Ayurveda, Digestion, and City Spontaneity
Yesterday I was chatting about food at a coffeeshop with a friend and because we were pretty excited and enthusiastic in our conversation, a woman from a neighboring table joined in.
Liz (the woman who joined us), is a student Ayurvedic medicine, and she jumped right into the conversation and started contributing. She taught us a number of interesting things, many of which I may write about here as I research them more thoroughly, but one of the things she prescribed was never drinking cold liquids with meals as they will inhibit the digestive process.
Over the past year or so, I realize now, I have had a subconscious aversion to iced water and have occasionally been ordering “water, no ice” when I go out to eat. (I wonder if my body was trying to tell me the same thing Liz said.) I hadn’t thought much about this, but I am going to make a point to make this order more often now that I know how iced water affects digestion.
I did a bit of searching on this topic and did not find any great studies, but I did find a pretty good analysis of how cold liquids affect our bodies here:
Similarly, cold liquids also disturb digestion. In fact, an ice cold drink can completely halt the digestive process. The inside of your body is a delicate, well-controlled environment. Digestion proceeds at a proper pace when this environment is kept constant. Pouring a glass of ice water into the stomach is like taking cooking food from an oven and sticking it into a freezer. You can bet that the cooking process is going to be seriously suspended, and so is the digestive process suspended when cold beverages are drunk. Nerve endings are also numbed by intense cold just as they are numbed by high heat. Drinking iced water or beverages over ice is a habit that has only been recently acquired by modern man. Why he must have ice cold drinking water from fountains is a mystery. No other animal will drink extra cold or extra hot liquids; they wait until they have reached room temperature.
Meeting Liz reminded me of what I loved about university: being (geographically) surrounded by a group of interesting people who are interested in learning lowers the barrier of striking up conversations with strangers. What I love about New York City is an almost university-like community. Most New Yorkers that I meet have a strong sense of purpose or ambition and a story to tell. I think people recognize a common drive in others and tend to congregate here. Hence, they put up with the ridiculous cost of living. This high cost of living, however, also serves as a filter that self selects for the driven. If you’re not in NYC for a good reason, why pay the higher costs? My hypothesis is the reason is to surround yourself with opportunity and other high caliber people you can learn from and collaborate with (which, incidentally, is also my argument for attending university instead of just taking courses online or studying at home, and my argument for paying more to go to a community/competition gym like Crossfit).
It seems we pay real money to participate in high value communities all the time—I wonder what sort of subscription communities will emerge on the web when someone realizes the value of price as this type of filter.
Anyway, that turned into much more of a tangent than I intended when I saw myself write this email subject line and thought, “Cool.”
Oh, one last point: I have been SEO-ing email subject lines both for myself and for the recipient. The subject line pictured is a great example of that.