ubiquitous food additives

Salmonella prompts processed-food recall
By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 5, 2010; A02
Thousands of types of processed foods -- including many varieties of soups, chips, frozen dinners, hot dogs and salad dressings -- may pose a health threat because they contain a flavor enhancer that could be contaminated with salmonella, the Food and Drug Administration said Thursday.
Officials believe the public health risk is low, and no one is known to have fallen ill as a result of the contamination. But manufacturers voluntarily recalled 56 products Thursday, and that number is expected to balloon in the coming weeks into what could be one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history.
"We don't know precisely how large this recall will get," said Jeff Farrar, associate commissioner for food protection at the FDA. "The potential amount of products . . . is very large."
Salmonella was detected early last month in one lot of the flavor enhancer -- hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP -- made by Basic Food Flavors, as well as inside the company's Nevada manufacturing facility, the FDA said. The company, one of only a handful that make HVP, has an extensive customer list. The additive, which comes as a powder or a paste and is mixed into foods to give them a meaty or savory flavor, is similar to monosodium glutamate, or MSG.
The contamination is believed to date to September 2009, meaning millions of pounds of potentially tainted HVP -- all of which the company has recalled -- was shipped in bulk to foodmakers over five months. Many of those companies then sold their products to other clients, complicating the chain and making it hard for federal officials to gauge the scope of the problem.
"This can potentially be in over 10,000 products," said Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumers Union.
The FDA has posted on its Web site a searchable list of products being recalled by manufacturers. It can be found at http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/HVPCP/.
Federal officials said the public health threat is low because most products containing HVP are cooked during processing or carry cooking instructions for consumers, so any salmonella would be destroyed before the food was eaten. Ready-to-eat products, such as chips and other snack foods, would carry greater risks.
In recent days, FDA officials have told foodmakers that their products do not need to be recalled if they can document that foods containing HVP were heated to appropriate temperatures.
Because of the number of products involved and the uncertainty of the risk, officials have been struggling to find the balance between protection and alarm.
"They're trying to come to some reasonable decision about how to protect the public health but not be so cautious as to be ridiculous and throw out tons and tons of product that may be fine," said Don Schaffner, a professor of microbiology professor and food-safety expert at Rutgers University, who has been advising several foodmakers that bought HVP from Basic Food Flavors.
FDA officials declined to say Thursday when they or state health officials last inspected the Nevada plant, or whether the company had a history of sanitation problems. The FDA was still attempting to determine what caused the contamination.
The company did not return calls seeking comment.
The salmonella bacterium is usually found in animal or human feces. Most healthy people infected with salmonella recover without treatment but experience fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Salmonella infections can cause serious problems and even death in the young, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems.
The agency learned about the problem after a foodmaker found the bacterium in a shipment of HVP and reported it under a new law that requires companies to notify the federal government if they detect contamination in a product or ingredient. Before September, the food industry was not required to alert the government to contamination.
"The FDA identified this before any major outbreak [of illness], and I think that is very good news," FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg said.
Joshua Sharfstein, deputy commissioner of the FDA, said the outbreak underlines the need for the Senate to pass a food-safety bill that has stalled since the House approved it last year. The bill would require companies such as Basic Food Flavors to take actions aimed at preventing contamination in the first place.
"We want to be able to set up preventive standards, so we don't have situations like this at all," Sharfstein said.




http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/04/AR2010030403863.html

You Are What You Eat: 93% of Americans Test positive For BPA

Just When You Thought It MIGHT Be Safe To Drink From Plastic....

Disputed chemical bisphenol-A found in paper receipts

By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 27, 2010; A13

As lawmakers and health experts wrestle over whether a controversial chemical, bisphenol-A, should be banned from food and beverage containers, a new analysis by an environmental group suggests Americans are being exposed to BPA through another, surprising route: paper receipts.

The Environmental Working Group found BPA on 40 percent of the receipts it collected from supermarkets, automated teller machines, gas stations and chain stores. In some cases, the total amount of BPA on the receipt was 1,000 times the amount found in the epoxy lining of a can of food, another controversial use of the chemical.

Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst with the environmental group, says BPA's prevalence on receipts could help explain why the chemical can be detected in the urine of an estimated 93 percent of Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"We've come across potentially major sources of BPA right here in our daily lives," Lunder said. "When you're carrying around a receipt in your wallet for months while you intend to return something, you could be shedding BPA into your home, into your environment. If you throw a receipt into a bag of food, and it's lying there against an apple, or you shove a receipt into your bag next to a baby pacifier, you could be getting all kinds of exposure and not realize it."

What remains unknown is how much of the chemical that may rub off onto the hands is absorbed through the skin or whether people then ingest BPA by handling food or touching their mouths.

Among those surveyed, receipts from Safeway supermarkets contained the highest concentration of BPA. A receipt taken from a store in the District contained 41 milligrams of the chemical. If the equivalent amount of BPA was ingested by a 155-pound adult, that would exceed EPA's decades-old safe exposure limit for BPA by 12 times.

Brian Dowling, a Safeway spokesman, said the company is researching the issue and consulting with its suppliers of receipt paper.

First synthesized in 1891 and developed in the 1930s as a synthetic form of estrogen, bisphenol-A has been widely used in commercial products including plastic bottles, compact discs and dental sealants. While it was regarded as safe for decades, recent research using sophisticated analytic techniques suggests that low doses of the compound can interfere with the endocrine system and cause a range of health effects, including reproductive problems and cancer.

Federal regulators have been focused on BPA and whether it leaches from containers into foods and beverages at levels that may cause health problems. Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration expressed "some concern" about BPA and joined several agencies in conducting $30 million in studies to try to answer questions about its safety. Lawmakers on the local, state and federal levels have moved to ban BPA from food and beverage containers made for infants and children.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents the chemical industry, said that while BPA can transfer from paper receipts to the skin, the level of absorption is low. "Available data suggests that BPA is not readily absorbed through the skin," a spokeswoman said. "Biomonitoring data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control shows that exposure to BPA from all sources, which would include typical exposure from receipts, is extremely low."

The Environmental Protection Agency, however, recognizing that paper coated in BPA may be a significant route of exposure, launched an effort this month to work with paper manufacturers, the chemical industry and environmental groups to encourage companies to find alternatives to BPA in receipts.

Appleton Papers, the nation's largest manufacturer of "thermal papers," the type often used for receipts, dropped BPA from its formulation in 2006 out of growing concerns about the safety of the chemical, said Kent Willetts, the company's vice president of strategic development. "We just realized we'd rather move away from it sooner than later," Willetts said.

The Environmental Working Group's report can be found

online at http://www.ewg.org/bpa-in-store-receipts.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/26/AR2010072605001.html

The Sky Is Blue

Cracks in the empire........... small cracks but cracks still.......


Reversing itself, FDA expresses concerns over health risks from BPA

By Lyndsey Layton
Saturday, January 16, 2010; A01

The Food and Drug Administration has reversed its position on the safety of Bisphenol A, a chemical found in plastic bottles, soda cans, food containers and thousands of consumer goods, saying it now has concerns about health risks.

Growing scientific evidence has linked the chemical to a host of problems, including cancer, sexual dysfunction and heart disease. Federal officials said they are particularly concerned about BPA's effect on the development of fetuses, infants and young children.

"We have some concern, which leads us to recommend reasonable steps the public can take to reduce exposure to BPA," said Joshua Sharfstein, FDA's deputy commissioner, in a conference call to reporters Friday.

Regulators stopped short of banning the compound or even requiring manufacturers to label products containing BPA, saying that current data are not clear enough to support a legal crackdown. FDA officials also said they were hamstrung from dealing quickly with BPA by an outdated regulatory framework.

Sharfstein said the agency is conducting "targeted" studies of BPA, part of a two-year, $30 million effort by the administration to answer key questions about the chemical that will help determine what action, if any, is necessary to protect public health. The Obama administration pledged to take a "fresh look" at the chemical.

BPA, used to harden plastics, is so prevalent that more than 90 percent of the U.S. population has traces of it in its urine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers have found that BPA leaches from containers into food and beverages, even at cold temperatures.

