Mediterranean cuisine enhanced by oriental techniques in order to favor and respect the doshas, which, according to Ayurvedic medicine and philosophy, are the principles that govern the welfare of our body. This is what the award-winning chef Giacomo Gaspari proposes. Since 2007 he has been the head chef of  “la Sinfonia”, the restaurant of the world’s first 7-star hotel, the Town House Galleria, in Milan.

According to ancient Indian philosophy, the functioning of the human body depends on the balance of the doshas, which regulate and govern our physiological and metabolic system. There are three doshas – vata, pita and kapha – which arise from the five elements: ether, air, fire, water and earth. Ether and air go to form the vata principle. Fire is represented by pitta, upon which also the element of water exerts some influence. Finally, water and earth make up the kapha principle. According to Ayurvedic principles, the individual is the unique and unrepeatable expression of the combination of these three fundamental principles, the balance of which determines the various different types of our personal constitutions. “The vata is a dosha of movement – head chef Gaspari explains to us – and it is characteristic of all long-limbed persons, who love taking long walks, or marathon runners in the field of sport. Instead, those Individuals who can be classified as pita have large reserves of explosive energy. They often have brilliant ideas and they point directly at their objectives. In sports they are sprinters. Finally, kapha people are calm and tolerant. They are big boned, physically strong and robust, and are inclined to practice sports that require strength such as boxing, weightlifting, discus throwing, etc.”

Mr. Gaspari, you combine food and nutrition with the philosophy of the doshas. Can you explain what this means in concrete terms?

I like to offer tailor-made cooking and I am able to do this thanks to various questions that I ask the guests, so as to find out what they need. To find harmony between the spirit, the body and the mind and attain psychological well-being it is good to follow the indications of the doshas: with a little test I can understand the characteristics of the person I am dealing with, and his or her profile according to the Ayurvedic dosha system. I then prepare the food they need. It is a real case of nutrition that is “made to measure”. You should “give your body what it needs, not what you want”! This is also what the ancient Romans referred to when they advocated “A healthy mind in a healthy body”.

How do you think food can help us to do this?

Our faulty habits, lifestyle, nutrition and stress can all act to unbalance the balance of an individual’s doshas, and this produces a change in the metabolism and leads to the accumulation of toxins. These then enter the bloodstream and are distributed throughout the organism, blocking the channels that, according to the Ayurveda, functionally connect all the body’s tissues. Intoxication gradually influences the body at all levels, energetic, immune and metabolic, leading to the physical appearance of disease. We were born to live 100 years but we get sick because of the way we eat. “You are what you eat”, as the English say, and if we eat badly and do not respect the different doshas we suffer a gradual but inexorable decline: up to the age of 25 we are able to climb the mountain, but then the moment of the descent begins at some point that, in my opinion, we alone decide. And that is why there are those people who grow old very quickly, those who live to the age of 100, and those who die when they are only 40 years old…

And you think this may be influenced by what we eat?

It is certainly influenced by our lifestyle and by what we eat. Let me give you an example: if a person with a very sturdy structure does not obey the needs of his dosha and does not base his nutrition on salt, because he needs to assimilate this every day, he will have a nutritional imbalance power failure that will probably lead him, sooner or later, to fall sick and therefore to die sooner. Eating well, in fact, means not suffering, respecting and loving yourself and coming to the end of your life after enjoying every single day from morning till night thanks to a proper diet, according to the style of your own dosha  while maintaining a balance of 40% carbohydrate, 30% protein, 30% fat. It also means knowing how to listen to your body and give it all the nutrients it needs.

Can you give some examples of dishes that you propose in order to achieve this harmony?

They are dishes with certain characteristics: the product is elaborated and worked on as little as possible and thus it is very close to nature. Most of the cooked food is boiled or steamed or only lightly cooked in a pan and in its own sauces and juices, thereby preserving the nutritional and vitamin value of the foodstuffs. This results in dishes like gnocchetti di ricotta flavored with lemon and curry made with fresh tomatoes, to make a natural emulsion of tomato in olive oil with a pinch of salt and pepper. Or a crisp fillet of sea bream with a salad of apples, or a cold soufflé of lettuce in a liquorice sauce. In general, the dietary regime that I propose involves very few complex carbohydrates, which in the long run can cause diabetes and force the pancreas to overwork. The Italian diet is not very correct because it is based on pasta, pizza and bread, sweets and various drinks, so much so that we have forgotten to drink water, which is the fundamental element for the welfare of our organism (in fact we should drink about 2 and a half liters a day).

But don’t you think that we are still far from the bad eating habits of Americans?

Absolutely not. In Italy we are already on that same road and in about twenty years we will have completely adopted it. Of course pasta may be eaten, but only once a week if it is dried, or twice a week if it is fresh and also rice only once. We should not get our bodies accustomed to digesting complex carbohydrates like pasta every day.

If you were to give some advice to our readers for a diet that favors mental and physical equilibrium, what would you recommend?

First of all, it is important to know what kind of dosha you belong to, if you are a vata, a pita or a kaphka. Then everything involves just six flavors: sweet and salty increase the kapha, sour and salty increase the pita, while bitter, astringent and spicy increase the vata. From this basic principle you can study in order to find collocare the right ingredients and complete menus for a healthy diet. Special attention should be paid to these categories. In order to facilitate the digestion of each individual.

As a general guideline I would advise, among other things, to mix fruits and vegetables with the other foodstuffs because it helps to improve fermentation in the intestine and maintains a high level of insulin in the blood. If, for example, I eat a plate of spaghetti with garlic, olive oil and peperoncino I will have a peak of insulin for at most an hour and a half, and then I will have a sense of hunger. This means that I have eaten wrongly and I have not respected the percentages I mentioned earlier (40-30-30). If do not I take these proportions into account the body will autonomously take the elements it needs: proteins from the muscles and salt from the bones and in doing so, problems and dysfunctions will arise over time (at the joints and the muscles, etc.) In a certain sense, we will self-destruct. The brain needs to absorb a liter of water per day. If we do not give it this because we replace it with wine, coca cola, beer and so on, the brain will take water from the body, thereby causing problems for the other organs, especially the kidneys and the liver.