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Nutrition

Ways to Keep Your Memory Sharp

Don’t forget about physical exercise

Believe it or not, when you’re exercising your body, you’re exercising your mind as well. Aerobic exercise gets your blood pumping, which increases the oxygen going to your brain and lowers your risk of disorders such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease that can lead to memory loss. If you can, start with some exercise in the morning. This can clear your head right off the bat to stay focused and alert during the day. Exercises that require coordination are especially helpful for keeping the mind active such as simply throwing a ball back and forth. continue reading »

7. Coffee

Coffee has a debilitating effect on both the middle and lower burners. Spleen yang is chilled and kidney yin and yang are exhausted by the consumption of coffee. Using coffee as an energy boost is like continually dipping into one’s savings or capital. Eventually such profligate deficit spending leaves one’s internal economy bankrupt.

 

Further reading:

The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health by T. Colin Campbell, Thomas M. Campbell II, John Robbins, and Howard Lyman.

6. The Basic Healthy Diet

To sum up the traditional wisdom of Chinese dietary theory, humans should mostly eat vegetables and grains with small amounts of everything else. We should mostly eat cooked and warm food which is not too sweet, not too greasy or oily, and not too damp. In addition, we should eat moderately and chew well. It is healthy to drink a cup of warm water or a warm beverage with meals. This facilitates the formation of that 100° soup. But it is unhealthy to drink or eat chilled, cold and frozen drinks and foods with meals.

 

In general, I would emphasize that most Americans do not eat enough vegetables. Grains, like meat and dairy products, are highly nutritious but heavy and more difficult to digest. If overeaten they can cause accumulation of dampness and phlegm. In Asia, Daoists and Buddhists interested in longevity emphasized vegetables over grains and even modern Chinese books on geriatrics recommend that more vegetables should be consumed.

 

Amongst the grains, rice holds an especially healthy place. Because it promotes diuresis, it tends to leech off excess dampness. Basmati, brown or jasmine rice are recommended. Other grains, in comparison, tend to produce dampness, as a by-product of their being so nutritious. This ability of rice to help eliminate dampness through diuresis becomes more important the more other dampening foods one eats.

 

Eating mostly cooked grains and vegetables with only a small amount of animal protein and fats and oils is referred to as a Qing Dan diet, which literally means pure and bland diet.

 

Lastly, whatever you eat try to get “organic” as much as possible!

5. Dampening Foods

Not only do foods have an inherent post-digestive temperature but different foods also tend to generate more or less body fluids. Therefore, in Chinese medicine, all foods can be described according to how damp they are, meaning dampening to the human system. We need a certain amount of dampness to stay alive. Dampness in food is yin in that dampness nourishes substance, which is mostly wet and gushy. However, some foods are excessively dampening, and since it is the spleen, which avers dampness, excessive damp foods tend to interfere with digestion.

 

According to Chinese Five-element theory, dampness is associated with earth. Fertile earth is damp. The flavor of earth according to Chinese Five-element theory is sweet. The sweet flavor in inherently damp and also is nutritive. In Chinese medical terms, the sweet flavor supplements Qi (the function of an organ) and the blood. When one looks at a Chinese medical description of various foods, one is struck by the fact that almost all foods are somewhat sweet. On reflection, this is obvious. We eat to replenish our body function and blood; therefore most foods are sweet and fulfill the replenishing function. All grains, most vegetables, and most foods eaten by humans are sweet, no matter what other of the five flavors they may also be. However, excessive intake of sweet foods, instead of energizing the spleen, overwhelms and weakens it. This is based on the Chinese idea that yang, when extreme, transforms into yin and vice versa. When the spleen becomes weak, it craves even more sweetness since sweet is the flavor, which strengthens it when consumed in moderate amounts. Thus, another pathological cycle is forged in many people.

 

Going back to dampness, the sweet flavor engenders dampness and the sweeter a food is, the more dampening it is. According to Chinese medicine, this tendency is worsened when the sweet flavor is combined with sour. Therefore Chinese medicine identifies a number of especially dampening foods. These include sweet and sour foods such as citrus fruits and juices, and tomatoes; concentrated sweets such as sugar, molasses, and honey, and wheat, dairy products, nuts, oils and fats.