The FDA's announcement came after extensive talks between federal agencies and the White House about the best approach to an issue that has become a significant concern for consumers and the chemical industry.

One administration official privy to the talks said the FDA is in a quandary. "They have new evidence that makes them worried, but they don't have enough proof to justify pulling the stuff, so what do you do?" said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "You want to warn people, but you don't want to create panic."

The FDA had long maintained that BPA is safe, relying largely on two studies funded by the chemical industry. The agency was faulted by its own panel of independent science advisers in 2008, which said its position on BPA was scientifically flawed because it ignored more than 100 published studies by government scientists and university laboratories that raised health concerns about BPA. Recent data found health effects even at low doses of BPA -- lower than the levels considered safe by the FDA.

The chemical industry, which produces more than 6 billion tons of BPA annually and has been fighting restrictions on its use, said Friday's announcement was good news because the agency did not tell people to stop using products containing the chemical.

"The science continues to support the safety of BPA," said Steven Hentges of the American Chemistry Council.

In a statement, the industry group said: "Plastics made with BPA contribute safety and convenience to our daily lives because of their durability, clarity and shatter-resistance. Can liners and food-storage containers made with BPA are essential components to helping protect the safety of packaged foods. . . . ACC remains committed to consumer safety, and will continue to review new scientific studies concerning the safety of BPA."

Bisphenol A was discovered to be a synthetic estrogen in the 1930s. By the 1950s, chemists found BPA could be used to make polycarbonate plastics, giving them a "shatterproof" quality, and the uses for the chemical exploded.

But recently, consumers have placed increasing pressure on manufacturers and retailers to migrate away from BPA. In 2008, Babies R Us and other major retailers told suppliers they would no longer stock baby bottles made with BPA. Last year, the six largest manufacturers of baby bottles announced they would voluntarily stop selling bottles made with bisphenol A to consumers in the United States.

But BPA remains in the epoxy linings of most canned goods, including baby formula. Research has shown that it leaches from the linings into liquid formula, but not powered formula.

Environmental groups, public health advocates and consumer organizations applauded the FDA for recognizing concern about BPA, but some said the agency didn't go far enough.

"It's really a shame after all of the studies out there that they didn't do anything to protect the public health," said Urvashi Rangan, director of technical policy at Consumers Union. "How many pieces of evidence do we need before we have enough to act?"

Canada declared BPA a toxin and banned it from baby bottles in 2008. Similar restrictions have taken root in Chicago, Minnesota, Connecticut and Suffolk County in New York. In Congress, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) have filed a bill that would block BPA from all food and drink packaging.

As it awaits additional research results, the FDA plans to change the way it classifies BPA so that it can exercise tighter controls over the chemical, Sharfstein said. Currently, BPA is approved as a "food additive," which means manufacturers are not required to tell the government which products contain BPA and in what amounts. The agency wants to reclassify it as a "food contact material," which would require greater disclosure from manufacturers and would allow the FDA to take fast action if it determined that the material posed a health risk.

The Department of Health and Human Services has released recommended ways for the public to reduce exposure to BPA. It can be found at http://www.hhs.gov/safety/bpa.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/15/AR2010011504070.html

Antibiotics In Fish

Ala.: Unapproved substance found in fish imports

The Associated Press
Thursday, November 5, 2009 8:14 AM

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Alabama Agriculture and Industries Commissioner Ron Sparks on Wednesday extended a two-year-old order banning the sale of untested fish from Vietnam and China in Alabama.

Sparks said Wednesday the new order comes after catfish from China and basa from Vietnam tested positive for fluoroquinolones, an antibiotic used in humans, but not approved for fish. Basa is a fish that tastes similar to catfish and is found in southeast Asia.

Sparks said his department's labs found the substance after testing fish from China and Vietnam that were marked as having already been tested. He said fish from the two countries can still be sold in Alabama, but only if they have been tested. Even then, Sparks said Alabama officials are allowed to order their own tests.

"We're going to stop it and it will never make it to dinner plates in Alabama," Sparks said of fish that tests positive for the antibiotics. "Personally I would not eat it. I would not recommend it."

