Five Types of Nutritional Disorders

Ayurveda identifies five distinct categories of nutritional disorder. The first is quantitative dietary deficiency, which is malnutrition from insufficient food or starvation. The second is qualitative dietary deficiency, which results from lack of essential nutrients and includes poor food combinations that disturb agni. The third is quantitative and qualitative over-nutrition, which includes emotional overeating and can lead to obesity, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, hypertension, heart attack, or paralysis.

The fourth type is toxins in food, including pesticides, synthetic hormones, and harmful residues that directly cause toxemia and digestive disorders. The fifth type is foods unsuitable for one's constitution, which imbalance the doshas and eventually lead to disease.

Quantitative malnutrition is rare in the West, while overeating, emotional eating, eating unsuitable foods, and consuming toxic food are extremely common worldwide. All of these create ama, the toxic residue that is considered the root cause of many diseases. A robust and balanced agni is the primary defense against all of these nutritional disturbances.