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Ayurveda Meets Functional Medicine with Dr. Shivani Gupta: Turmeric, Doshas, Digestion, and Inflammation
Dr. Ben Weitz introduces the Rational Wellness Podcast and interviews Ayurvedic practitioner and Fusionary Formulas founder Dr. Shivani Gupta about integrating Ayurveda with modern functional medicine. Gupta describes growing up between U.S. antibiotic-heavy care and Indian spice-based remedies, then adopting Ayurveda’s preventive lifestyle focused on circadian rhythms, gut “agni” (digestive fire), self-care rituals, and detox. She explains doshas (vata, pitta, kapha) as elemental body types that guide diet and lifestyle, and emphasizes inflammation as a root cause of chronic disease and “inflammaging,” highlighting sleep—especially the 10 p.m.–2 a.m. window—as foundational for reducing inflammation. The discussion covers turmeric vs. curcumin, absorption with fat and black pepper, her formulations including synergistic herbs like boswellia, plus Ayurvedic approaches to diabetes and gut support with Triphala, cumin, hing/asafetida, and other spices. Gupta shares resources for her book, podcast, and supplements.
00:00 Show Intro and Mission
00:59 Meet Dr Shivani Gupta
02:13 Two Worlds of Healing
05:34 Discovering Ayurveda
06:17 Ayurveda Core Pillars
08:38 Turmeric vs Curcumin Debate
12:01 Building Better Turmeric
15:04 Synergy Formula for Inflammation
18:05 Doshas Explained
23:48 Dosha Based Eating
25:02 Why Inflammation Matters
26:12 Inflammaging Not Aging
27:40 Ownership Over Health
28:58 Ayurveda Detox Story
32:42 Perimenopause Inflammation Reset
35:57 Sleep Tools That Work
39:09 Ayurveda For Diabetes
40:50 Gut Healing Herbs
42:46 Spices For Brain Health
44:49 Lifestyle Before Supplements
45:43 Agni Digestive Fire Future
47:17 Where To Find Shivani
47:58 Podcast Wrap Up
Dr. Shivani Gupta is an Ayurvedic practitioner, speaker, educator, founder of Fusionary Formulas, and host of the Fusionary Health podcast. She completed a PhD focused on turmeric and inflammation and has spent more than 20 years studying Ayurveda both in India and the United States. She’s also developed what she calls the “Fusionary Method,” integrating Ayurvedic principles with functional and lifestyle medicine, and some of her favorite topics are the role of spices, circadian rhythms, detoxification, and personalized healing strategies in chronic disease prevention and healthy aging. Her website is ShivaniGupta.com
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure. Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111.
Ayurveda Meets Functional Medicine
Dr. Weitz: If you’re looking for clinically useful insights, not wellness hype, then this is the place for you. Welcome to the Rational Wellness Podcast, the podcast for functional and integrative practitioners who want to practice with greater clarity and precision. I’m Dr. Ben Weitz, and each week, I sit down with the leading clinicians, researchers, and lab innovators to explore the science, lab testing, and clinical reasoning behind modern root cause medicine. This is a show focused on practical evidence-informed insights that you can actually use in patient care. Please subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. Please tell your friends and colleagues, and if you could give us a ratings and review on Apple or Spotify, we would certainly appreciate it. Finally, to access the show notes and the full transcript, please go to my website, drweitz.com.
Today on the Rational Wellness Podcast, we’re diving into the ancient healing system of Ayurveda with one of the leading voices bringing Ayurvedic medicine into the modern functional world, Dr. Shivani Gupta. Shivani is an Ayurvedic practitioner, speaker, educator, founder of Fusionary Formulas, and host of the Inflammation Code podcast. She completed a PhD focused on turmeric and inflammation. She spent more than 20 years studying Ayurveda in both India and the United States. Her work focuses on bridging ancient Ayurvedic wisdom with modern science to help patients reduce inflammation, improve digestion, optimize energy, and restore resilience. She’s developed what she calls the Fusionary method, integrating Ayurvedic principles, [00:02:00] and some of her favorite topics are the role of spices, circadian rhythms, detox, and personalized healing strategies. Dr. Shivani, thank you so much for joining us.
Dr. Gupta: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Weitz: Great. So you grew up, between India and the United States, and you were exposed to both conventional medicine and Ayurvedic healing traditions.
Dr. Weitz: : How did that shape your philosophy of health?
Dr. Gupta: : You know, I grew up living between these two worlds, and I always wondered which one is right. When I’m in the United States, when I got sick, I would… I have, like, a little mark on me. I feel like I have a tick bite, but we’re gonna learn if this was a tick bite or not on my arm. Oh, boy. Yeah. Fingers crossed it was not a tick bite. But growing up in the US when I got sick, we’d go to the pediatrician, and the pediatrician would write you a script. They’d say, “Oh, you have a cold? Here’s an antibiotic and you’ll get better.” And that was just the philosophy back then, and that actually still is [00:03:00] pervasive now.
I took my kids to a pediatrician who said that, and I looked at her like, “Are you kidding me?” That is… I thought we had debunked antibiotics for viral colds.
Dr. Gupta: But sometimes we haven’t, which to me is kind of insane. But I ended up taking antibiotics again and again and again and again through my childhood.
Dr. Weitz: Is, isn’t it amazing how they try to justify it- Yeah … knowing that, you know, 99% of the likelihood is you have a viral infection, not a bacterial infection, and that antibiotics are zero effective,
Dr. Gupta: Correct. you know, why don’t we change the system? Why don’t we culture and find out what somebody has- Correct
Dr. Weitz: : or why don’t we stop prescribing antibiotics? But the bottom line, I think, is that if you go to the pediatrician and the pediatrician says, “Take some vitamin C, drink some water, just get some rest”-you’ll say, “Oh, that was a rip-off. Why did I go to the pediatrician? Why did I have to pay $250 for that?”
