What are High Vibration Foods?
What are High Vibration Foods?
From seaweed to cacao and pho, how important is a high vibration diet for raising your vibration? Plus how to know if what you're eating is low vibration.
*For your listening pleasure there is also an audio version of this article read by the author.
Updated October 2024
Vibration: The Next Evolution of Food
Imagine telling someone from the 1700s about lectins, pH balance, or antioxidants. I imagine some people would be receptive, and some would think the ideas ludicrous and side eye a person delivering such tales.
Society can often only advance so far before we're ready for the next step in knowledge evolution. Let's explore adding vibration to antioxidants, vitamins, and other invisible components we get from food.
The Vedas, the oldest sanskrit religious texts from India, spoke about the concept of prana, or life force energy in food. "The Gods eat food with prana." It's possible vibration is just a new term for a very old concept.
Basically us discovering something “new” is more like ancient cultures wrote about it and we just didn’t get it for thousands of years. Our society moves so fast we likely couldn’t slow down enough to feel what they were talking about.
Why Care About the Vibrational Frequency of Food?
I was listening to a Dave Asprey podcast discussing the work of Bruce Tainio from Eastern Washington University. Tainio invented a calibrated frequency monitoring system and measured frequencies of the human body and natural matter.
According to his work, humans have a healthy frequency range we want to stay within. Drop below that frequency range and disease can occur.
I found people who support Tainio's work, and those who think it's rubbish. There's a wide range of vibrations reported for high frequency foods, so I’m going to stay away from quoting precise measurements in this article.
As far as the benefits to eating high vibration foods, anything amplifying vibration in the physical body elevates our overall vibrational frequency.
Since reality conforms to vibrational frequency, when we enhance our frequency we enhance our magnetism for attracting higher vibration realities. Plus, high vibration foods add a sense of lightness and flow to our bodies; consuming high frequency food is quite the opposite of how we feel after Thanksgiving dinner.
In addition to health, as we intensify vibration in our physical body we often experience enhanced creativity, intuition, and synchronicity as those who read my article on benefits to a high vibration life may remember.
Why Do Frequency Measurements for the Same Food Vary?
I imagine kale picked from a garden and measured will register a different vibrational frequency than kale trucked across three states before being measured will.
Even the minerals and microbiome of the soil a vegetable grows in will likely make for a different measurement. Same for quality of water, if pesticides were used etc. Vibration is so micro it’s going to register even the smallest changes. So a lack of consensus around the vibration of foods makes sense to me.
Society’s understanding of what makes high vibration food is still evolving, so take it all with a grain of Himalayan pink sea salt.
There are so many things we can think about optimizing our diet for currently, and we are in the early stages of vibration being added to that list.
What Are Some High Vibration Foods?
One consensus I found across all sources, was canned and processed foods have a frequency of 0hz. Feels logical. I've never heard anyone say they ate a can of string beans and felt incredible, yet we can find many people who will gladly take a green juice if offered. On some level we sense it's good for us.
I eat canned chickpeas because spending hours cooking them doesn’t feel fun. If I'm focused on high vibration foods, this is a low vibration option. If I'm focused on fiber, it's a win. It's about balance.
Here’s a few random findings for fun. Naturally, all greens are high vibration foods. Raw nuts have a higher vibration than roasted nuts. Almonds highest of all. Seaweed is apparently epic. Fruit makes the list in moderation, (eating too much fruit for a high vibration is a fail I detail in my article on how I’ve messed up trying to raise my vibration.) A shot of liquid chlorophyll can be a high vibration food shortcut, and rose essential oil has a higher vibration than any food across sources.
Goji berries were one of the most high vibration foods I found. This dovetails with how they are seen as a tonic herb in Chinese Medicine. There’s consensus raw cacao is a high vibration food, as are most spices, lemons and limes.
Zest a lemon in your mind. Feel the lift? This is where I suspect humans are better at sensing frequency than we realize. Whether it can be accurately measured with a machine or not becomes irrelevant when we pay attention to ourselves.
We often even look younger as we begin to eat a higher vibration diet.
Expensive Food Doesn’t Equal High Vibration Food
Someone picking a handful of sun drenched cherry tomatoes may eat a higher vibration diet than someone at a swank juice bar. Especially if the wheatgrass has been sitting under fluorescent lights for days, and is prepared by a someone who hates their job.
