Food Energetics--Chinese Medicines Ancient Wisdom with Food

"Seaweed is cooling, descends and enters the kidneys and is very beneficial in the winter."

As you read through my website or if you've ever received treatment from a Chinese medicine (CM) practitioner you are likely to run across many phrases like this. At first, the energetics of foods may sound a bit confusing, but it's really quite logical once you get the hang of it. Once you do, you can easily shift your diet depending on your needs, so let's delve.
Chinese medicine categorizes everything--from mental emotional disharmonies to physical pathology. CM practitioners listen to the tone of voice and look for color and temperature--even specific scents and how a person behaves gives us clues and insight into their particular patterns. From these observations a CM (Chinese medicine) assessment is formed and then recommendations and treatments are honed for the individual

A cold is a cold, and high blood pressure is high blood pressure, right? Yes and no. However, CM practitioners may treat these dis-harmonies in individuals very differently. "Same disease different treatment, different treatment same disease." This simple phrase helps to explain our approach. It means that 5 people can walk in with a western diagnosis of high blood pressure, however the CM practitioner is still going to use their assessment skills of tongue, pulse, questioning and observation to form a pattern. Those 5 people will likely walk away with different CM assessments and treatment principles. To elaborate, A 50 year-old woman who is very cold, has a purple tongue and is exhausted will receive different assessment than a 50 year-old male who is angry, hot all the time, has a red tongue and a pounding pulse and complains of high pitched ringing in his ears. Though they both have high blood pressure they have different patterns. One is deficient and one excess--to overly simplify. The same is true of a cold.

Back to food.

As I mentioned earlier...CM likes categories. All food, drink or anything you can ingest (including medicine) are categorized by the post metabolic phenomenon they create once digested. These categories follow the major assessment theories of CM--8 Principles, 5 Element, Organ theory, etc. Let's look closer.

How food is categorized.

Taste--correlates to the 5 elements. Sweet, sour, salty, bitter and pungent. Excess or deficiency of a flavor in your diet can lead to various disharmonies. Need a refresher on what each flavor does? Read their individual blogs:

sweet
sourrnsaltyrnbitterrnpungent

Temperature--what does the food do to your internal temperature once ingested? This ranges from hot, warm, neutral and cool to cold. Ginger is a very hot food where as seaweed is cooling. In this instance we are talking about the nature of the food itself not the method of preparation.

Action-regulate or tonify? Regulating foods direct and shift energies in the body because they are not moving adequately or are in excess in an area. Here we may drain water or dampness; cool heat or fire; and warm cold or move stagnation. Tonifying foods build or strengthen an energy or fluids when there is deficiency. These foods build qi, yang and blood or nourish yin and fluids.

Direction-All food moves in a direction in the body: up, down, inward, outward, centering. Squash centers, seaweeds move inward and down and cayenne moves outward.

Organ or route-All foods have particular organs that they enter. For example, the lovely seaweed enters the Kidneys. Therefore, we may ask a client with deficient Kidneys to eat more seaweed. The sour flavor (lemon and vinegar) enter the Liver, for a congested liver we might recommend a client utilize a few of these foods.

By starting to understand the nature or energetics of foods you can begin to personalize your needs and goals.