Nutritional Healing with Chinese Medicine

Hello and welcome to Medical Mondays! I’m back with another alternative medicine/health post, also in the form of a book review–this time, it’s on nutritional healing with Chinese Medicine!

In Chinese culture, medicine and food share the same origin–I’m a big advocate of food as medicine, so I was really intrigued by this book! It’s essentially divided into 4 different parts.

Nutritional Healing with Chinese Medicine

By Ellen Goldsmith

Genre: Health, Alternative Medicine, Nutrition
Pages: 480

Part 1: Foundations of Chinese Medicine

The use of food for nutritional healing in Chinese medicine is classified according to yin and yang, the “thermal nature” (qi), and the classification of flavors in food. Yin is the energy of the moon and night, so it’s thought of as cooling, moistening, and nourishing. Yang is the energy of the sun–warming, motivating and energizing.

Part 2: Foundations of Chinese Dietary Therapy

In Western medicine, we tend to look at the disease mechanisms and find the parts of the body that are affected to treat the symptoms, which is especially useful in acute situations. Chinese medicine focuses more so on identifying patterns of “disharmony” and working on intervening with what’s causing it in order to stimulate healing, making it potentially helpful as an adjunct to treatment of chronic lifestyle conditions.

It goes into a lot more detail than the above, but I figured just scratching the surface might be a good way to start!

Part 3: East Meets West in the Kitchen

This section goes over how to clear out your kitchen, look at food labels, what food additives to avoid for better health, equipment needed, and also includes examples of what to stock your kitchen with in a variety of different food types (whole grains, beans/pulses/legumes, nuts/seeds, culinary herbs/spices, medicinal herbs, sweeteners, salt, dried vegetables).

One example in here is bitter melon, which has been used to stabilize blood sugar in diabetics–during our culinary medicine didactic a few months ago, one of the chefs told us about how she made a drink out of bitter melon juice, okra, lemon, and cinnamon sticks and how it’d been helping her keep diabetes in check!

Recipes For Every Season

The recipes are divided out into:

• Spring Recipes
• Summer Recipes
• Seasonal Transitional Recipes
• Autumn Recipes
• Winter Recipes
• Blood Tonic* Recipes
• Condiment Recipes

*If you’re wondering what blood tonic is, don’t freak out yet! These are basically dishes that are typically made for women after childbirth or for anyone recovering from surgery.in order to help replenish health and vitality.

I don’t know how to make too many Chinese recipes (not that all of these are Chinese recipes), but I’m excited to try a lot of em’, including the Fresh Fish Ball Soup with Napa Cabbage (I grew up having that one!), Ginger and Tangerine Peel Tea, Coconut Tapioca Pudding with Mango, and Walnut Chai, just to name a few. (There are a tonnnn of recipes that sound super good!)

There are over 175 recipes in this book! Each one includes a short intro, serving size, equipment needed, the ingredient list, instructions, and health tips associated with the ingredients used in the recipe! The only downside is that this book doesn’t include any photos at all–I’m a fan of food photography so I was a little sad about that, but I guess that just means I’ll have to make the recipes so I can add my own photos! :P

• Have you ever heard of traditional Chinese medicine? My advisor did acupuncture on me earlier this year when my face was super swollen and painful and it helped a lot! I’m not sure if I ever shared any photos from that gloriously wonderful time in my life, but here you go!

Check out my other book reviews!