Dr. Gupta: Right. So they have to give you a prescription.[00:04:00] Right, just so you feel like- And then- … you got your money’s worth. I mean,
Dr. Weitz: And then they justify it by saying, “Well, you might have a secondary infection.”
Dr. Gupta: : True. True. They’d say, “Here’s some prophylactic antibiotics.” And I’d say, “Why don’t you do a throat swab?”
Why don’t you swab this kid- Right … when you know it’s bacterial- Right … I am happy- Right … to give antibiotics.
Dr. Gupta: : You call me with that data before we- They don’t do that … completely kill their microbiome.
Dr. Weitz: : That’s just not done. Why isn’t that done?
Dr. Gupta: Yeah. It’s simple. So I, with my kids, I did that every time. I was like, “We do not give antibiotics unless we are actually proven to need them.” The doctor always looked at me like I was a huge pain in the butt. And I was like, “Well, I have a history here. My whole childhood was this. We’re not repeating this pattern in front of me again for my own kids.” And then what was interesting was growing up, we’d go to India every single year, and when I’d go to India and get sick, my grandma, she’d just open up the spice cabinet. She’d be like, “Let me mix up some turmeric, some ginger.” We have very special potent spices in the Indian kitchen, and whether it was a gut issue or a cold or whatever it was, I [00:05:00] would get healed with spices. And so I always thought stinky spices that work- … antibiotics that taste like bubblegum also seems to work.
I don’t know which system works. So fast-forward, by the time I got to college, I had been sick so much they had upgraded my antibiotic status into always giving me Augmentin, even harsher antibiotics, ’cause it was India, so sometimes you’d get sick and they’d just throw the kitchen sink at it. And no one was thinking, “Hey, maybe we should pay attention to what’s happening. Maybe there’s an immune issue here.” So by the time I got to college, I learned there’s something called the gut microbiome. You can destroy it. And then I also learned that there’s this entire system of health and healing in India called Ayurveda, and in Ayurveda, it’s a preventive lifestyle. They teach you how to live in rhythm with nature, how to use self-care to detox, how to heal the gut.And once I signed up for that plan, I felt amazing, vibrant, strong, healthy. I never got sick again, [00:06:00] and I was like, “This is it. This is the system I needed my whole life. I’m gonna now figure out a way to teach this to everyone back home so no one has to live the way I did.”
Dr. Weitz: So explain Ayurveda to those of us who are not familiar with it.
Dr. Gupta: For sure. So Ayurveda is an entire ancient system of medicine from India. It’s over 5,000 years old. So just like we know in the West about traditional Chinese medicine, so many of us love acupuncture, when you have traditional Chinese medicine, it’s not just acupuncture. It’s also herbs. It’s qigong. It’s this understanding of flow in the body and that we are elemental beings.
So in the same way, in Ayurveda, we taught, my first pillar that I teach always is our elemental design. We’re made up of the five elements, and knowing our body type is actually really powerful if we’re more air, fire, or earth body types, ’cause that can guide us on how we eat, when we eat. It really guides our whole entire [00:07:00] lifestyle and daily rhythm.
Then Ayurveda taught us the circadian clock and that the circadian clock even exists, which is cool because now in biohacking and longevity, we talk a lot about circadian rhythm. Ayurveda taught that the gut health is the center of all health. We call it agni or digestive fire, and how that fire is meant to be honored and built and revered and really managed well every single day if you want to have vitality and great health Then Ayurveda taught us about Ayurvedic self-care rituals, like daily rituals as easy as tongue scraping and oil pulling, but daily rituals that detox this accumulation of toxin burden that we know happens over time.
Then we taught big annual detoxing that we can do to really clean out the car engine, it’s like an oil change every year, and how that’s a centerpiece of good health. Then Ayurveda taught a lot about healthy diet, what we call the Sattvic diet, a beautiful diet that’s nourishing to the body, not just all these [00:08:00] kind of extreme diets of modern-day life.
And then finally, Ayurveda taught about the super spices, and reaching into the spice kit as a medicinal kit that we can use with adaptogens and all these things. And so I ended up doing my master’s in Ayurvedic sciences and my PhD dissertation on turmeric, the spice. And so I’m a super fan of turmeric and its power, but also of all the other spices and how you can make a simple tea and heal yourself. It doesn’t have to be so complicated. But healing can come from the herbal kingdom as well, not just super foods here in the West. That’s why I call them super spices, ’cause I think they’re as powerful.
Dr. Weitz: Now, i- in the natural world, I’ll just use that as a kind of a broader term encompassing functional medicine as well as, Chinese medicine and many other forms. There’s been a bit of a, two different ways of looking at herbs and spices. Yeah. And we have the natural herb itself, like [00:09:00] turmeric with all its vast properties, and then we have the more scientific functional medicine perspective. Not that all functional medicine is focused on that, but there’s a tendency to say, “Okay, what are the most essential ingredients in this spice?” So with turmeric, we have curcumin.
Dr. Weitz: : But then there’s a problem, it’s not that well absorbed, so now we have to have a specialized form. And then, you know, there’s basically, i- in the supplement industry, there’s been the curcumin wars, what’s the best form? This form’s better, that form’s better. No, this one is water soluble, this one is fat soluble.
Dr. Weitz: I notice that you have two supplements, one that has turmeric and one that has curcumin.
Dr. Gupta: For sure. You know, it’s interesting, I fell in love with turmeric as a kid. My mom and my grandma, I’m Indian. India is the largest consumer of turmeric in the world. [00:10:00] There’s not a dish we have that doesn’t have turmeric in it. We’re always gonna use turmeric. But in the kitchen, turmeric was also always used with ghee, because we’re always gonna use a healthy fat in the base of any cooking. And in our spice box, our daily spice box that we use in pretty much every dish, we have a spice called garam masala, which is a mixture that has black pepper , in it. And so when we look back at the science of using Ayurveda, we always used it inside of our own culinary cuisine using all the different things that we need to absorb it, the black pepper and the healthy fat. And so people ask me this question all the time, “Can’t I just eat raw turmeric? Can’t I just sprinkle it on my chicken, or do I have to take this extract, and how do I take this extract?”
