because it wasn't complete, we may be searching for something afterwards? [Vaidya Jay:] Both. One, the mind tricks you to eat whatever taste you're eating. Let's say you're eating a salty thing, and it'll make you eat more of it. Because it's compensating for what is missing. Number two, after finishing, let's say you mindfully said, oh, I'm eating too much of this. Then after 30 minutes later, you're searching for something in the cabinet again. Interesting. Thank you. Because you made the choice, you controlled your mind, but the satisfaction was not achieved.

You're not satiated. Exactly. That's the word. You're not satiated. Right? How many times do you hear that word from anybody? Satiety. Nobody talked about Satiety. What is that word? Satiety means feeling a sense of, yes, I'm done with my meal consumption. My ritual of consuming is done. That brings about Satiety. Okay? All right. Then we have, because I chose all these, because summer is a great time, and I wanted to show you, even in vegetables, we have all these six tastes. We don't have to resort to, oh, sweet has to be like a pudding.

Carrots, potatoes. Mm-hmm. Sweet. Doesn't have to be always a sweet dessert to eat. Okay? So that's what I wanted to tell you. Summer is celebration of vegetables. Okay? And you will see that every part of your gut thrives when you add. I'm not saying it should be completely plant-based, preferably plant-based, because in summer, we lose our metabolic capability to almost half. In winter, it's 100%. It will digest anything. In summer, it comes down. So heavy meals are to be avoided, and then six tastes can be done just with the vegetables.