The study of food, nutrition, public health, and the social systems shaping the way communities eat has also enjoyed incredible expansion in higher education. Indeed, universities are hosting a growing array of programs on food policy, sustainability, cultural foodways, agriculture, food insecurity, and global health; these are all relevant streams that form the bedrock from which future leaders must draw as they confront the modern landscape of food.
Yet despite such progress, one key layer of food literacy remains strikingly absent from most university curricula: the pragmatic, experiential knowledge of digestion, daily rhythm, and sensory and energetic properties of foods. Students learn to think about nutrition as a science, food as a system, health as an outcome—but rarely about how health is cultivated in the body through daily habits.
This is no minor absence. It represents a deep omission in how we instruct young individuals about their relationship with food, well-being, and patterns that maintain good health over the long haul.
The Disconnection Between Food Knowledge and Lived Health
Universities excel at teaching frameworks—sociological, political, biochemical, ecological—but very often neglect the translational layer between “knowledge” and “experience.” A student can graduate understanding:
- macronutrient ratios
- food policy and regulation
- agricultural sustainability
- socioeconomic inequalities
- global supply chains
and yet very little understanding of:
- how digestion feels like in the normal or abnormal state
- and why certain meals create clarity while others create fatigue
- How Eating Rhythm Influences Mood, Attention, and Resilience
- how sensory qualities of food influence physiological states
- how daily routines interfere with or disrupt metabolic harmony
This isn’t fringe wellness theory; this is the bottom line for human functioning.
A person can become expertly educated to analyze a food system and yet miserably suffer from energy crashes, bloating, sleepless nights, or stress-related eating, simply because no formal education taught them how to read the signals of their own body. In a world where student mental health challenges and digestive disorders are increasingly common, this absence matters.
Digestion: The Lost Centre of Health Literacy
Because when digestion is running well, everything goes just a little bit better:
- cognitive performance
- attention span
- emotional regulation
- physical strength
- immune resilience
When digestion is compromised, it affects every aspect of daily life—including a student’s ability to learn.
And yet digestion is almost never taught as a practical, embodied skill. It may be learned that the small intestine performs nutrient absorption or that the microbiome drives immunity, but it is seldom learned:
- How Meal Timing Shapes Daytime Energy
- how food combinations influence digestive comfort
- how spices and herbs can support or hinder the digestive fire
- how stress, sleep, and sensory overload change digestion
- how to identify personal digestive patterns rather than general models
Universities teach analysis; digestion requires awareness. Without cultivating that awareness, a central aspect of food literacy goes unaddressed.
Food Energetics: A Dimension Modern Nutrition Often Ignores
Modern nutritional education tends to be reductive by necessity: calories, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals. These frameworks are indispensable but leave out another axis of understanding altogether: how food interacts with the body in a qualitative sense.
People across cultures have perceived food by its qualities for thousands of years:
- warming
- cooling
- grounding
- drying
- stimulating
- soothing
These qualities affect mood, energy, digestion, and even creative capacity. They are not mystical claims but observations of how the human body responds to the sensory and thermal nature of what it consumes.
It’s the job of universities to teach young adults about how to make sense of the world. But it’s their job, too, to give them tools to understand themselves.
Healthy Habits: The Lost Art of Higher Education
While higher education institutions usually provide credits for physical education or occasional workshops in wellness, few offer a developed understanding of how daily rhythm influences wellbeing.
Routine—when we eat, how we sleep, how we transition through the day—provides a profound influence on metabolic stability and mental clarity. Yet, as fundamental as any academic skill, routine is almost never taught as a discipline.
Students benefit enormously from understanding:
- the relationship between circadian rhythms and digestion
- how routine mealtimes balance blood sugar and mood
- how early-day routines influence cognitive performance
- How overstimulation affects appetite and digestion
- restful evenings have been shown to support next-day alertness
Teaching students about routine is not simply teaching “habits” — it is teaching the physiological basis of resilience.
Shifting From a Disease Model to a Wellbeing Model
Most health education in the universities is actually built on what goes wrong: hypertension, diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, nutrient deficiencies. Disease literacy is critical, but it accidentally projects a model that is reactive — health is talked about when there is an issue.
A wellbeing-based model would instead teach:
- what it is like when digestion is functioning at its best
- how to maintain the balance through the rhythm of food
- how emotionally responsive eating patterns develop
- how sensory awareness affects food choice
- How small changes to routine prevent long-term imbalance
Teaching students how to support their health before disease develops is not only more empowering, but it is more cost-effective and humane.
A Personal View from Within Traditional Education
Having passed through both undergraduate and medical education at respected institutions, I can confidently assert that these subjects never featured in the mandatory curricula. We studied biochemistry, pathology, physiology, pharmacology—but not how to maintain digestion, how to align eating with energy cycles, or how qualitative attributes of food influence health.
This is not a niche problem; it’s systemic. Students leave campus with an extraordinary amount of information about disease but very little guidance on cultivating health.
Modern Tools That Could Facilitate Curriculum Change
With universities starting to rethink health literacy, modern platforms can help bridge the gap between theory and daily practice.
- Ayurveda online courses by CureNatural provide structured introductions through which one can learn about digestion, food energetics, and daily rhythms rooted in a time-tested framework.
- An AI-integrated CureNatural Ayurveda mobile application lets students experiment with routines and observe their digestive responses in order to personalize their wellness pattern—to take an abstract concept to a lived experience. The AI component lets users generate recipes, specific to their body types and preferences, so they can learn what goes into proper food alignment with their body & mind.
These resources do not replace academic instruction; they complement it by providing students with a means to explore the more practical applications of the principles being taught.
Conclusion: A More Complete Model of Education
If the purpose of higher education is to prepare students for meaningful lives, then health literacy must be more than a footnote. Understanding digestion, food energetics, and daily routines is not alternative—it is foundational. Universities have mastered how to teach systems, policies, histories, and data. The next evolution is teaching students to understand their bodies with the same clarity.
The future of food and health education requires both: the world that feeds us, and the physiology that interprets that world.
Leave a Reply