At one time or another most of us struggle to figure out what to eat. You know what’s healthy, but you’re too busy to cook. That sugary treat you’re eyeing isn’t the best choice, but you crave sweets. Or with a lot of confusing news about diet and nutrition, the foods you thought were healthy are no longer considered to be, or vice versa.
The conflict that we face around food is because we all understand that eating well can enhance our health. In Chinese medicine, food is seen as medicine that you get to eat three times a day. In fact, ancient Chinese scholars suggested that a practitioner should first treat an illness with food therapy, and only if that doesn’t work should they turn to acupuncture and herbs for a cure.
Chinese Food Therapy
Food therapy is an important healing tool in Chinese medicine, for good reason—it’s effective, inexpensive, and can be practiced at home. The power of food to heal is very real, and while not as potent as Chinese herbs, foods exert very real effects on your body. In fact, there are a number of foods that are also considered to be herbs.
There are several principles associated with food therapy, including the idea that we each have our own unique needs when it comes to diet. Also, choosing foods that are easy to digest, appropriate to the season, and that address your specific health issues are important. This means that there’s no single diet that’s right for everyone; what’s good for your best friend isn’t necessarily what’s good for you.
Using the guidelines of food therapy, foods are chosen for their specific actions. They can boost your energy, support your digestion, dry phlegm, cool inflammation, or help you fight off a cold. In addition, foods are chosen for their inherent temperature. This is not about how it feels in your mouth or whether it gives you a frozen headache or burns your tongue. Instead, the energetic temperature of a food is about the overall effect it has on your body after you’ve eaten it. Foods are classified as hot, warm, neutral, cool, or cold. While the effect of a food can be subtle, some foods are obviously hot, such as ginger or chilies, which can make you feel hot and even sweat, and mint is a noticeably cooling, even when drunk as a tea.
What to Eat for the Heat
Which brings us to summer. Food therapy can be used to cool you off during the hottest days of the year, and can even help you avoid dehydration and heat stroke. The Chinese have a condition called Summerheat, which is a pathogen that occurs only in the hot, and usually humid weather of summer. It’s responsible for that queasy, tired feeling you get when you’ve overdone it in the heat.
So what should you eat to stay cool? The first place to start is with foods that are in season locally, as they tend to be cooling in nature. Some of the best choices are melons (especially watermelon), cucumbers, and tomatoes, which can help cool you off and are full of water to avoid dehydration. Other cooling foods include fruits, such as berries, apples, and pears, as well as spinach, summer squash, lettuce and most greens, cabbage, bok choy, celery, and mint. A couple of foods that are very cooling but may not be local include mung beans and sprouts, citrus fruits, and bananas.
How you cook a food also impacts its temperature. A good rule of thumb is that the longer you cook a food, the warmer it becomes. So during the winter, soups, stews, and foods that have been roasted are good for warming you up. For the summer however, raw or lightly cooked foods are the most cooling, which is good news, because many of the delicious local seasonal foods are best eaten raw!
Through the lens of Chinese food therapy, it’s no accident that watermelon is a welcome treat on the hottest days of the year. It’s cold in nature, packed with water, tastes delicious, and wards off Summerheat. It’s what to eat to stay cool.