Traditional Chinese Medicine: Food & Diet Therapy 

Traditional Chinese medicine understands food in terms of various properties:

Temperature, including warm, hot, cold, and cool

Flavors, such as pungent, sour, sweet, bland, and acrid 

Cooked or raw, with the understanding that cooked foods are generally easier to digest and therefore provide a “net” benefit that can be greater than raw foods

Depending on the patient’s presenting pattern, some foods are encouraged and some foods are discouraged. The object is to bring about balance and harmony in the body. Just as with other elements of traditional Chinese medicine, Arkansas Acupuncture practitioners discern the patterns characteristic of the individual client’s body and make recommendations leading to optimum health.

If you would like to know more about traditional Chinese medicine’s approach to food, Bob Flaws’s book The Tao of Healthy Eating can be purchased from Blue Poppy Enterprises. It provides a guide to food and diet therapy in TCM.