So when I was doing my PhD dissertation, there were over 10,000 scientific studies and papers and review papers at the time. And in ancient Ayurveda, we knew that fresh turmeric is useful. It’s beneficial. People are juicing it and getting benefits from it. But that [00:11:00] fresh turmeric is the raw form. It is very warming to the body, and it wasn’t as commonly used in ancient India And so I actually do not use fresh turmeric. Now, when you take fresh turmeric and dry it into the spice, that is a much more concentrated version. And when you take that spice and cook with it, add black pepper and/or add a healthy fat or do both, and that is going to help you with the absorption of that turmeric powder. Now, I eat turmeric in my food every day, but I don’t consider that a therapeutic dose of turmeric to combat inflammation and th- and the types of things that we’re dealing with nowadays.
And so what most people don’t know is out of that entire turmeric plant, only 3 to 5% of it is the curcuminoids. And we know that those curcuminoids are the most effective at reducing inflammation. And so imagine if all of us are just sprinkling a half teaspoon of turmeric on our eggs or on our chicken, we’re not getting that therapeutic level. We’re getting a little bit, but not enough to [00:12:00] really move the needle. And so when I finished my PhD, everyone asked me, they’re like, “Okay, y- you keep saying turmeric’s the best thing ever. You keep saying if I have a sore throat, I should take it. If my knee hurts, I should take it. It seems to be your Windex l- solution, like in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Everything that’s wrong with us, you think it’s gonna work.” “But then whose do I take?” And I was like, “Well, I don’t know. Let me go try to figure this out.” And so I went to the grocery store. I went to the health food store, Whole Foods, Sprouts, all these kinds of places. Even I could not decipher based on all those different supplement labels whose was better, because everyone has different games that they play. So I went back to my advisors, and I actually had a PhD advisor in Houston, Texas at MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was the father of discovering that black pepper increases the absorption of turmeric by 2,000%. So I sat down with him and I was like, “Look, I don’t know what to do. Like, everything out there is so different.
What do you think?” He’s like, “Shivani, if you [00:13:00] ever decide to build your own turmeric, the one thing I don’t want you to do is take the curcumin molecule, break it into pieces, and then patent it and call that better And I looked at him like, “But that would be the best business idea.” Like, if you call yours special and do studies after it, then you kind of have the whole market ’cause you proved yours is better.
He goes, “Yeah, but Mother Nature’s Mother Nature, and you studied Ayurveda, and you know Mother Nature is queen, and what she creates is what’s best for us.” And so I took that to heart, and I ended up creating my own turmeric because I couldn’t understand if anyone else was truly seeking the best ingredient at the highest potency.
And so when I met my factory, it was like 2014, over a decade ago, I said, “Guys, I just wanna make a turmeric to prove to all of orthopedic medicine that they don’t have to give me NSAIDs when I come in with pain. Every time I have knee pain or plantar fasciitis, I take NSAIDs for 24 hours, 10 days a week.
That’s what they’ve been telling me to do for years, and [00:14:00] then my stomach hurts.” And again, after all my gut health issues my whole life, the one thing I protect is my gut health. And so I ended up creating a formulation sourcing a curcumin that hits 97% grade potency. So my supplier that I found goes above the standards, and my factory told me, “You are insane.
Nobody does this. This is not how you build a supplement. You build a supplement to source the cheapest thing to get the maximum profit.” And I was like, “No, no, no. That is not what I’m doing here. I’m trying to prove a point to all of Western medicine that the herbs of Ayurveda are as effective as what they’re doing.”
So my factory was like, “I just want you to know you’re insane. You’re gonna lose money all day. You’re ridiculous.” But I went for it anyway, and they weren’t wrong. I did lose money hand over fist for over half a decade. That was, you know, my mistake. They were correct. But then finally that leveled off because I truly believe in this world if you create good things with good intentions, then it’s going to get to the people who need it, [00:15:00] and that will make sense eventually.
Dr. Weitz: : All right. And so you have a product that actually has curcumin, and I think you put boswellia in, which is also known as frankincense, I think
Dr. Gupta: : Yes. Yeah, so I made two formulas. I made one hedging my bet that if orthopedic surgeons and everyone in the Western medicine space, I mean, the chiropractors I work with are all much more open-minded, but if I was gonna work with classic MD, DO, I wanted to follow exactly the literature.
And the literature says 500 milligrams of curcumin, four milligrams black pepper extract will create this result, and we have thousands of scientific studies that say that. So I made that first formula that way. But I added turmeric into it for the synergistic effect with the curcuminoids, because I couldn’t imagine not honoring Mother Nature.
Like, Mother Nature’s always right, even if we want to extract and do our own modern science ideas. But then I made a second formulation for me. I [00:16:00] actually didn’t think the doctors would ever use it. I was like, “Let me make this one that follows the ancient Ayurvedic principles.” In Ayurveda, we believed in synergy, that there’s a synergy of herbs that comes together in a beautiful proportion, and had you gone to an Ayurvedic doctor 5,000 years ago in your village, he would have taken boswellia, turmeric, guduchi, amla, which is a, has an antioxidant effect, black pepper potentially for the absorption, and mixed them together in the right proportion and given it to you.
And when we do that, that’s true healing. That is top herbs doing the main job. Secondary herbs helping the first herbs go where they need to go in the body. Third set of herbs mitigating the negative effect of even putting such strong herbs in the body in the first place. Like, there’s such a, an art, science, and beauty to a formulation like that. And so that’s the formula I made called Inflammation Relief. And then what shocked-
Dr. Weitz: otherwise understood in the biochemical perspective as curcumin to interfere with the COX enzyme pathway, and boswellia to interfere with the LOX pathway enzyme.
