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How Insulin Resistance Disrupts Fat Metabolism & Brain Function in Vata Types
Understanding the Meda Dhatu → Majja Dhatu Connection
Why Vata Types with Insulin Resistance Could Experience Brain Fog, Anxiety & Poor Focus.
This article aims to show that for Ayurvedic Vata types who have insulin resistance (IR), their digestion is compromised, and that without sufficient amounts of the right fats or oils in their diet, there can be difficulties with focus, concentration and anxiety. To understand this clearly, we need to look at how Ayurveda describes the digestive process.
The Vata Insulin Resistance Cascade
1. Insufficient healthy fats
2. ↓ Meda Dhatu becomes dysfunctional
3. ↓ Majja Dhatu (nervous tissue) undernourished
4. → Brain fog, anxiety, poor concentration
The Vata Digestive Paradox
In Ayurveda, agni means digestive fire and vishama means irregular or erratic. Vishama agni can occur, especially for Ayurvedic Vata mind-body types, when there are insufficient fats and oils to support proper digestion. This is a link to a short mind-body type questionnaire to discover your type. Since Vata by nature is cold and dry, this mind-body type is more sensitive to a lack of fats or oils. The result can sometimes (especially if they are insulin resistant) be that rather than feeling hungry, Vata types feel full and stop eating too soon.
This can lead to frequently eating small amounts, but if these are low in oils, many of the nutrients still don’t reach the cells — a problem that insulin resistance significantly worsens. To address this, healthy fats — particularly ghee and coconut oil for cooking, and extra virgin olive oil used cold — serve two functions for Vata types.
The Seven Dhatus – Fundamental Tissues
The seven dhatus are sequential building blocks — plasma, blood, muscle, fat, bone, marrow, reproductive — each nourishing the next, maintaining body structure, vitality, and immunity. When any stage is compromised, all downstream stages suffer proportionally.
These oils lubricate and stimulate digestive fire (called jathara agni) and they act as the carrier substance (called vahana) that allows nutrients to actually be processed through the seven stages of the assimilation sequence (called the dhatu sequence). The dhatu that deals with processing the fats is called Meda Dhatu — this is the 4th stage of the 7 — and without enough oils, the metabolic chain from this stage downstream experiences significantly reduced nutrient availability.
Meda Dhatu – Fat/Adipose Tissue
If Vata types aren’t getting adequate healthy fats, the Meda Dhatu becomes depleted (Meda kshaya). But here lies the paradox that maps onto the modern insulin resistance picture: the body, sensing inadequate Meda Dhatu nourishment, triggers compensatory mechanisms that can lead to a strong desire for simple carbohydrates, storing whatever it can as visceral fat through stressed metabolic pathways, and disrupting the Meda Dhatvagni (the metabolic fire governing fat tissue transformation).
The result: Meda Dhatu is simultaneously undernourished qualitatively (lacking sufficient lipid substrate from healthy fats) while becoming dysfunctional — which in modern terms maps directly to adipose tissue insulin resistance, where fat cells stop responding properly to insulin signalling.
Why This Affects Focus, Concentration and Anxiety
The dhatu sequence doesn’t stop at Meda Dhatu. Each dhatu nourishes the next in sequence, and when Meda Dhatu is compromised, the downstream dhatus are progressively affected. The 5th dhatu, Asthi (bone), suffers next — which is why Vata types with metabolic dysfunction often present with joint and bone issues that can be connected to their insulin resistance.
But it is the 6th dhatu, Majja Dhatu (marrow and nervous tissue), that explains the cognitive and emotional symptoms. Majja Dhatu governs the nervous system, the brain, and the spinal cord. When it is undernourished — because the upstream dhatus, particularly Meda, have not provided adequate nourishment — the direct consequences are often difficulties with focus and concentration, increased anxiety and mental restlessness, as well as sometimes poor sleep quality, and a feeling of being “ungrounded” or scattered.
For Vata types, who are already constitutionally predisposed to these very qualities, the effect is amplified. Insufficient healthy fats don’t just compromise digestion and metabolic health — they deprive the nervous system of its building blocks. This is the Ayurvedic explanation for why people with insulin resistance so often experience brain fog, anxiety, and difficulty concentrating, and why restoring adequate healthy fats can produce noticeable improvements in mental clarity alongside metabolic markers.
What You Can Do
For anyone with insulin resistance it is important to maintain high levels of healthy fats and adopt a diet to reverse insulin resistance. There are two short questionnaires available here – one for Insulin Resistance and one for Gut Health where you can get a broad assessment.
You can also learn about this with a free consultation by calling 07540 185534, or take one of my courses on ‘The Very Low Carbohydrate Diet — For Hypertension and Type 2 Diabetes Remission’.