Why, from a rational perspective, should you pay any attention to Ayurveda? If you’ve heard of Ayurveda at all, you probably associate it with traditionalism and pseudoscience – basically ineffective practices that are strictly worse than the information we now have access to from modern science. I mean, c’mon, we have 5.8M articles in Google Scholar on nutrition - peer reviewed publications with a scientific basis informing us how we ought to eat.
On the other hand, here are the first two sentences of the Wikipedia page on Ayurveda (bolds are mine):
“Ayurveda is an alternative medicine system with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent. The theory and practice of Ayurveda is pseudoscientific.”
Hearing this description and comparing it with the modern Western scientific system, most rationally-minded people would conclude that there’s no value to be gained from Ayurveda. In fact, our cultural preconceptions would stop most people, past me included, from even opening the Wikipedia page. They just didn’t have science back in the day; that’s why Ayurveda exists, right?
I’m here to tell you why this pseudoscientific alternative medicine system has much more to tell us about how to live a holistic, well-balanced, healthy life that prevents diseases before they begin than Western medicine. This has been the aim of Ayurveda for thousands of years in India, an aim it’s been successful in achieving. In this post and a few to follow it, I want to show you why I think this, since it’s a perspective I haven’t seen discussed much in the mainstream.
Before I start, a little about my journey into Ayurveda and why these subjects have captured my attention so deeply. I’ve been interested in health and wellness for years. Specifically, I wanted to understand three things. First, how to live a vital, healthy, and happy life today. Second, how to prevent or delay the onset of chronic diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and diabetes. Third, how to treat those chronic diseases once they do occur. I’ve been on a journey to find rational, systematic knowledge that addresses these questions with the aim of improving my health, the health of those around me, and to find solutions for the diseases that plague society more broadly.
I spent several years trying to answer these questions from the perspective of Western science. I did this by working at the edges of biotech and longevity science with the aim of understanding and advancing the state-of-the-art approaches to maintaining and extending healthy life. I worked on a variety of projects and initiatives - each of which at the time appeared to me to be the best path forward for using science to achieve healthy longevity. I helped start a funding organization for longevity research. I pushed for rapamycin, the best-proven anti-aging drug, to be tested in prevention/treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. I worked as a scientist for a CRISPR gene editing startup, Amber Bio, aiming to cure rare genetic diseases by pushing the edges of gene editing technology.
Throughout all of this time, I was trying to find the systems, knowledge, and technologies that could most benefit human health and wellness. However, the result of my exploration led me to deep pessimism about the benefits of Western medical science for fundamental questions of importance to wellness and longevity. I’ll talk a bit more about some reasons for that below.
There are many merits and use cases for Western medicine - if you have a broken bone, if you’ve just had a heart attack, or if you have a rapidly advancing bacterial infection, Western medicine is the place to go. Western medicine excels at acute care - solving big problems as they appear. Its explicit aim is to diagnose and treat symptoms.
However, if you ask basic questions related to day-to-day wellness, such as how much you should eat, when you should eat, or what you should eat, it’s of little help. You’ll get a conflicting answer from each source, and each answer will be based off of, if you’re lucky, a short clinical trial of limited applicability, and a bevy of theoretical, reductionist arguments of questionable epistemic validity. I’ll illustrate this with two examples - first looking at the best answer Western science has as to how to extend your life, the second looking at what Western science has to say about what diet you should adopt.
First, one of the best-validated results from the field of longevity science is that restricting an organism’s caloric intake will extend its lifespan. This has proven true across a few different organisms. The closest relative to humans we’ve proven it for are mice. However, we still don’t really know whether and to what extent this applies to humans, and if it does apply, how to put it into practice. Should I eat less calories every day? Should I fast? Should I reduce just my protein intake and increase my carbohydrate intake? Do the reverse and reduce my carbohydrate intake? You’ll get conflicting answers from different leading scientists in the field. In addition, there’s evidence to suggest that calorie restriction may extend lifespan but have other negative effects, like affecting brain integrity, weakening the immune system, or decreasing fertility. Keep in mind that this is one of the best validated facts in longevity science - and we still don’t really know what it means for our actual lives.