Dr. Gupta: : Exactly. It’s like a more holistic approach to that inflammation, really targeting it from all angles.
Dr. Gupta: : You’re right. Even though turmeric can affect over 30 different pathways, and turmeric does affect those master switches of inflammation, NF-kappa B, TNF alpha, COX and LOX like you’re talking about, all those pathways are impacted by curcumin itself. But by adding those other synergistic or herbs, we’re kind of fulfilling those last pieces of the puzzle to make sure someone gets the complete solution that they need.
Dr. Gupta: : So that’s where I think Ayurveda has so much magic to it and so much ancient science wisdom that we’re only now starting to prove to be true, and, and that’s so beautiful to watch. So I hope I get to do more and more clinical trial research on herbs in Ayurveda, because there’s [00:18:00] such a potency to them
Dr. Weitz: : That would be great. Definitely need more research on that. So one of the central concepts in Ayurveda is the doshas. Can you explain what the doshas are?
Dr. Gupta: : For sure. So in my new book, The Inflammation Code, I was putting so many of these-
Dr. Weitz: : Oh, I’m sorry. I should have mentioned your new book.
Dr. Gupta: No, that’s okay. That… It… I renamed the doshas in my new book. So in this book, I was putting together all the Ayurvedic wisdom, but trying to make it approachable for people, because I knew if I threw too many Sanskrit words at my audience, they’d be like, “Shivani, we’re not here to learn a new language from you. We’re just trying to get healthier.” And so I took the doshas, and I renamed them elemental design, because I wanted everyone to have, like, a framework so the whole world goes out there and understands what their elemental design makeup is. Just like so many of us are into human design and knowing what our human design makeup is and our personality quizzes we do. And so the doshas, or elemental [00:19:00] design, is your self-understanding of your individual body type. It’s you taking a quiz and coming to understand from your different traits what is your dosha from birth, and then where are you now? Are you imbalanced from that original constitution that you were born with? And so we teach that these elemental designs, or doshas, are made of the five elements: air, ether, fire, water, and earth. And so when you subdivide those, you get the three body types. The first one is Vata, or in the West we pronounce it Vata So a vata person is air and ether.
This is someone who’s always in motion. Imagine the properties of air. It can be a beautiful breeze. It could also be a crazy tornado. Could be a ceiling fan, moves, moves, moves, but never stops, but consistent. And so those properties of air apply to a vata person. Tend to be taller and shorter than anyone in their demographic. So imagine tiny and petite or tall and lanky. [00:20:00] This is someone who has oval features, oval face. They tend towards dryness like air, so dry skin, dry hair, dry nails. Tend towards being cold, kind of like air can be cold, breezy. And then also their tendency in their health is to struggle with insomnia, anxiety, dryness, constipation, and their,
Dr. Gupta: : When it comes to their, like, personality, they’re very happy. They’re always in motion. This is someone who’s always moving. This is someone who’s creative, someone who runs endurance marathons and things like that. And so that’s a vata person. Imagine the person in your life who’s always moving, never stops, tends towards anxiety, tends towards dryness.
Dr. Gupta: : And so the homework for the vata person is grounding, warmth, oilation, routine, and schedule. A vata person can tend to just not eat all day and forget to eat, and so we’re always like, “Guys, it’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s healthier fats. Let’s ground that energy.” And that’s how you help a vata feel more balanced and complete [00:21:00] what they start and feel more settled Then you have the pitta body type.
Dr. Gupta: : Pitta’s fire with some water. So this is someone who’s medium bodied, tends towards reddish skin, reddish hair, maybe early graying of the hair. Anything that happens in their body that’s negative is gonna show up as inflammation and show up on their skin. So that’s why when I get bites, it turns into big red patches.
Dr. Gupta: I’m a pitta fire. We tend to have, like, acne, hives, rashes. Like, everything will explode out of the skin for pitta people. Pitta personalities are driven, ambitious, organized, perfectionist leaders. But when pittas, who are fire, get out of balance, it’s kind of like a volcano. We erupt. We explode. Everyone around us is collateral damage. So the pitta tendency is anger, frustration, inflammation, burning, and wanting to burn everything down. And so the homework for pitta is to stay cool and calm. I want them to have coconut water, summer foods, [00:22:00] really have a plan in place to stay hydrated, well-fed, and supported because pittas get hangry. They have the strongest digestive fire.
And then finally, the third body type we call kapha. Kapha is the earth body type. This is earth with water. So this is a body type of someone who’s really grounded. Imagine mountain energy. This is your person who’s like a caretaking grandma who loves and feeds everyone around her. In a man, it can feel like a very grounded mountain energy. You’re not gonna move him very easily. This is someone who has oilier skin, oily hair, round features, bigger boned. They’re just one step at a time, one thought at a time. They’re fiercely loyal to everyone around them. They have a very sturdy constitution. They don’t get se- sick easily, and they typically get, like, 10 hours of slumber.
Dr. Gupta: : They get the best sleep of everybody. And so the struggle that kapha can have is sluggish metabolism, congestion, ’cause of that water element. And so we always guide them to do [00:23:00] bigger intermittent fasts, cut the dairy, support that metabolism, move their energy first thing in the morning so their energy moves for the day.
Dr. Gupta: : And then when kapha ends their day and sits down, they’re not gonna move again. They’re not part of our hu- hustle culture that we create right now. And so it’s really supporting them to understand what keeps their energy moving and feeling good. And so those are the three constitutions, and you’re born with your constitution.
Dr. Gupta: : Everyone has a primary or a secondary. Some people are balanced in all three. We call that tridoshic. And when people find me, they’re usually like, “I don’t feel like myself in my body. Can you help me figure this out?” And what we usually figure out is they were born in one constitution, and now they’re just so imbalanced into another, and we just need to walk them home so they’re back to themselves
Dr. Weitz: : Does each dosha have a different dietary approach?