Department of Agriculture chemist Joe Basile said the danger to humans eating fish containing the substance is that people might build up an amount of fluoroquinolones in their systems and allow bacteria to build up a tolerance to the antibiotic.

The antibiotic was also found in a small amount of fish imported from Cambodia, Indonesia and Thailand. The order banning sales was not immediately extended to those countries.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/05/AR2009110501460.html

MSG - more negative eveidence

One of the most ubiquitous additives out there - plenty of evidence for years that MSG causes problems - generally regarded as safe is relative to your notion of the meaning of safe. (I wrote about it in my college senior thesis 30 years ago....) The Surprising Ingredient Causing Weight Gain By Margaret Furtado, M.S., R.D. July 27, 2009 Say it isn't so! A recent study out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill cites what animal studies have hinted at for years: MSG (aka monosodium glutamate) could be a factor in weight gain. The study focused on 750 Chinese men and women, ages 40-59, living in 3 rural villages in north and south China. Most of the study subjects prepared their meals at home without commercially processed foods and roughly 82 percent used MSG. Those participants who used the highest amounts of MSG had nearly 3 times the incidence of overweight as those who did not use MSG, even when physical activity, total caloric intake, and other possible explanations for body mass differences were accounted for. The positive correlation between MSG and higher weight confirmed what animal studies have been suggesting for years. Maybe you're wondering what monosodium glutamate is exactly, and what you can do to avoid it in your diet. MSG is a flavor enhancer in foods—some believe it may even provide a fifth basic taste sensation (in addition to sweet, sour, salt, and bitter), what the Japanese call "umami" (roughly translated as "tastiness"). MSG is considered an "excitotoxin," since its action in the body is to excite neurotransmitters (important brain chemicals), causing nerve cells to discharge and also exciting nerves related to taste. Perhaps this ability to excite these nerves is a factor in an association between increased MSG usage and weight gain. How prevalent is MSG in the U.S. diet? Americans consumed about 1 million pounds of MSG in 1950, and today that number has increased by a factor of 300! The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) describes MSG as "naturally occurring," and has it on the GRAS ("generally regarded as safe") list. However, not only could MSG be causing us to gain weight, but some studies also reveal that as many as 25 to 30 percent of Americans have adverse reactions to it (e.g., palpitations and migraine headaches), and as many as 30 percent are extra sensitive to it if they consume more than 5 grams at one sitting. OK, if you're an MSG user who could stand to lose a little weight (or know someone who is), what should you do? Unfortunately, eliminating MSG from the diet is much easier said than done, since—given the fact that food processors often change recipes—there's no list of "safe" foods that never contain MSG. A good start is to avoid anything with MSG anywhere in the ingredient list, but there will still be many foods that have MSG hidden inside other ingredients. Likewise, even products labeled "no MSG added" can still contain these hidden sources. Best bets for avoiding MSG Buy organic produce whenever possible. Make things from scratch, avoiding processed ingredients as much as possible. Limit making stews or soups in a crock pot, since slow-cooking tends to cause small amounts of glutamic acid to be released from the protein sources (e.g., meat, chicken) in the recipe. What are your thoughts on MSG? I'd love to hear from you! © 2007 Johns Hopkins University. All Rights Reserved. This article from Johns Hopkins University is provided as a service by Yahoo. All materials are produced independently by Johns Hopkins University, which is solely responsible for its content.

Salt and sodium content in food are big issues in my house. For a long time I generally avoided salt at home as I figured that I was getting plenty of sodium from processed foods that I ate. I have experienced a number of no salt cooking methods / diets. Then I was told that I had rising blood pressure. Not interested in a pharmaceutical solution, I questioned all and every bit of salt and sodium in my life. Working to eliminate my sodium intake, my blood pressure has gone down enough that the doctor does not speak of pharmaceuticals anymore.

Drastically reducing yet alone eliminating sodium inputs when meals are for four to six people is not easy, yet can be done. Basically, cook it yourself and be creative because there are few food products that do not contain sodium. Consumer choice? Make it at home from whole ingredients or fuggedaboutit. No bite out, no snack on the road, avoid packaged food that has been processed or is not whole - items that have no need for massive amounts of sodium are infused with salt - "gives it flavor" and acts as a non-chemical preservative.

