NEW YORK — Travis Eliot, an online subscription yoga instructor who also is a practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine, wants you to put down your cup of cold water.
Ayurvedic medicine is a health and wellness discipline believed to have originated in India more than 3,000 years ago. Some of its tenets have no correlation in western medicine and have not been tested with the western scientific method.
As we move into fall and the temperatures drop, Eliot said people need to keep their Ayurveda digestive fire strong.
“In Ayurvedic medicine, the digestive fire is known as ‘Agni,’” he told the PIX11 Morning News team on Thursday. “The stronger the fire is, the better our overall health and well-being. Get rid of the cold beverages and start drinking ginger tea, warm apple cider, things like that.”
Limes also provide several health benefits.
“According to the yogic tradition, lemon is considered to be subtly aggravating. Whereas lime is considered to be superior. It evokes calmness, clarity, purity in both the body and the mind,” Eliot said.
Eliot, who founded the video subscription online site Inner Dimension TV with his wife Lauren Eckstrom, believes fruit should be eaten separately from other foods by at least 30 to 40 minutes. His concern is that eating foods with different digestive times cause toxins to build up in the body, which can lead to illness.
“The reason is because fruit requires a unique subset of digestive enzymes and acids in order to break them down,” he said. “So you want to separate your fruit … to avoid increasing toxins within the tissue of the body.”
There is no western scientific standard supporting Eliot’s view. Some dietitians warn that eating fruit alone may result in sugars entering the bloodstream too quickly, a potential risk for diabetics.
There is some western science that coincides with Eliot’s suggestion to sleep on your left side to aid digestion.
“When you sleep on your left side you’re actually going with gravity instead of going against gravity … and then your food waste can move more effectively from your small intestine to your large intestine,” Eliot said.
A study published in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology found that the length of time people suffered from acid reflux incidents was significantly reduced when study participants slept on their left side, although the number of incidents was not significantly reduced.