Dr. Gupta: : Yes. Yes, absolutely. So vatas, we need more grounding foods, fall foods, warming [00:24:00] foods, anything grounding for them. So like nutmeg, healthy fats, adding in more ghee or avocado, root vegetables to root their energy down. Versus with pittas are always on fire. Pittas have the strength to digest everything, but really need to manage that they’re eating properly, eating well, and incorporating cooling foods. Cause oftentimes you like to eat the thing that imbalances you most. So pittas just wanna eat fried food and everything hot and spicy and chili, but that causes more imbalance. And so it’s about teaching them how to keep their fire cooled and regulated. And then the kaphas, we teach them cooked meals, less raw foods, ’cause they don’t have the same digestive fire capacity to digest food.
Dr. Gupta: : And when they start eating cooked foods, they start to feel better. And then cutting dairy down, because dairy’s not helpful to them, and then holding those bigger intermittent fasts. So it’s interesting we’re living through a time where everyone’s like, “Drink your cold, icy smoothie. That’s the best thing.”
Dr. Gupta: : That’s not the best for everyone. Like, there’s [00:25:00] no one thing that’s good for all of us.
Dr. Weitz: : You’ve made inflammation a big focus. Why is inflammation so important?
Dr. Gupta: : You know, I come from a family of diabetics, and I grew up landing in India, and it was always devastation. It was heart attack, stroke, quadruple bypass, Parkinson’s, leg amputation due to diabetes.
Dr. Gupta: : And I watched all this unfold, and my family was very hardworking, very successful entrepreneurs. And I thought, “Is this what we’re all signing up for? Am I gonna be an entrepreneur, and then I’m gonna be real successful, and then from 60 to 80, I’m gonna be in and out of the hospital suffering and making my whole family suffer?
Dr. Gupta: : Is that the plan?” And so when I started studying health, I realized inflammation is the root cause behind our chronic metabolic diseases and so many of the chronic diseases we struggle with. And it’s kind of insane as a modern-day society that we know this and allow this and allow it to persist. [00:26:00] And the fact that nearly all of us are running around with chronic low-grade persistent inflammation wreaking havoc, the fire alarms are going off.
Dr. Gupta: : Your body is saying, “Hey, something’s wrong here.” Brain fog. I mean, imagine the symptoms we all run around with post 40. Fatigue, brain fog, digestive issues, joint pain, fatigue, like just not feeling like ourselves. And everyone who I meet says, “I guess this is just aging. I guess that’s just what this is now.”
Dr. Gupta: : And I’m always like, “The moment your mind says to you, ‘I guess this is just aging,’ you need to say stop. This is inflammaging. It’s just inflammation causing aging symptoms. Let me go address my inflammation and see if the symptoms persist.” And if we would all pause and do that, if we’d pause and say, “What did I eat this week?
Dr. Gupta: : How’s my sleep? Where have I not been taking the right supplements? Am I under significant stress? Did I add on new toxic burdens that could be causing a change in me? What did I change?” [00:27:00] And then we start taking those things off the table, then we’ll start to see a shift. And so my whole book is about how to understand what is inflaming us and how to make small subtle shifts, improve your gut health, reduce your toxic burden, and each thing adds up.
Dr. Gupta: : In my case, I’m a mom, an entrepreneur. I’m busy. I get it. I- We don’t all have full-time hours to take care of our health, but each thing you put into place as a system, you can just maintain that system. And so that’s my goal, is to show everyone inflammation is a root cause issue, and we have to address it because the punishment at the end of the tunnel is tremendous if we don’t.
Dr. Weitz: : Why has feeling bad become so accepted in our culture?
Dr. Gupta: : Honestly, I think we’ve accepted the death sentence of how life is gonna feel. Like, I go to Houston, I’m from Houston, Texas, and when I go home everyone’s like, “Oh, you know, we’re all on GLPs. We’re [00:28:00] all overweight. We’re all obese, and this is just how it is.”
Dr. Gupta: : And I’m like, “No, this is our family tendency. It’s not our genetics. These are choices. Everyone needs to get up, walk three miles a day, go lift some weight, cut your carbs and sugar, and you can’t just lean on your GLP and eat to the max, eat the junk food you still wanna eat, and expect to change.” Like, we have to take ownership.
Dr. Gupta: : We have to take initiative. And so my goal is always, how can I help you feel so good that you then understand how good you can feel? And then when you start to kind of fall off the horse, ’cause we always do, we always will, then you have the habits, the lifestyle practices, the understanding of like, “Okay, my gut health’s off. Let me just fix that. Oh, my energy is off. Let me fix that. My sleep is off. Let me fix that.” You’re so empowered with herbs and spices and teas and tools that you can reach for one quick and get back to feeling great. That’s my goal.
Dr. Weitz: : Tell us something about [00:29:00] Ayurveda that, is not well known.
Dr. Gupta: : Ooh Oh my gosh, there’s so much to Ayurveda. But I’ll give you a story. When I was younger, in my 20s-
Dr. Weitz: : I love stories.
Dr. Gupta: : Yeah. When I was in my 20s, I actually had some sort of dental thing done. I bet I had, like, a couple teeth pulled or something filled. Whatever it was, it took me out of the gym for a month, and then I went on this quest for why do I feel like garbage? What’s wrong with me? And so I went to 10 different specialists. I had gotten home from college. My parents were like, “Okay, endocrinology.” The doctor looks at me and was like, “Oh, based on your symptoms, you’re diabetic.” And I was like, “Wait, that’s a death sentence. What are you even talking about right now?”
Dr. Gupta: : And then they did my blood work. They were like, “Oh, just kidding. You’re not diabetic. We don’t know what’s wrong with you.” Went down the line. Neurologist. Like, kept trying to understand what’s wrong with me. It turns out this girl has to eat well and work out or this body does not work well, and that was such a simple answer.