Among other points, the article below says that up to 150,000 premature deaths could be avoided if Americans were to halve their salt intake. Whatever way the statistic is played with, certain facts remain: too much salt can make you sick and eventually kill you. Processed foods and restaurant foods have been increasing their sodium content. While processed food in the grocery store has a label so it is possible to "make a choice" (try finding canned tomatoes with no added salt that is in a can bigger than a small over priced can - if you find a brand, please email me) but food on the go, whether at a restaurant, fast food outlet or convenience store has no label so any "choice" is rather limited. While some nutritional info is available on the Internet, there are still major restaurant chains in the US that resist any "infringement" on what they consider to be their proprietary information.

Many brands that claim to be healthy and/or fresh are actually filled with salt, which acts as preservative in addition to contributing to hypertension, heart disease and stroke. For example, check out the Chipotle vegetarian burrito nutritional info at Chipotle's web site - the nutritional info is not available at Chipotle outlets. Chipotle advertises that it's food is fresh and while not saying that their food is good for you, Chipotle uses many marketing techniques to make the consumer feel that the food at Chipotle is healthy. Never mind that the veggie burrito has more salt in it than a grown man needs in a day! Personal choice is important but when restaurants and prepared food providers empahsize marketing while not providing real nutritional / health information, we don't have a level playing field between food providers and food consumers (that's all of us!). Without a level playing field, claims about the power of choice are just hype.

