Food is your first medicine and every body is different – learning what’s best for you, now and forever.
Eating for Health according to Chinese Medicine
In Chinese Medicine (CM), food and diet play a critical role in the promotion and maintenance of health and wellbeing. This view would not surprise most people as food provides nutrients necessary for the regeneration of various tissues and fuel for our activities.
In CM, we look at foods prepared according to their attributes and how they affect the Yin and Yang of the body, which can be broadly seen as the maintenance of equilibrium of matter and function. It is not simply what foods we eat, but also how they are eaten that plays a role in how well they can be broken down and absorbed by the body. This latter aspect is the focus of this article.
In CM, we advise that patients eat predominantly cooked and warm foods, and warm drinks. There are two aspects to this understanding. Firstly, bodies work hard to maintain a narrow range of body temperature for survival, known as thermoregulation. Ingesting foods or fluids colder than our body temperature will lower our temperature, leading to extra energy consumption to raise it once again to a suitable range. Expending energy unnecessarily further depletes us of the limited energy we have, leaving us more fatigued. Secondly, whether the foods are raw or cooked impacts our body’s ability to digest and access nutrients.
It is commonly thought that foods in their raw state have nutrients intact and are therefore the best choice for promoting good health. In CM, however, we recognise an additional dimension to this. If the food is not readily digestible, it reduces the availability of nutrients to be accessed by our body. Raw foods require more effort from the gut to be broken down, again utilising more energy and unnecessarily working the gut harder, and over a longer period of time. While the body is awaiting nutrients, it often signals a sugar craving in its attempt to get some quick fuel. If indulged, this can lead to other health issues over the long term. The longer transit time through the gut may also lead to symptoms such as indigestion, bloating, gas, reflux, or less than ideal bowel movements. These factors are symptoms signalling inefficiencies within the digestive system and can potentially lead to other complaints later.
The solution to aid digestion is to eat predominantly cooked, rather than raw foods.
Practitioners at To the Point Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine are well versed in CM diet therapy and can assist with dietary advice, acupuncture and herbal solutions.