Dr. Gupta: : But after that, I also took my parents to India because we were going to India every other year, [00:30:00] and I was still on this quest of what are the tools I have to pick up for my body to finally be its absolute most healthiest? And so we went to a detox center in India. We checked in, and these people take your luggage and scavenge through it to make sure you haven’t brought in contraband.
Dr. Gupta: : And I looked at my family. I was like, “What did I do? What did I sign us up for?” They’re like, “These Goldfish, unacceptable. You can’t bring those in here.” I was like, “Okay, guys.” So they wanna make sure you don’t bring in any junk food, gluten, things that are gonna affect your detox. And once you check in, you’re in for two weeks.
Dr. Gupta: : You don’t leave the property- … and the doctors say what you’re gonna do. And so they started doing all these treatments. Castor oil packs. I was like, “Oh, we know if castor oil packs are beneficial.” So they’d come to your room and put warm castor oil packs with warming packs on top. Every day we would be on juice fasts.
Dr. Gupta: : They would say every morning you need to walk five miles a day and drink three liters of water, which was hard. That’s, like, its own job to pack in. We did [00:31:00] colonics. We did enemas. We did all these things. Yoga, pranayam. I have never felt better in my whole life. And so I became such a believer in this concept of we all here are gonna pollute our bodies.
Dr. Gupta: : We’re gonna do things. We’re gonna consume things. We’re gonna breathe the air in the West and c- drink the water and all the things we do that we should acknowledge are pretty harmful. They’re basics, but they’re actually pretty harmful, and we have to learn to clean those things up, which is what I talk about when I say systems that are less toxic.
Dr. Gupta: : I mean clean water, clean air, cleaner food, all those kinds of systems you can put in place. But what I learned was we can detox on a daily basis in our own homes using the simple practices of Ayurveda, like using a copper tongue scraper every day. Scrape your tongue 7 to 14 times, and we teach that you’re scraping every organ of the body because every organ of the body is reflected on the tongue, just like in reflexology we know they’re reflected on the bottom of [00:32:00] our feet.
Dr. Gupta: : And so it’s simple tools, and they almost sound rudimentary because nowadays we’re like, “Oh, I need a $2,000 sauna or a $2,000 PEMF device. That’s the only way to get healthy.” But Ayurveda said no. It’s less than a minute and it’s less than 10 bucks, and you can actually be really healthy. And so each time I went to India after that to do those profound detoxes, I thought, “Gosh, the whole world would be such a different place. We wouldn’t struggle with disease the way we do if we all showed up at these places and detoxed.”
Dr. Weitz: : Yeah, we gotta force all the world leaders to go there.
Dr. Gupta: : Seriously. Seriously. Clear the body to clear the mind, and then we’d have a different world.
Dr. Weitz: : How can Ayurvedic support women especially struggling with some of these issues like fatigue and weight gain and sleep issues?
Dr. Gupta: : For sure. You know, I’m 45 at this moment, at the recording of this podcast, and hitting perimenopause has been quite [00:33:00] a beautiful level of understanding and journey. I hit 40 and was like, “Whoa, okay. That’s some change.” And then 45, and you’re like, “Wow, okay.” So as your estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, everything wants to shift and move on a rollercoaster type of situation, you have to change your habits.
Dr. Gupta: : And so I think we’re actually living through a beautiful moment where we are studying and finally doing great science on women’s health, diving deep into what is it that’s happening during this huge hormonal transition. But I also think that as women, when we hit our 30s and our 40s and our 50s, each d- half decade and decade, we’re hitting it more and more inflamed, and we’re not understanding that role that inflammation plays when we’re hitting those transition points.
Dr. Gupta: : And so the work I’m doing now is let’s win at inflammation so the body can function well, so it’s not like a fire alarm situation with the entire fire station going nuts inside of us trying to figure out what’s wrong. We [00:34:00] talk about autoimmunity in women. That’s the body under attack from itself, thinking there’s a problem inside when there is none.
Dr. Gupta: : And so women who are struggling with Alzheimer’s, dementia, all these things in much higher rates than ever, we know that the root cause is inflammation. And so why wouldn’t we pause and take a moment and say, “Okay, you know what? My body’s even more sensitive to the world around me. What am I willing to change for my body to be more at ease?”
Dr. Gupta: : So for me, it’s things like water, air. It is our food and how we source it into our home. It is pausing to eat meals well. It is supplements and taking the right supplements. We know that our land is lacking nutrition, and so when I say food sourcing, I mean if I’m gonna eat spinach, for example, today I had, and it has 10% of the total vitamins and minerals that it had in the past, then it’s my job to make sure I’m supplementing with vitamins, minerals- And really testing, and that’s actually where I love functional medicine.
Dr. Gupta: : I go to functional medicine and I’m like, “Tell me what’s [00:35:00] wrong with me.” And 40 pages later they’re like, “There’s a lot wrong with you. There’s a lot to do here.” And I’m like, “Okay, well if it’s vitamin B and D and 500 things, let’s figure it out through supplementation and through food, and let’s try to get there.”
Dr. Gupta: : But at least on the inflammation side, I work with turmeric a lot. I work on people’s sleep a lot. People don’t understand that if we don’t sleep well, we’re going to stay inflamed. And so when we look at that circadian clock from Ayurveda, Ayurveda says 10:00 to 2:00 is our Pitta time of day. It’s when the fires come out and clear and clean inflammation.
Dr. Gupta: : And if we’re not gonna sleep in those time windows, we’re not gonna get the maximum result of clearing inflammation. And so one easy place everyone can start is with sleep. That’s why I create sleep teas, sleep gummies, and I really do a lot of talking on sleep ’cause if we put sleep hygiene and sleep rituals in place, I think our sleep can be that much better
Dr. Weitz: : Sleep is definitely something that a lot of [00:36:00] patients complain of, and there’s many strategies, but a percentage of patients have trouble even employing a lot of the best strategies.
