Nutrition in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Food as medicine, food as poison. In TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine food is the lifeline after birth, what you eat, how you eat, when you eat, and factors affecting digestion determine your energy levels, stress levels, and can affect every other system of your body. Instead of looking at foods as ‘good or bad,’ Chinese medicine considers temperature. Granted some bad for you foods such as fast food or too much sugar or alcohol have their own temperature quality. Fresh and raw fruits and veggies are typically cooling, but a cucumber is more cooling than broccoli and ginger is warm regardless of it’s cooked or non-cooked status. It’s pretty self-explanatory but as Americans we may not be used to thinking of the temperature of the food as affecting health. If you are presenting with a red and splotchy skin rash, your acupuncturist will likely recommend avoiding too much heat such as getting overheated with exercise, in the sauna or shower, and eating too many hot temperature foods such as lamb and hot peppers.

Functional or naturopathic medicine might see a skin rash as related to a food sensitivity and tell you to eliminate dairy, eggs, gluten, nightshades, and corn. It’s tradition in naturopathy to do an elimination diet which strips all but the least possibly allergenic foods which are white rice, chicken, blueberries and pears - for a couple of weeks and gradually adds food back in to see what the offender is. This very scientific and rigid approach may help but also is open to variables, a highly stressed person who’s disease is caused by stress and not by food, might see no changes despite drastic dietary measures and be frustrated with this model. It’s also likely that cutting out foods that might be causing inflammation will subtly reduce the symptoms even where stress is the main culprit. As acupuncturists we take a combination of this road (many teachers in acupuncture schools hold a naturopathic degree and are known as N.D.’s and/or they are dually trained and certified in naturopathy and acupuncture).

The acupuncture side of healing your body through your diet tends to look at your body’s struggles to digest food as the main ‘problem’ with these known inflammatory or sensitivity provoking foods. An acupuncturist trained in China is more likely to work on the health of your digestive organs and offer dietary advice that aims to soothe and heal them so they can digest and process food more efficiently. The benefit of an American trained practitioner is that it’s integrated to reduce offending foods, while at the same time offers flexibility to see if you may be able to tolerate those foods over time. Acupuncture and herbal medicine have methods to strengthen digestive Qi, the former is an extension of food medicine and be combined. As a young acupuncture student in Portland, OR in 2006, I learned what Pho is for the first time in a class that focused on acupuncture and bodywork for musculoskeletal pain. Our teacher, Dr. Lu, recommended getting Pho with tendon to heal tendon injuries.

Chinese Herbs differ from the plant pharmacopeia we are probably used to in Western Herbalism. It contains a whole catalogue of weird things from cuttlefish bone to charred human hair (trust we don’t use the latter), snake juice potion is actually a thing based on the actual healing properties of the snake. What may have seemed fantastical suddenly is by the book and what seemed like old wives tales, nowadays can and often is scientifically proven. I’m no research scientist but there has been enough research to show that what ancients knew and believed is often true. How did they know things before science? That just proves that science is merely but one way of knowing. Yet again there is the benefit of the integration of ancient and modern, clinical and scientific, and without this integration we may not be able to call acupuncture a holistic medicine. For specific foods to match your body’s constitution or to help with certain life transitions, challenges, or goals please contact us to make an appointment with one of our qualified and compassionate practitioners.