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Why hot food?

by Joel Whitehead

We put many of our patients on a diet consisting strictly of cooked, hot food. "Why?" they ask. After all, it almost negates everything that is currently said about the advantages of raw food. In fact, most of the health food industry centres on this. So why are we in Chinese medicine so different?

Growing up in California, I've been around this health food industry for a long time, and in becoming a Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, I've begun to see what's wrong with a lot of the philosophies and where they come from. First of all, the industry is guided by biochemists. Not that they are doing us a disservice, but they have a hard time seeing a reasonable diet among all the separate foods involved. They are measuring qualities of separate foods such as pH value, vitamin and micronutrient make-up, fibre, etc., and are coming up with what seems to them to be a logical solution... but it's only scientific. "Only scientific!" you might say, " Isn't that all there is?" Not at all. After all, a diet is not just the sum total of the food that passes your lips, but the assimilation and effect of that sum total and how it all works together. Before we became scientific about food and created ultimate diet upon ultimate diet, man had a natural sense of balance as does nature itself.

The first thing we had to consider was the climatic zone we lived in and what was growing during each season. If we lived in the tropics, we would see lots of tropical fruit that would naturally cool us and liquify us. We would also eat a lot more raw vegetables of the leafy, green type, as that is what is more cooling, as well as being a prevalent source of food. If we lived in arctic areas, we would see very few fresh vegetables and virtually no fruit. What we would find to sustain us would be lots of animal meat and especially cherish the fattier parts. Actually, most Canadians live near the border of the United States in a temperate area, which has some elements of each extreme. The hot summer is a very yang force, meaning that it is hot and light, and things move quickly. This is a time when we seek balance by yin substances that are very cooling and add more water to our bodies. The winter is a very yin force, being colder, darker, and more slowing. For balance we eat things that are more warming and substantive. Heat moves things and coolness slows things down. So, one reason we should eat hot things is seasonality.

People can be hot or more yang in quality, or more cold and yin in quality. A person who is very yang in quality, hot, active and perhaps very angry, should probably be careful to try to take in food that controls this and avoid meats, cheeses, and herbs like ginseng. However, a person who is usually cold and tired and perhaps depressed would only make themselves worse by eating food that is either cold or raw. The number of people we see in today's society are by far more yin in nature. Ever since food has been able to be processed, we have used it as a cold substitute for warm nutrition. This may be okay when you're feeling great, but when all that runs out, you need to nutrify and warm from the inside.

Since we've begun to use the magic pill solutions of western medicine, we've avoided nutrition and its common sense. Now that we are finding the fallacy in that kind of thinking, we are trying natural solutions. But just because we are trying herbs instead of pharmaceuticals doesn't mean that the food you choose has lost its place as the primary medicinal choice.

Copyright © Joel Whitehead. This document may only be modified for technical reasons (e.g., compatibility with other platforms), but the actual content of this page may not be changed. One electronic copy and one paper copy may be made for personal use, but this document may not be distributed under any form, in whole or in part.

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