Dr. Gupta: : Yeah, it’s true. It’s so true. I recommend tracking your sleep so you get real data. Right. We’re such a data-driven society right now that just seeing it sometimes- Sure … like I’ll, I have an Oura Ring, and every once in a while I’ll wear it. I don’t wear it year-round. And I’ll look at it, I’m like, “Why are you always a B student?
Dr. Gupta: : Like, what’s, when are we gonna- … get into the A student category? What’s happening here?” And it explains the fatigue, that malaise, that not feeling good that we have going on. And so it kind of gamifies trying to at least get towards a better result. And so when I do that, I’m like, “Okay, well, what are the triggers that are gonna affect your sleep?”
Dr. Gupta: : Alcohol will do it. Eating late will do it. Cut off dinnertime earlier. No more snacking. Are you tired enough to get good sleep? A lot of times I’ve had clients come through with major sleep issues, and I’ll say, “Start walking three miles [00:37:00] a day,” and that alone will make them tired enough. Then I teach them about sleep pressure.
Dr. Gupta: : Are you waking up and stepping outside at all? Or are you just staying inside? Are you ever letting the sunlight hit your eyes and start that circadian clock for the day? So there can be a lot of simple things to do there. But I agree with you, there is a category of people who always struggle with sleep.
Dr. Gupta: : We would think of it as the Vata crew, who’s always gonna have that lighter sleep, and so they might need to reach for more and more tools to get that better sleep. It might be, deep breathing before bed, yoga before bed, or a hot shower. We even have a self-care ritual in Ayurveda called Abhyanga massage.
Dr. Gupta: : It means self-massage with oil. And so you just put a towel down, warm up any food-grade organic oil, could be like almond oil, sesame oil, coconut oil even, and you gift it to the body. So like generous amounts of the oil from your feet all the way up to your neck. You can even do your hair if you want thicker, oilier hair.
Dr. Gupta: : But it’s [00:38:00] so grounding to that Vata energy that it helps all of them sleep profoundly. And so it’s a beautiful habit to add on board if you need to reset your sleep cycle.
Dr. Weitz: : That’s, that’s interesting.
Dr. Weitz: : If you could convince every listener to change one habit tomorrow, what would it be?
Dr. Gupta: : Oh my God. I want everyone to do 100 things.
Dr. Weitz: : I do too, but-
Dr. Weitz: : You know, it’s easy to overwhelm patients with lots of things to do.
Dr. Gupta: : It is. I would say the number one thing is sleep, honestly. If we sleep well, we’re gonna let the body clear inflammation, clear the lymphatic system, the glymphatic system, repair and heal everything that went awry during the day, allow the immune system to clear up everything and reboot and do what it needs to do. So I think the number one winner is if you can get your seven to eight hours of sleep, depending on what you need, ideally moving [00:39:00] closer to that 10:00 to 2:00 window when we knew, we know that circadian clock supports you the most, I think that’s the biggest gift you can give yourself
Dr. Weitz: : You talked about diabetes. What’s the Ayurvedic approach to diabetes? Is there an Ayurvedic approach?
Dr. Gupta: : Absolutely. I mean, for diabetics, we have yoga poses that are beneficial. Always if you see an Ayurvedic practitioner, we’re gonna give you homework when it comes to breathing techniques, ’cause that’s gonna reduce stress in the nervous system, yoga poses that are beneficial, ’cause that will detox and support the system, and you can even support endocrine system through diet, through, yoga.
Dr. Gupta: : We would give you special herbs that cut your cravings for carbs and sugar. So we have herbs like Garcinia cambogia, different herbs that historically just the leaf would turn off the tongue’s ability to taste carbs and sugar so that we reduce all those cravings and that consumption. We would recommend moving more, usually through yoga and walking.
Dr. Gupta: : That’s how we like to prescribe exercise. [00:40:00] We would ask for better sleep. But definitely, we have a lot of herbs that are kind of bitter, like, bitter herbs. We have different herbs that are gonna support the system in supporting the diabetic. So that’s how we would go about it.
Dr. Weitz: : Yeah, bitter melon- Yeah … I know is one.
Dr. Weitz: : Cinnamon, yeah.
Dr. Gupta: : Garcinia is another one we love. we love Triphala. Triphala helps heal the gut. I love turmeric, of course. It’s my favorite ’cause it’s so anti-inflammatory. But I mean, the modern science on turmeric talks about how it is for anti-aging, for longevity, gut healing, helps with healing leaky gut. So to me, turmeric’s like my all-in-one solution. Ginger lemon tea in the morning we would give them to ignite their digestive fire, get it churning and burning, and get that metabolism moving for the day. So we would have kind of a systematic approach to it.
Dr. Weitz: : Yeah. I treat a lot of patients for gut problems. What are some of your favorite, gut-healing, herbs?
Dr. Gupta: Number one is Triphala. We think of Triphala as the perfect [00:41:00] evening herb to take, because it’s gonna help make sure you’re regular in the morning. Number one, we want zero people constipated.
Dr. Weitz: : I’ve always pronounced it as Triphala, but…
Dr. Gupta: : Triphala. Yeah. We pronounce it Triphala. And so yeah, that Triphala’s so helpful ’cause we want everyone regular, and people don’t understand how horrible constipation is.
Dr. Weitz: : And that’s actually a combination of three herbs, right?
Dr. Gupta: : Exactly, yeah. It’s a combination of three. And then our next recommendation would actually be- And
Dr. Weitz: : what is, what is, what does Triphala do?
Dr. Gupta: : So Triphala, anyone who’s constipated, we recommend taking it. It’s not going to cause, like, diarrhea or anything, but it just causes that regularity in the system. It’s like a very gut-healing, gentle herb that you can take over good long periods of time. Then you are meant to take breaks from it and then start it again.
Dr. Gupta: : But any time anyone’s having a gut issue, that’s, like, a good place to start. Then I always recommend using a copper tongue scraper in the morning. Some people who are constipated have used the tongue scraper, and that alone helps them get more [00:42:00] regular, because copper tongue scraping is gonna ignite the digestive fire for the day as well.
