The Chinese diet is quite different than Western diets. While Western diets strive toward providing protein and vitamins while watching calories and carbohydrates, the Chinese system concentrates on flavors, energies, movements and common and organic actions.
While every food has a certain taste, this also symbolizes the actions that these foods provide. For example:
Pungent foods like ginger, green onion and peppermint, induce perspiration and promotes energy circulation.
Sweet foods like honey, sugar and watermelon, slows down symptoms of illness and neutralizes the toxic effects from other foods.
Sour foods like lemons and plums can obstruct movement, therefore are useful in stopping diarrhea and helping with excessive perspiration.
Bitter foods like hops or an animal’s gall bladder will reduce body heat, dry body fluids and induce diarrhea.
Salty foods like kelp and seaweed softens hardness. This is why symptoms that involve hardening of the muscles or glands begin to subside with the introduction of salty natural foods.
All natural foods have a specific energy and a designated area in the body that they move toward. It is more complex than just snacking on a piece of watermelon or eating a plum when you have certain ailments. Body types are susceptible to inherited conditions and have certain energies that have a better tolerance to certain types of food. This is called the Yin-Yang Principles or Y-Scores.
By matching up certain body types with the Y-Scores of certain foods, an organic balanced diet is able to keep the body in check for disease, moods, sex life and seasonal changes.
All of this can sound like another language to most Westerners, and it is. But, considering the health, weight and longevity of the Chinese people, it must work.
For more information on the Chinese system of food cures, prevention and remedies, see Dr. Henry Lu at: http://drhenrylu.com.