Food as Medicine:
Part 3 - Ancient China
Ancient China
Even today, China is famous for their use
of food as medicine. The earliest work on the topic came about during the Han
Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) with a book called The Yellow Emperor's Classic of
Internal Medicine. Although now 2,000 years old, the tome still contains the
basics of Chinese food therapy used today.
The food written about within classifies
the known ingredients into four food groups, five tastes and by their natures
and characteristics. Like Hippocrates, the tome gave recommendations on what to
eat in order to keep balance of qi, yin, yang and body fluids within the body.
As the changes in weather also affected the balance in the body, Chinese food
therapy also includes a number of seasonal dishes.
Even today, the amount ingredients used for
medical purposes is enough to fill a book, or even multiple books, as medical
cuisine was eventually broken into four categories: health-protection cuisine,
prevention cuisine, healing cuisine and therapeutic cuisine.
Health-protection cuisine refers to the reinforcement
of nutritional food to correspond to and maintain organic health. In more
understandable terms, it basically boils down to eating things like a soup of
pumpkin and almond to help lose weight; a soup of carp and angelica to increase
natural beauty; or eating a ginseng congee (rice porridge) to increase
strength.
Prevention cuisine is used to build
resistance to ailments. This leads to dishes like mung bean soup, which is
often eaten in the summer to prevent heat stroke.
Healing cuisine is where medicinal food is
used for rehabilitation from illness. One of the most popular dishes among this
subset of medical cuisine is broiled sheep's heart with rose to help raise a
healthier constitution.
Finally, therapeutic cuisine aims at easing
a specific ailment such as using fried potatoes with vinegar to help high blood
pressure or a carp soup with Tickahoe to help reduce swelling.
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