New Year's Gathering: Choosing Sattvic Foods for a Happy Mood
Introduction: The Spring Festival is approaching, and reunion gatherings are definitely a must. Eating right and smart can bring you a wonderful mood in the new year! Let us tell you which foods are sattvic and how to eat them. Come and learn to prepare a joyful and healthy meal for your family during the New Year, eating happily and healthily!
Ingredients are divided into meat and vegetarian categories. Fish, meat, eggs, dairy, and the five pungent vegetables are classified as non-vegetarian, while vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grains are vegetarian. This is the general understanding of food for most people. However, people with illnesses, especially those with chronic diseases or cancer patients, may start paying attention to the acid-alkaline balance of food, as many people tell them that eating too much meat makes the body acidic, leading to fatigue and a weaker immune system.
So, which foods are acidic and which are alkaline? This also confuses many readers. Lemons and vinegar taste extremely sour, yet they are alkaline foods. Rice and noodles are daily staples, but they are acidic foods.
In addition to meat/vegetarian and acid-alkaline values, knowing how to classify ingredients is also very important. Furthermore, some people describe foods in terms of "pressure." Deep-fried meat is the highest "pressure" food for the body and therefore the most detrimental to health.
Sattvic Foods Grant You a Calm Mind
What surprises everyone the most is that all mushrooms are also considered tamasic foods. This is because mushrooms grow on decaying wood or sawdust, in darkness, and possess a nature of decay and corruption. Although black fungus and enoki mushrooms are popular health foods recently, yoga practitioners tend to avoid them.
Stimulating foods, such as cola, carbonated drinks, coffee, strong tea, chocolate, pickles, kelp, and raw white radish, are classified as rajasic foods. They can cause tension, over-excitement, anger, anxiety, and even hatred and depression.
If your diet mainly consists of tamasic and rajasic foods, you might often feel restless, have mood swings, or become easily tired and lethargic.
Sattvic Foods: Grains, legumes, nuts, most vegetables and fruits, and medication-free milk and dairy products
Tamasic Foods: Fish, meat, eggs, black fungus, enoki mushrooms, alcohol, stale or spoiled food, etc.
Rajasic Foods: Cola, carbonated drinks, coffee, strong tea, chocolate, pickles, kelp, raw white radish, etc.
Sattvic foods are encouraged by yoga practitioners. These foods bring a relaxed and happy mood, making one feel energetic yet calm and peaceful, and less prone to overthinking and creating worries for oneself. All grains, legumes, nuts, and most vegetables and fruits are delightful sattvic foods.
Pure, medication-free milk and dairy products are also classified as sattvic foods, but this does not include colostrum from cows that have just given birth, as that is meant for the calves.
A new year, a new beginning. We wish you to exchange good food for true health, enjoy a wonderful life, and have a joyful mood.
You Are What You Eat
Muslims are famous for their strict dietary rules. The Quran states: "Lawful for you is the game of the sea and the food of the land... Forbidden to you are carrion, blood, and the flesh of swine, and that on which any name other than that of Allah has been invoked."
The "Tian Fang Dian Li," a book exploring Islamic culture, mentions: "Good-natured things, when eaten, can help people's morale; bad-natured things, when eaten, will erode one's good character." There are HALAL-certified foods specifically for Muslims, and Kosher-certified foods for Jewish people. The Bible, Genesis, says: "Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. I give them to you as I gave you all the plants."
In the New Testament, Luke's Gospel also records Jesus Christ's words to his believers: "If anyone welcomes you, welcome them in the same way."
Different ethnic groups have different dietary classifications and focuses. In the realm of practicing yoga and meditation, food is divided into three major categories: sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic. The human body is built from food. To allow the body, mind, and spirit to feel purity and joy simultaneously, one must eat more sattvic foods and avoid rajasic and tamasic ones. The nature of food is defined by its effects on the body and the soul, which is different from the classifications mentioned earlier.
Eating tamasic foods can easily lead to laziness, lethargy, restlessness, and a stream of delusional thoughts. Excessive tamasic food may even lead to death. Alcohol, narcotics, fish, meat, eggs, stale or spoiled food, etc., all fall into this category.