Eating a Bit Less Salt Can Be a Big Health Boon By TIFFANY SHARPLES Tiffany Sharples Fri Mar 13, 3:00 am ET 2009 Over the years, Americans have become inured to salt. Most people have no idea how much salt they consume - on average, about 9 to 12 g (or 3,600 to 4,800 mg of sodium) per person per day, according to the American Heart Association (AHA). That's twice the amount recommended by the government. In the past four decades, Americans' salt consumption has risen 50%, mostly as a result of eating more processed foods and more food prepared in restaurants. "Over time, we have adapted our taste buds and adapted our bodies to crave much, much higher levels of salt than we require to function," says Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. (See the top 10 food trends of 2008.) Some salt is crucial for good health, of course - to regulate blood pressure and assist with muscle and nerve function - but too much (that is, at the levels we currently consume) can lead to hypertension, heart disease and stroke. If Americans halved their salt intake, as many as 150,000 premature deaths could be prevented each year, according to the American Medical Association. And new research presented March 11 by Bibbins-Domingo at the AHA's annual conference shows that even small reductions - as little as 1 g of salt per day - could have dramatic effects, saving 200,000 lives over the course of a decade. Using a sophisticated computer model to analyze trends in heart disease over time among U.S. adults, Bibbins-Domingo and colleagues discovered that incremental population-wide reductions could drastically improve public health. Cutting out just 1 g of salt (or 40 mg of sodium) per person per day could prevent 30,000 cases of coronary heart disease across the U.S. population by 2019. Reducing consumption by half - a more sizable 6 grams - could prevent 1.4 million cases of heart disease during that same period. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.) While eating less salt would improve the health of the population across the board, researchers found that the benefits would be greatest for African Americans and women. As a group, African Americans tend to have higher blood pressure than the general population, and "many studies suggest that they may be more sensitive to salt," Bibbins-Domingo says. Her analysis found that a reduction of 3 g of salt per day would reduce heart attacks 8% on average; among African Americans, that rate would drop 10%. A similar result was found in women, whose stroke risk dropped 8% with a 3-g reduction in salt intake; in men, the risk fell 5%. The numbers certainly offer compelling incentives to cut salt consumption, but that's no easy task. You can put down the salt shaker and cut back on obviously salty snacks, but there's still so much sodium packed into processed foods that trying to extract it from your diet is a tricky business. "It's so pervasive in an average U.S. diet that it's really hard to tell people, 'You have to avoid salt,' " says Bibbins-Domingo. And there is salt hiding in places you wouldn't think to look. According to a sodium chart from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a single slice of commercially made whole-wheat bread has 148 mg of sodium; white bread has 170 mg. Cheerios contains 213 mg of sodium per cup; Total Raisin Bran, 239 mg. And then there are the big offenders: processed soups and sauces. Chicken noodle soup, for example, even after it has been diluted with water during preparation, has a whopping 1,106 mg of sodium per cup. "I think people don't have a clue," says Bibbins-Domingo. "The recommended daily amount of salt is about a teaspoon," she says. "It's easy to add that much if you're just adding salt," let alone all of the salt that's in food before we break out the shaker. (See pictures of what makes you eat more food.) If you're dining out, all bets are off. According to the British organization Consensus Action on Salt in Health, a three-course meal in a restaurant can contain more than 15 g of salt, almost three times the recommended daily amount. Bibbins-Domingo says it's especially tough for families with limited income, who tend to rely more on processed or packaged foods and canned fruits and vegetables rather than fresh foods. Patients tell her they've cut salted nuts, potato chips and pretzels from their diet and started eating more soup instead. "You realize that they're actually consuming more salt in their attempt to make healthy choices," she says. Any large-scale success in salt-intake reduction would have to involve policymakers and the food industry, say public-health experts. "If you could reduce blood pressure by just a few points, you could reduce hundreds of thousands of deaths," says Dr. Thomas Frieden, commissioner of New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, who recently announced a national campaign to diminish salt intake 20% in the next five years and 40% in the next decade. Frieden, who has in the past targeted trans fats and led the charge to require chain restaurants to list calorie content on menus, has evoked less animosity from the food and restaurant industries with his desalinization efforts than with his previous initiatives. "[Frieden] is looking for voluntary guidelines. It's a national movement, and he's working closely with the industry on developing these re-education guidelines," says Rob Bookman, an attorney for the New York State Restaurant Association, but he adds wryly, "I don't know if it's one big happy family." (See nine kid foods to avoid.) Frieden points to a successful salt-reduction campaign in the U.K. as a kind of proof of principle. Several years after the British government launched an aggressive national campaign, which included voluntary reductions in salt content by food manufacturers, British citizens had reduced their annual sodium consumption roughly 10%. "If you look at what happened in the U.K., at first the industry was very concerned," Frieden says. "But after a few years, they saw that they could drop their salt content 20% to 30% [without losing customers]." For Bibbins-Domingo, the issue is less about mandating food production or proscribing salt consumption than enabling people to make better choices. "This is actually something that we can achieve with very little cost to our personal liberties," she says. But Frieden adheres to a harder line. When asked whether the government should be allowed to influence how or what we eat, he responded with a pointed rhetorical question: "Should industry be allowed to serve us food that makes us sick and kills us?" See pictures of a salt mine in Uganda. See pictures from an X-ray studio. View this article on Time.com Related articles on Time.com: Report: Eating a Bit Less Salt Can Be a Big Health Boon

You Don't Have to Be Ayurvedic to Keep Your Doshas in Balance

Conscious eating.

