Thursday, November 19, 2015

Food as Medicine: Part 3 - Ancient China

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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