Chinese Dietary Therapy
Chinese dietary therapy is used in conjunction with other Chinese medicine therapies to gain better momentum towards your health goals.
It may surprise you to hear that a ‘healthy diet’ through a Chinese Medicine lens is probably different to contemporary nutritional advice.
This is because energetic and thermal principles about damp, cold and heat natures of foods are taken into account and we consider both energetic balance, and individual needs and constitution. By educating yourself about principles of a foods nature and its impact on your body and mind, you can empower yourself to make choices to both remedy and prevent issues of digestive discomfort. You can achieve better balance and healthy function when choosing foods that suit you!
What Types of Food Can I Eat?
Think of the typical menu you’ve seen in Chinese restaurants. The meals are built around steamed rice, cooked vegetables, and small quantities of animal protein or beans. In quality Chinese restaurants, the amount of cooking oils used will be low. If you skip the deep-fried choices and those made with flour products (think dumplings and wheat noodles), you have the basic Chinese Medicine diet – a diet that helps to maintain balance in the body at any age.
Cooked Vegetables
Have you ever noticed the quantity of vegetables on a typical plate of Chinese food? You are usually served a heaping plate of lightly cooked vegetables when you order a dish that includes vegetables in a Chinese restaurant. Vegetables play a major role in draining dampness and are packed with life giving nutrition. A variety of colors and textures create a combination that is both pleasing to the eye and to the palate. Taste and texture play an important role in regulating appetite. A wide variety ensures satiety, so you feel full. Varied colors provide a broad array of nutrients and antioxidants to promote health and longevity. Your plate should begin with a large quantity of lightly cooked vegetables. A good guideline is to fill half your plate with vegetables. You will want to include lots of leafy greens as these are one of the most balancing and nutrient dense foods you can eat.
Non Gluten Starches
Rice is a balanced food which is easily digested. In my allergic patients, rice is a recommended carbohydrate to help them reduce symptoms while undergoing allergy treatments because it is so gentle to the digestive system. White or brown rice are interchangeable depending on which one digests most easily for you. White rice tends to be more cleansing while brown rice is considered more nourishing. Other wheat-free, non-glutinous grains include millet and quinoa. These are considered ‘clean burning’ foods in Chinese Medicine, that gently drain dampness from the body. Rice, quinoa, or millet should fill one quarter of your plate or less.
Protein
Small quantities of animal protein or beans are included in the Chinese diet. The animal proteins are ‘building’ foods and can be difficult to digest hence the emphasis on ‘small’. A serving size of animal protein is typically 2-4 ounces 3-4 times per week. Beans can be eaten more often as they absorb dampness and provide fiber and protein. Your protein choice should fill the other quarter of your plate.
Limit Cold Raw Food
One food you will find very little of on the Chinese Medicine diet is raw, cold food. This includes salads and chilled food, iced drinks, and frozen foods. Cold, raw foods are culprits in the formation of damp because they are difficult to process. For your digestive system to extract the essence of food, it must ensure the food is warmed up to body temperature before it can begin breaking it down. Heating the food inside your body strains your energetic resources, weakening your energy system over time. Lightly cooked vegetables and well-cooked grains allow your digestive system to immediately begin extracting energy without first having to heat the food to body temperature. Even though raw foods such as those found in salads contain slightly more enzymes and nutrients, the net gain is less than that of cooked vegetables as you lose energy to the internal heating process while trying to assimilate these foods.
Eliminate Dairy
Notice that there is no cheese, butter, or milk on the Chinese menu. One of the reasons is the tendency of these foods to create dampness. Even if heated, dairy’s energetic nature is cold and hinders digestion. Chinese Medicine considers dairy to be a building food, only suitable for undernourished people. This makes dairy very stagnating if you are already well fed.
In a culture concerned about calcium, we have been led to believe that dairy is the only source of this bone building mineral. However, foods such as almonds, salmon, leafy greens, and broccoli are high in calcium and other minerals that are equally important in the formation of strong bones. Your calcium needs will be easily met by eating several servings of vegetables per day and adding foods like salmon and almonds to your diet each week.
Eliminate Sugar
Concentrated sweets such as soda, candy, sweetened yogurt, and energy bars, quickly create damp. The flavor of ‘sweet’ is considered nourishing in Chinese dietary therapy but the ‘sweet flavor’ applies to foods like rice, beef, and vegetables, not concentrated sugars. If vegetables are considered sweet, you can imagine the intense sweetness of a piece of chocolate cake. The sweet flavor of rice, meat, and vegetables benefits the digestive organs. Concentrated sweets such as sugar, impair the body’s ability to transform food into energy and to transport the wastes for elimination. Incompletely transformed food becomes dampness, accumulating over time to produce blockage and disease.
The 5 Flavors are sweet, sour, pungent, bitter, and salty. Balancing these flavors in accordance with your individual body type, disease pattern, and season are all part of Chinese dietary therapy. This is a complex subject that can be explored in the book The Tao of Healthy Eating: Dietary Wisdom According to Traditional Chinese Medicine by Bob Flaws.
Eat According to the Seasons
Different seasons of the year require modified cooking methods and different food choices. People naturally eat more warming, heavier foods in the winter, like soups, stews, and baked foods. Conversely, in summer we are drawn to lighter, cooler types of foods that are more quickly cooked, like steamed vegetables. Varying your food choices according to seasons is a way to keep your body in sync with the natural environment. Eating warmer foods when the weather is cold and cooler foods during the summer months keeps you healthy in all seasons.
Likewise, eating in accordance with what grows in your region will keep your body in balance. For instance, someone who lives near the equator where the weather is warm all year around would eat different foods than people who live in cold, northern climates. People in tropical regions would naturally be near tropical fruits since they grow in that type of climate. Those living in the north, say high in the mountains, would never naturally see a tropical fruit growing in their area so should probably avoid them.
One of my favorite herbal educators, Bob Flaws, says that the modern diet is a ‘recent aberration in the history of the human diet’ that has only developed over the last 50 years. Many modern food choices would not exist in the absence of fast global transportation and indoor refrigeration. If you think about it, humans evolved eating what was locally available and in season. Preservation methods evolved but these methods usually involved cooking. The modern grocery store is like having an in season garden all year. Foods like watermelons, pineapples, and grapes are always available at your local grocery. But these are foods you might never find growing where you live and consuming them freely will lead to imbalances over time.
Eating local foods in season is still a common practice in many parts of the world. Indigenous cultures that produce many centenarians (people living past 100 years) have been studied for their dietary practices to find the key to their health and longevity. Scientists have tried to isolate which specific foods these people are eating to find the secret to their long, healthy lives. Many of these studies, however, seem to overlook the obvious fact that Indigenous people aren’t eating foods grown outside their region. Additionally, when you view the diets in longevity studies through the lens of Chinese Medicine dietary therapy, there are many similarities between their food choices. Especially noticeable are the larger proportion of locally grown vegetables, rice, whole grains, an absence of sugar or processed food, and smaller quantities of protein than their Western counterparts.
Now that we have covered some basics regarding the Chinese medicine diet and the concept of dampness, you can begin to make choices that will provide you with more years to your life and more life to your years.