By Katie Pickard, Director of Education
Ayahuasca, a powerful psychoactive brew native to the Amazon basin, has become a focal point for spiritual seekers and wellness travelers from around the world. Traditionally used by Indigenous healers in ceremonial settings, ayahuasca combines two primary plant ingredients:
- Banisteriopsis caapi vine
- Psychotria viridis leaves
The former contains MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors), while the latter contains DMT, a potent psychedelic compound. When prepared together, they induce intense visionary experiences, often described as deeply emotional, purgative, and revelatory.
Over the past two decades, interest in ayahuasca has skyrocketed, particularly among people traveling from Western countries to Central and South America for guided retreat experiences. These retreats are often structured around group ceremonies facilitated by shamans or facilitators (sometimes Indigenous, sometimes not), offering an authentic experience and spiritual depth.
What Makes a Psychedelic Experience “Ceremonial”?
In traditional Amazonian contexts, ayahuasca ceremonies are embedded in a cultural and spiritual framework that includes singing (icaros), smudging, energy work, and symbolic rituals. These ceremonies are not just about the substance, they’re about the container: the setting, the intention, and the relational ethics involved. A “ceremonial” psychedelic experience implies ritualized use with cultural significance and a framework for integration, usually led by someone trained in the tradition. This is distinctly different from recreational or clinical psychedelic use.
However, the globalization of ayahuasca has resulted in significant cultural dilution. Thousands of retreat centers now offer ceremonies modeled after various traditions, but many have a minimal understanding of their true origins. One of the most debated and misunderstood elements adopted in these spaces is “La Dieta.”
What is “La Dieta” and Ayahuasca?
La Dieta, or “the diet,” refers to a set of food and lifestyle restrictions that are often prescribed to participants in the weeks leading up to an ayahuasca retreat. These restrictions typically include avoiding salt, sugar, alcohol, pork, processed foods, caffeine, and sexual activity. The idea, according to many retreat facilitators, is to “cleanse” the body in preparation for the medicine and to avoid potentially dangerous interactions between foods, substances, energies and ayahuasca’s active compounds.
But here’s where the debate gets started: much of the diet as it is practiced today in the Western retreat industry is not firmly grounded in traditional use, or in scientific evidence.
Tradition, But Without Context
In traditional Amazonian settings, dieta does exist, but it’s often more nuanced and specific. Indigenous practitioners may use dieta protocols when dieting master plants (plantas maestras) for healing or training purposes. These are typically done in isolation, sometimes lasting weeks or months, and involve consuming very bland foods while forming a spiritual connection with a specific plant spirit. It’s a discipline, not just a physical cleanse.
In contrast, the contemporary “ayahuasca diet” offered at many retreats is a simplified, often misunderstood version of this concept. It’s designed less for spiritual apprenticeship and more as a standardized pre-retreat checklist. This Westernized version has been popularized by the desire to emulate traditional practice, but often without asking why those practices emerged in the first place.
Several texts continue to explore this, like tThe chapter on “La Dieta” in The Expanding World Ayahuasca Diaspora, which considers “how the practice of ayahuasca dieting has become detached from indigenous cosmologies and sanitized into a series of techniques that Westerners employ in the hope of attaining certain psychological and spiritual traits.”
The real risk? When rituals are stripped of their cultural and contextual meaning, they lose their power, and can perpetuate misinformation.
Is There Evidence for the Diet?
The evidence behind the commonly cited restrictions is, at best, inconclusive. As Bia Labate and Clancy Cavnar have explored in depth in their work on the ayahuasca diaspora, much of the contemporary dieta is built on assumptions rather than research. While there may be some pharmacological reasoning for avoiding MAOI interactions with certain substances (e.g., SSRIs or tyramine-rich foods like aged cheese), many of the more common restrictions, like salt, garlic, or even sexual abstinence, are not supported by any compelling scientific data.
Instead, it’s likely that the benefits participants report from following a dieta, such as feeling more grounded, focused, or spiritually attuned, stem not from the diet itself but from the simple act of restricting. In many spiritual and religious traditions, self-imposed restrictions are a way to demonstrate readiness, build discipline, and shift consciousness. It’s the psychological effect of preparation, rather than a biochemical one, that may be doing the heavy lifting.
In Amazonian Medicine and the Psychedelic Revival: Considering the “Dieta,” the authors acknowledge the medical implications of “diets have a particular focus on the body and regimenting behaviour in order to achieve synergistic effects, and there are a large number of interacting variables that complicate the isolation of these effects. The functioning of diets is therefore poorly understood across multiple levels.”
Don’t get me wrong: the vast majority of people can absolutely benefit from healthier eating practices and developing a connection to what nourishes them in mind, body and spirit, but it’s a stretch to link dietary restrictions to an optimal psychedelic experience.
The Need for Nuance
The growing popularity of ayahuasca has inspired more people to reflect on how they prepare for, experience, and integrate their journeys. But as we respectfully borrow / learn / grow from Indigenous traditions, we should also be careful not to turn complex, context-rich practices into rigid dogma. The global retreat industry often encourages uniform practices under the banner of safety or authenticity, when in reality these are layered cultural adaptations in need of constant reexamination.
If you’re looking for personalized guidance and support before or after a psychedelic experience, the Unlimited Sciences Psychedelic Info Line offers free, 1:1 support for answering questions about psychedelic safety, integration, and emotional processing.