You Don't Have to Be Ayurvedic to Keep Your Doshas in Balance By Jennifer LaRue Huget, Washington Post Tuesday, May 19, 2009 I'll admit it: I've been avoiding ayurveda. Since I started writing this nutrition column last summer, several of my friends -- mostly yoga buddies -- have suggested I look into this ancient Indian system of medicine. But whenever I tried to read up on ayurveda, my eyes glazed over. It's not the Sanskrit terminology: I've practiced yoga long enough not to be put off by the language in which both disciplines' core texts are written. But to my Western brain, descriptions of ayurveda have seemed, frankly, kind of flaky, at once complicated and simplistic -- and far removed from my own experience. What I really needed was for someone to explain the system to me in straightforward terms that made clear how it might be useful in my life. So I was happy for the chance last week to visit the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts, and listen to a presentation by Hilary Garivaltis, dean of curriculum for Kripalu's school of ayurveda. Here are the basics: In the ayurvedic scheme of things ("ayur" being Sanskrit for life, and "veda" for science or knowledge), every aspect of life is governed by five elements: ether (the element of space), air (movement), fire (transformation), water (chemical energy) and earth (structure or form). Those elements combine in different configurations to form doshas, the three life energies that characterize every individual and everything else, from seasons and times of day to the foods we eat and the manner in which we live our lives. Keeping one's doshas in balance is the cornerstone of physical and psychological health, and imbalances can lead to everything from anxiety, grouchiness and exhaustion to serious disease. Balancing those energies (called vata, pitta and kapha) requires daily vigilance, as our doshas shift according to what we are doing and what's going on around us. Although for most people all the life energies are present in varying degrees, one usually dominates. Vata, the combination of ether and air, is all about lightness, dryness, quickness and cold; vata-dominated people are thin and tendon-y, active and restless. Pitta, combining fire and water, is hot, sharp, oily; pittas can be stubborn and tend to be driven, workaholic types. And kapha, comprising water and earth, is cool and damp; kapha is common among people with larger, round body types, who tend to be laid-back, even lethargic. Still with me? Whether you're self-administering ayurveda or following guidance from a pro such as Garivaltis, the practice starts with evaluating your own mix of doshas. Any book or Web site about ayurveda is likely to offer a questionnaire to help pinpoint which dosha is dominant in your makeup at the moment: Are you irritated by loud noise? (That's a vata trait.) Do you anger easily? (That's pitta for you.) Do you feel sluggish? (Your kapha is showing.) Doshas are governed in part by things beyond our control, such as the change of seasons -- vata rules in wintertime, while summer is pitta's season -- or one's stage of life. (Teens tend toward pitta, while post-menopause might be vata time for many women.) But one of the main tools by which doshas are regulated -- and the reason I'm writing about ayurveda here -- is nutrition. As with all else in ayurveda, foods have their own energies. Each of six key tastes -- sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent and astringent -- exerts influence on the doshas and can be used to help restore balance among them. Pungent, salty and sour foods ("the bad-American-diet kind of foods," Garivaltis says) aggravate pitta, for instance, while sweet, bitter and astringent ones calm it down. Eat too much of a pitta-promoting food such as fast-food burgers, ayurvedics say, and you might find yourself feeling hot and acting rude and domineering. But if you've got too much vata going, you may be eating too much cold, raw and dry food, and consequently you may experience dry skin, constipation, insomnia and anxiety. You can curb that tendency by eating and drinking moist, warm foods and beverages, those whose qualities are opposite to vata's dryness and cold. The trick, though, is that the labels attached to foods aren't literal, at least not by Western definitions. So these "warm" and "sweet" foods include such things as butter, beef and beets. Ayurvedic practice encourages maintaining a regular schedule, rising before sunrise and going to sleep between 10 and 11 p.m. Lunch, eaten between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., should be your main meal of the day; dinner should be lighter and eaten between 5 and 7 p.m. Sipping lukewarm water during meals and throughout the day helps maintain bowel regularity, one of the key measures of health in ayurveda. Other ayurvedic tips sound remarkably like what many American nutritionists preach: Eat freshly cooked meals. Chew food carefully, being mindful of its tastes, smells and textures. Focus on eating, not on talking, watching TV or reading. Eat only when you feel hungry; allow your last meal to be fully digested before consuming the next one. Like many other practices that we label complementary or alternative medicine, ayurveda has not received conventional medicine's warm embrace. Few physicians trained in Western medicine would explicitly espouse ayurveda because its precepts haven't been researched in such a way that they pass conventional scientific muster. Garivaltis notes that Western scientific research typically demands focus on an isolated aspect of a medical system; in ayurveda, the whole system depends on the interactions between elements, making it a hard protocol to study. Without supporting science, conventional physicians are understandably skeptical. Garivaltis is quick to say that ayurvedic practice is no substitute for Western medicine. When she had to have her appendix removed a few years ago, she told me, she went to a regular hospital for surgery. But she attributes her speedy recovery to her having adopted ayurveda, which she says prepared her body to weather the stress of illness, surgery and recuperation. I can't say I'm ready to give myself over wholeheartedly to ayurveda. But I do find myself thinking about my doshas, which two weeks ago I never knew existed. And this morning as I poured my coffee, I found myself pausing to consider whether it might boost my pitta -- something I don't need, thank you very much. It just might, I concluded. But I drank it anyway.