Eating healthy but still feeling bloated, heavy, or sluggish?
It’s not always what you eat sometimes, it’s how you combine or consume your food that could be slowing down your digestion, how you combine or consume your food that could be slowing down your digestion.
Enter Viruddha Ahara Ayurveda’s ancient wisdom on incompatible food combinations. This concept has been extensively detailed in Ayurvedic texts like Bhavaprakasha Nighantu proving that mindful food pairing isn’t just tradition. it’s smart gut science.
Bhavaprakasha categorizes and gives examples of foods that are incompatible based on their, taste (Rasa), quality (Guna), potency (Virya), post-digestive effect (Vipaka) and specific action (Prabhava).
Simply put, certain foods, because of their individual properties when eaten together or at the wrong time can disturb your body’s natural balance (Vata, Pitta, Kapha) weaken digestion (Agni) and create toxins (Ama).
Why Should You Care about your Food?
Because wrong food combinations or consumption habits don’t just mess with digestion over time, they can lead to:
- Gas & bloating
- Acidity & Heartburn
- Gut inflammation
- Toxin build-up (Ama)
- Long-term health issues
The good news? It’s totally fixable.
By making just a few simple tweaks to how you pair, prep, or time your meals, you can give your gut the support it needs.
Let’s break down the different types of Viruddha Ahara (aka food incompatibility mistakes) along with easy, everyday fixes to keep your digestion smooth and stress-free.