 

Highly nutritious foods such as dairy products, meats, nuts, eggs, oils and fats are strongly capable of supplementing the body’s yin fluids and substance. However, in excess, they generate a superabundance of body fluids, which become pathologic dampness. Although to some this may appear a paradox, it has to do with healthy yin in excess becoming evil or pathological yin or dampness, phlegm and turbidity.

 

It is also easy to see that certain combinations are even worse than their individual constituents. Ice cream is a dietary disaster. It is too sweet, too creamy, and too cold. Ice cream is a very dampening food. Pizza is a combination of tomato sauce, cheese, and wheat. All of these foods tend to be dampening and this effect is made even worse if greasy addition, such as pepperoni, and sausage are added. In the same way, drinking fruit juices can be very dampening. Fruit and vegetable juices are another relative modern addition to the human diet. Prior to the advent of refrigeration as discussed above, juices would turn into wine or vinegar within days. Therefore when they were available in traditional societies, they were an infrequent treat. Now, we have access to tropical fruits and juices thanks to refrigeration and interstate and intercontinental transportation. However, we should bear in mind that we would not eat 4 – 6 oranges in a single sitting nor every day. When we drink a glass of orange juice, tomato juice, apple juice or carrot juice that is exactly what we are doing. We are drinking the nutritive essence of not one but a number of fruits or vegetables. This over-nutrition typically results in the formation of the pathogenic dampness and phlegm.

 

Meats are so nutritious and very much supplement body function and blood. They also tend to be damp in the same way. The fatter and richer meat is, the more it tends to generate dampness within the body. Amongst the common domestic mammalian meats, pork is the dampest with beef coming in second. Therefore, it is important not to eat too much meat and especially not greasy, fatty meats. Most people do fine on 2 ounces of meat, 3 – 4 times per week.  On the other hand, eating only poultry and fish is not such a good idea either. Everything is this world has its good and bad points. Poultry and fish tend to be less dampening and phlegmatic, it is true, but chicken, turkey and shellfish tend to be warmer. If one eats only these meats, they run the risk of becoming overheated. I have seen this happen in clinical practice. From a Western scientific point of view, we can also say that eating too much fish may result in mercury accumulation and toxicity and overeating commercial chicken may result in too much estrogen and exposure to salmonella food-poisoning. Chinese medicine sees human beings as omnivores, and suggests that a person should eat widely and diversely on the food chain.

4. Post-Digestive Temperature

In Chinese medicine, there is an important distinction made between the cold physical temperature of a food or drink their post-digestive temperature. Post-digestive temperature refers to a particular food or drink’s net effect on the body’s thermostat. Some foods, even when cooked, are physiologically cold and tend to lower the body’s temperature either systemically or in a certain organ. In Chinese medicine, every food is categorized as either cold, cool, neutral, warm or hot. Most foods are cool, neutral or warm and in general, we should mostly eat neutral and warm foods since our body itself is warm. During the winter or in colder climates, it is important to eat warmer foods, but during the summer we can and should eat cooler foods. However, this mostly refers to the post-digestive temperature of a food.

 

If one eats ice cream in the summer, the body at first is cooled by the ingestion of such a frozen food. However, its response is to increase the heat of digestion in order to deal with this cold insult. Inversely, it is a common custom in tropical countries to eat hot foods since the body is provoked then to sweat as an attempt to cool itself down. In China, mung bean soup and tofu are eaten in the summer because both these food tend to cool a person down post-digestively. If we are going to eat cold and frozen foods and drink iced, chilled liquids, it is best that these be taken between meals when they will not impede and retard the digestion of other foods.

 

Many Westerners are shocked to think that cold and frozen foods are inherently unhealthy since they have become such an ubiquitous part of our contemporary diet. However, chilled, cold and frozen foods and liquids are a relatively recent phenomenon. They are dependent upon refrigeration in the marketplace, during transportation and in the home. Such mass access to refrigeration is largely a post World War II occurrence. That means, in temperate zones, people have only had widespread access to such cold temperature foods and drinks for less than 70 years. 70 years is not even a blink on the human evolutionary scale.

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