Dr. Gupta: : Then we talk a lot about cumin seeds in your food. So sometimes people are cooking, but they’re not using the right herbs to help them digest their food, and cumin seeds help you digest anything that’s hard to digest. We also have another spice called hing, H-I-N-G, and it’s, in the West you call it asafetida, but I don’t think anyone has heard of this spice.
Dr. Weitz: : I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.
Dr. Gupta: : It’s really pungy. It’s really stinky. But you use a tiny pinch of it in the beginning of cooking, and so any time you cook lentils or beans or meat or anything really hard to digest, cooking with that will pre-digest it and help your body digest it better
Dr. Weitz: : One sp- thinking of, specialized herbs, one spice that’s, come, it seems to be coming into its own as a herbal, treatment that especially helps with brain health is [00:43:00] saffron.
Dr. Gupta: : Absolutely. Saffron’s having a moment right now. I think it’s Dr. Daniel Amen who talks about saffron a lot and its c- ca- capacity for ADHD, for brain health overall. I mean, some spices out of Ayurveda, turmeric, saffron, ginger, ashwagandha, cinnamon, are so multifactorial in their approach. I actually know more about ashwagandha than I do about saffron.
Dr. Gupta: : In ashwagandha’s case, they’ve done studies that’s shown it’s as effective as 14 different psychoactive drugs when it comes to helping us, and we know that it’s an adaptogen. So if we’re stressed and anxious, it calms us down a couple notches. If we’re depressed and feeling the blues, it lifts us up. So imagine putting natural thermostats in the body using herbs that meet you where you are, and I feel like saffron has that multifaceted capacity as well.
Dr. Gupta: : So I’m really excited to see the continuation of all this research on these botanicals. When you go [00:44:00] to India, they are studying them in great depth. Like, they are doing so many clinical trials per herb, per health issue. And so I think in the future, even here in the West, we’ll, we’ll have, like, our own spice boxes ready, and we’ll know, like, “Hey, I can’t focus today.
Dr. Gupta: : Let me just put some saffron in a hot cup of water and drink it, and I’ll feel like I can focus,” or, “Let me put some ashwagandha in some nut milk, and I’ll feel more settled for today.” Like, I can’t wait for that day when we all have that understanding for reaching for herbs and spices first, as opposed to, like, painkiller first for a headache and things like that.
Dr. Weitz: : Right. It doesn’t quite fit into the capitalist system, though. No. We need the patented form of saffron that costs $300 a bottle.
Dr. Gupta: : Yeah. Yeah. We don’t. We don’t. The… It can be simple. I think the problem is we escalate our issues to much bigger issues, and then we need that biggest hard-hitting solution, right?
Dr. Gupta: : If we managed our [00:45:00] inflammation, we wouldn’t have to create mega-potent turmeric supplements. We would have managed it earlier. And so that’s actually why I wrote a book, was I’ve had my supplement company now for over a decade, and I have people who take my product for five years, and they’re like, “I have to have it.”
Dr. Gupta: : And I’m like, “Okay.” I appreciate that you like what I made, but we need to have a conversation. Where’s your sleep? Where’s your gut? Where’s your digestion? How are you eating? Like, there’s a lifestyle piece, and if we win at lifestyle, we might not need to take all these potent supplements, guys. We can win on the first part.
Dr. Gupta: : I know it’s not easy, and so what I tell people, “Look, take the supplement. Get out of pain. Get out of your inflammation state. I get it. And then you’ll feel good, and then we can start working on the lifestyle piece as well.”
Dr. Weitz: : What’s one Ayurvedic concept that you think will become mainstream in the next 10 years?
Dr. Gupta: : Oh, beautiful question. I think we will all come to understand that inside of us, we have a campfire, a digestive fire. We call [00:46:00] that agni, and that fire is meant to be honored. It’s not just, oh, I have a gut, and I can throw anything down the hatch- … and it will digest and process it, and it’ll be fine. I think we’ll have this newfound understanding of it’s not fine.
Dr. Gupta: : It’s being stored in our fat cells. Our body doesn’t know how to do anything with all this foreign stuff that we’re throwing down into our bodies. Instead, we’ll understand how to wake up our digestive fire in the morning, then you can have your morning caffeine. We’ll understand better hydration for the gut.
Dr. Gupta: : We’ll understand eating two or three meals a day. That’s it. Not five or six snacks and expecting that fire to keep working at full force. We’ll understand our own custom intermittent fastings, as women will cycle with it, but we will understand the intermittent fasting ideal for our body type. We’ll understand the diet we should eat on a circadian seasonal diet to support the digestive fire to function at its best.
Dr. Gupta: : And then we’ll also know how to work and cycle through [00:47:00] all the super spices to give ourselves such a robust digestive fire that we can absorb all our nutrition, we can avoid having leaky gut and all those health issues we have, avoid autoimmunity and these things, and have the robust digestive fire and vitality that we deserve
Dr. Weitz: That’s great. So where can listeners learn more about your work, your podcast, your book, your programs?
Dr. Gupta: Everyone can find me at drshivani.com, and that’s where you’ll find my book, The Inflammation Code, my podcast, The Inflammation Code, and then I’m on Instagram as @dr.shivanigupta, and everyone can message me your questions. Reach out to me anytime. I love talking to everyone. And then for the supplements, my website is fusionaryformulas.com, ’cause it’s a fusion of East and West, and I made a special code for your audience, rationalwellness, will give them 15% off.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great. Thank you so much, Shivani.
Dr. Weitz: : Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would very much appreciate it if you could go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and give us a five-star ratings and review. As you may know, I continue to accept a limited number of new patients per month for functional medicine. If you would like help overcoming a gut or other chronic health condition, and want to prevent chronic problems, and want to promote longevity, please call my Santa Monica White Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition office at 310-395-3111, and we can set you up for a consultation for functional medicine. And I will talk to everybody next week
