Blood Sugar Solutions: Bridging Ayurveda and Modern Nutrition

Date: Saturday, May 2

Time:  noon – 1:30 pm

Speaker Bio

Mary Sheila Gonnella is Board Certified in Holistic Nutrition and the founder of Occidental Nutrition, LLC, where she helps people transform their health through food, rhythm, and lifestyle. With nearly two decades of experience, she blends modern science, Ayurveda, ancestral nutrition, and her training as a Wahls Certified practitioner to support blood sugar balance, hormone transitions, bone strength, and brain health in midlife and beyond.

A former Bauman College faculty member for seven years, she has also spent more than a decade supporting patients in a medical clinic. Mary Sheila lives in Occidental CA, gardening, cooking, and enjoying the outdoors with her family.

Description

As nutrition professionals, our niches vary, but our common shared thread is metabolic health. Metabolism, the body’s ability to digest, absorb, and assimilate what we take in, aligns with Ayurveda’s concept of Agni (“digestive fire”), the transforming force that turns food, information, and experience into energy and resilience.

Modern disruptors like processed foods, circadian misalignment, and chronic stress dampen this fire creating a ripple across body systems, contributing to rising rates of prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, PCOS, Alzheimer’s, obesity, and autoimmunity.

In this session, Mary Sheila Gonnella will bridge Ayurvedic principles with current research in metabolic physiology and glycemic regulation. We’ll cover the foundations of metabolic flexibility and energy production, through the Ayurvedic lens, while comparing it to current scientific research, with a special focus and deeper learning on blood sugar and insulin resistance. She’ll provide practical tools, including meal structure, supportive nutrients, and rhythm-based habits, to stabilize blood sugar, the upstream driver that also improves energy, cognition, hormonal balance, bone density, and liver function.

Learning Objectives

• Explain Ayurveda’s elemental framework and Agni, a multi-level metabolism (digestive, tissue, elemental), and map these concepts to modern systems biology, highlighting why supporting metabolic health is central to client care in any niche.
• Understand the role of blood sugar regulation as a metabolic foundation influencing multiple systems, including bone, cardiovascular, and brain health.
• Compare modern research on metabolic flexibility and circadian biology with Ayurvedic frameworks of strong/weak Agni and dinacharya (daily rhythms).
• Recognize the links between insulin resistance, cognitive decline (“type 3 diabetes”), and impaired Agni leading to ojas depletion, as well as food and nutrient remedies to support this system.
• Apply practical strategies from both Ayurveda and modern nutrition, including meal composition, timing, and lifestyle practices, to help clients re-ignite Agni, improve insulin sensitivity, and reduce inflammation.