The tenants of traditional Chinese medicine include understanding your body’s energy and how it travels through the body. There are several different types of energies, and when they are disrupted it can impact your whole life. Using these tenants, we can help you modify your diet to include habits and foods that nurture your body’s energies and help influence them to positively impact your health. In the West, we often describe our foods by the protein, carbohydrate, and fat makeup of each food. However, in Eastern medicine, foods are described by either being warming or cooling, and the flavors are determined by the effects of the food on our bodies. Essentially, when a food is described as warming, it indicates the food is warming the body’s Qi from the inside out and gives us more energy and keeps us moving. Cooling foods, of course, do the opposite. In terms of flavor, Eastern Medicine acknowledges salty foods affects the kidneys and moves inwards and outwards, so salty foods can be either warming or cooling. Sour foods affect the liver while sweet foods affect the spleen. Bitter foods affect the heart and move downwards, and pungent foods affect the lungs and move outwards and upwards. Having a good balance of foods in relation to their temperature and effects on the body is a key concept in Eastern Medicine, and ‘bingeing’ towards any one of these flavors or temperatures will always generally do more harm than benefit. The tenants of traditional Chinese medicine include understanding your body’s energy and how it travels through the body. There are several different types of energies, and when they are disrupted it can impact your whole life. Using these tenants, we can help you modify your diet to include habits and foods that nurture your body’s energies and help influence them to positively impact your health.