Eating high vibration food is about more than just the food itself.
Gratitude and love during preparation are free, and can transform the most humble foods. Quantity is also key. We can stuff ourselves with high vibration foods, but if we can't digest properly, it's not doing much for us.
How many people have touched a food purportedly lowers vibration. I found this suspect at first. Then I thought of the following visual: Picture standing in a circle of 20 people with pristinely clean hands.
Example 1: A carrot is picked from the ground and passed around the circle to you.
Example 2: A carrot is picked from the ground and passed directly to you. Which carrot would you rather eat?
Atoms, Ayurveda & the Science of Vibration
Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine both agree on the concept of prana or qi in food and its relationship to health. There is a vibrational quality to foods humans throughout history have thought worth considering. It appears when we eat living food that's vibrating fast it helps us vibrate fast, and thus become a higher vibration person.
By vibrating fast what I mean is matter is made of molecules. Atoms of a molecule vibrate at different speeds relative to each other. Various foods have atoms vibrating at various speeds. When we consume foods with high vibration atoms those vibrations influences whether our atoms have a high or low vibration.
To quote Wikipedia’s article on Molecular Vibration, "A molecular vibration is excited when the molecule absorbs energy." It would appear that when we eat fresher foods with more energy, our molecular vibration becomes excited; it’s kinda cute if you think about it.
The collection of our body’s vibrations becomes our frequency, and food is a big part of this.
If we focus narrowly on one variable, like protein, we could end up doing an epic job at one thing because we can see results like muscles in the mirror... at the expense of invisible variables like antioxidants and vibration. At that point, how much we have improved our vitality becomes questionable.
Across multiple measurement sources, meat and animal products are typically considered lower vibration foods. Fruits and vegetables are high vibration foods. Even without measurements, this makes sense. The former have perished, and the latter still have life in them. (For example, you can grow a new onion by planting one from the grocery store.)
The idea of high vibrational foods offers a lens to expand our nutritional world view, and what we consider "valuable" to consume.
Spring Water is a Whole Food
I had a friend with severe back pain from a surfing accident, who swore his back felt better if he drank spring water. My eyebrow was arched.
He countered with a slightly snarky, but humorous, “I can’t believe you have a yoga certification and drink tap water.” Touché. He challenged me to drink only spring water for one month.
Naturally, challenge accepted. I'd already noticed a few of my house plants didn't like tap water, turning brown at the tips when I gave it to them. (Which is really kind of creepy if you think about it.) Sometimes I think humans are just fancy plants, so I was down to try.
Two weeks later I was out of spring water, and eying a glass of tap water. I felt actual resistance to drinking it.
I've never gone back, and have issued this challenge to other converts. Reactions range from visceral ones like mine, to softer, "I don't notice a huge difference, but I don't want to go back either."
Fresh spring water feels like one of the highest vibration elements I consume in my diet. Better than store bought spring water. I suspect it's the amount of time sitting in plastic that makes the difference.
I’m so converted I now visit a spring in the Cherokee National Forest (using a kit that checks water quality). Not advising anyone to go traipsing in to the wilderness for giardia. Just saying.
Some people even get really fancy, and deuterium depleted water is becoming rather trendy. I’ve heard about it on podcasts like the Life Stylist, but haven’t sprung for it myself yet. I offer the idea for those of you biohackers out there to explore.
Final Thoughts
No matter how many high vibration foods we consume, if we gulp them in front of a screen, are too in our heads to notice the taste, or feel gratitude when others are not so fortunate, I suspect it's all a wash.
I'm starting to wonder if the faster we go, the more stress it puts on us, and the slower our frequency gets. Our society's value for eating rapidly, and instantly grabbing the check may be robbing us of our ability to find a higher vibration.
A family eating plain rice prepared with love, crowded around a table outside, blessing their food and laughing, sharing stories while they slowly eat...their food may be the highest vibration of all.
If you want to go deeper on raising your vibration I’d be delighted to join on the journey; there’s way more than high vibration food to focus on. Swing by my website to see if anything resonates.
If you prefer to work solo, try my article on 17 Ways to Raise Your Vibration.