Chinese Dietary Therapy
Food As medicine
What IS Chinese dietary Therapy?
Chinese Medicine involves understanding the properties or “energetics” of food and how they affect your health. Chinese Dietary Therapy is used for maintaining your health, as well as preventing and treating illnesses.
In the 6th century, Sun Simiao, China’s King of Medicine, wrote that “A true doctor first finds out the cause of the disease, and having found that out, he tries to cure it first by food. When food fails, then he prescribes Traditional Chinese Medicine.”
This is food as medicine.
WHat is the Energetics of food?
Chinese Medicine and energetics are about creating and maintaining the balance of Qi—the vital essence found in all things—within your body to achieve optimal wellness. Sickness and disease is thought to be created by imbalances of Qi within body and treatment for these illnesses is to rebalance your Qi. Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine can also be used to maintain your balance of Qi, but using food is by far the easiest method in which to do this.
While Chinese Medicine looks at “western” nutritional values of foods, such as calories or carbohydrate content, it focuses mainly on the other dimensions of the food we eat. Those dimensions are yin and yang, hot and cold, and the 5 flavors (bitter, sour, sweet, pungent, and salty).
Each person has their own constitution and thus each person must eat according to what their body needs.
More information
For more information about the Food as Medicine and the Energetics of Food click here.
For more information on Digestion & the Art of Chewing click here.
