While the western media was busy bashing Ayurveda based on a faulty study , another research’s finding has come out. Ayurveda’s concept of calssifying each person into one of the several body constitutions – namely Vata, pitta, and Kapha – has been corroborated by a recent genetic study. This pioneering effort was done by Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi.
Ayurveda practitioners believe that susceptibility to disease is determined by a person’s constitution which, according to ancient texts, is fixed at birth. People with extreme constitutions are classified as Kapha, Pitta and Vata, but most people belong to a combination of these.
Now, biologist Mitali Mukherjee and her colleagues at the IGIB have discovered that individuals from within each of the extreme constitutions appear to share gene activity patterns — among housekeeping genes and genes involved in diseases.
“It was a surprise. The body constitutions defined in ayurveda appear to be reflected in gene activity and in blood tests,” Mukherjee said. The findings appeared last week in the Journal of Translational Medicine.
“This is perhaps the first biological evidence to support a central concept of ayurveda,” said Marthanda Varma Sankaran Valiathan, a cardiac surgeon and former director of the Sri Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Sciences, Thiruvananthapuram, who was not involved in the study. “There’s more in ayurveda than herbal medicines. This work is exploring the biology of traditional medicine.”
But the IGIB study, first proposed seven years ago, was almost obstructed by project reviewers of the department of biotechnology who appeared sceptical of attempts to investigate ayurveda through genome studies and turned down the proposal.[Gene proof for ayurveda concept]
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