We nowadays constantly hear people say things like: “You might as well ignore all scientific advice on what to eat and what to avoid. Just eat what you want, they will change their minds tomorrow”. And certainly ideas do often make a complete U-turn – from the low-fat late 80s to early 90s we have progressed to a point in time where the benefits of healthy fats such as omega 3, or the monounsaturated fats in olive oil, are fully recognised. We also know that although eggs are high in cholesterol consuming them does not increase blood cholesterol levels. Of course, this constant change of mind is not confined to nutritional or medical research. The fact is that all scientific research is a work in progress and any change in information will generally be a sign that something new has been learned, and by their very nature scientific explanations must be potentially disprovable in the light of new findings. In other words, science itself is not a series of facts but simply a method of understanding the working of the universe.

Scientific research is also susceptible to limitations of many kinds, not least when the research is biased, even unconsciously, towards a particular outcome or when it is poorly conducted. It would be easy to arrive at two completely opposite conclusions simply by making minor adjustments to the parameters of any scientific study. Also, a large percentage of research studies are by their very nature focusing in a very narrow field and it can take many years for the information gained from a large number of limited studies to be pooled so that new knowledge can be spread.

All of this means that research scientists should never be short of work, but while we wait for their latest findings it is easy to be confused in the light of so much contradiction. It is therefore comforting to find that some things can be depended upon never to change. For more than 5,000 years Ayurveda as a complete health system has been based on the same fundamental principles, which involve maintaining a lifestyle that is completely in tune with Nature. You can be sure that those principles won’t be changing anytime soon.