Another example is the age-old debate on nutrition and diet - what’s the best, or healthiest diet? Let’s take the ketogenic diet as a case study, since it’s drawn significant scientific and popular attention in the last few decades. Looking at a summary of the evidence around the ketogenic diet, we see a few different kinds of evidence. We see a number of short-term studies on patients with particular chronic diseases aiming to alleviate symptoms. We see studies looking at alterations in biomarkers, e.g. blood glucose levels, blood lipids, etc. Finally, we see some deductive arguments from the above evidence arguing for efficacy or lack of efficacy of the diet. There are a few glaring exclusions. There are very few studies on the efficacy of the ketogenic diet (or really any other diet) for preventing chronic diseases. Second, there’s quite a bit of controversy over whether any of the basic biomarkers, e.g. blood glucose or LDL-C levels, actually cause chronic disease. This is really notable, since LDL-C is one of the most ‘foundational’ or well accepted causal biomarkers of chronic disease in Western medical science - we treat millions of people with statins to lower their LDL-C levels to prevent heart disease, and the evidence around the efficacy of this practice is highly questionable. In my opinion, this means that the validity of arguments based on less well-studied biomarkers is even more questionable. Those are the kinds of arguments you’re hearing when you’re listening to your favorite nutrition pundit opine about their dietary choices. Unfortunately, that’s all the evidence we have to go off of from Western science on one of the most important subjects for longevity, nutrition. This is part of the reason why the consensus dietary recommendations in the West shift so often - low fat to high fat to low protein to low carb, etc.
Note for contrast that Ayurveda has thorough dietary recommendations, personalized to the individual and the current circumstances the individual is experiencing, and further personalized to the present environment, like the season, the weather, and so on. This is a system that has had thousands of years to come to the conclusions it has, repeatedly observing and testing its conclusions on its patients and practitioners.
The lack of answers from Western science isn’t for lack of effort or intelligence. It’s just hard to get answers to questions like this in any reasonable time frame, and institutionalized Western medical science has only really been around for a century or so. There have been almost no long term studies (read: lifetime length) on anything in Western medical science because it just hasn’t been possible. It certainly hasn’t been possible to run several lifespan-length studies and iterate on the evidence from each study to come to conclusions. That would take a few generations, minimum. And no, mice are not acceptable substitutes for humans… That means that everything is based on either short-term studies or deductions from available evidence.
That’s why Western science is so good at treating things for which you can see the effect in a day, month, or year, but has few solutions for health and wellness; i.e. preventing disease and maintaining health and vitality, because in part you start to see the effect of wellness practices after years, decades, or in the length of a lifetime.
To understand what kinds of approaches, habits, and treatments will be effective over the course of a lifetime, you need a science that’s had the time to be able to iterate and grow over lifetime after lifetime after lifetime. You need to take practices that work for a single generation and make sure they reproduce across circumstances and generations, understand the root causes of why they work, and then codify them into systems of practices that reliably yield their fruits.
Enter Ayurveda: a science of healthy and long living that is at least 3,000 years old.
We in the West tend to underestimate the importance and efficacy of tradition, particularly in domains that science and technology hold authority in - medical care being the prime example. However, what tradition implies is that something has continually proved its efficacy and worth over the years it's existed, as well as adapted and evolved to changing circumstances. Over time, functional traditions throw out what doesn’t work, and keep only what works uncontingently, over the course of multiple generations, over many life circumstances and environments. People would not have continued to practice Ayurveda or use it unless it was functional for them and their lives. This is the epitome of the Lindy effect - what’s been around for a few thousand years will likely remain for another few thousand years, because time has proven its continual efficacy.
This also means the Ayurvedic tradition has had the time, more than enough time, to observe many, many generations and see what the effects of its approaches have been on each generation’s lifespan, health, and overall well being. It contains a comprehensive set of practices to support every phase and state of life, from maintaining health starting early in adulthood, to creating the most healthy conditions from which a couple can produce the most healthy child, to delaying the onset of chronic diseases and treating those chronic diseases when they do emerge in old age. The methods and results of Western science are brilliant, but they simply haven’t had enough time to develop, validate, and maintain practices like these.
All this should be enough to convince you that Ayurveda is worth paying attention to, at the least; worthy of digging into a bit more. It was mostly an argument for the absence of particular qualities from Western science, and the presence of those qualities within Ayurveda. As such, it was mostly a negative argument. In future posts to come, I’ll talk more about the positive reasons for Ayurveda’s appeal and effectiveness. I believe Ayurveda can supplement Western medicine’s effectiveness in dealing with acute conditions by providing a holistic perspective on prevention and day to day wellness, and I’d love to share more about it with you. Subscribe if you want to hear more about why Ayurveda has come to be my primary system for wellness and health - I’ll also share practical advice and knowledge from the system once I have you thoroughly convinced.
This post was originally published 6 months before the founding of Radiance, and details some of Kush Sharma's (Radiance Co-Founder) journey to Ayurveda.
