Holistic nutrition – Hot & Cold describe more than just temperature

This article exposes you to some ideas that we use in Oriental medicine to think about foods, herbs, spices, even people.  How does Traditional Oriental medicine holistically approach the subject of diet? Its approach involves evaluation of the body first.  Once we understand where your body, as a whole, is at, then we have an idea what foods would help you, and what would hurt.  If you’re one of my patients, that evaluation part already happened in the evaluation session before acupuncture.What is a good diet? Great question. Different sources will give you entirely different answers.  Rather than giving a list of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, I want to provide you with some tools to help you think about foods.  You have to understand that something that is good for one person can be poison for someone else.  So in my practice of traditional holistic medicine,  I integrate what I see in you with the following ideas to give you your diet plan.

There are three main ways we categorize foods, herbs, spices, etc…  One way is the taste of a food, and is especially important for herbology – its NOT the main subject of this article but briefly: we classify tastes into five categories: bitter, sweet, pungent, salty, and sour. These tastes have certain actions in the body, and different foods fall into one or more of these categories.  There is also a property that I’ll call tropism, which is a tendency of a food to have either a sinking or rising, inward or outward property; for example ginger tends to move outward, so it can induce sweat, bananas have a sinking property so they can help relieve hiccups!

We also talk about whether a certain food is hot or cold in the common understanding of temperature, but we also use the same terminology to refer to an energetic nature separate from temperature (but not unrelated).  The warming and cooling properties of foods depend on different things, and can change substantially with time, the part of the plant or animal used, how the meal was prepared, …

Meats are on the warm side while fruits and veggies tend to be energetically cool to cold; there are exceptions, for example cherries and mango have a warm nature. How do you use this information? You can look at the energetic nature as temperature, so if its a cold wintery day you would do well to eat warm soup, maybe with some meat in it; and if you are vegetarian, then cooking will influence the cool temperature of your veggie dishes. If you have a fever or if the temperature outside is very warm, fruits like watermelon and pear can help cool you.

rice porridge

The idea is that all foods (and herbs), regardless of their temperature when you eat them, also have a certain nature that will influence your own energy.  Because people also can run hot or cold. Certain conditions can be clearly categorized as too much heat: fever, red face, over-excitable. Situations where someone is listless, depressed, lacks energy and so on can be seen as too-cold conditions.  So if a person runs cold, that person should avoid eating too much cooling foods. If a person is too hot, they should avoid eating hot foods all the time. Makes sense, no?

A lot of times, maybe the majority of times, infertility problems directly correlate to lack of heat/too much cold in the body. So when you come in for treatments, I use the diagnostic techniques available to us in Chinese Medicine to look for where you are on the spectrum. If I see you’re running too cold, then it may seem strange to you to be told that having salads for a meal are too taxing for you and can make a difference in your quest for fertility!

Of course, it gets more complicated. The human body is constantly trying to make do with whats its given and so the reality is that while something (like digestion) is too cold, something else is running too hot (say, the Liver). It takes professional evaluation and treatment to treat any ‘real’ problem.  But now that you have this hot/cold idea, you can look at foods from a new perspective.  It becomes easy to see how foods that are in different classes like salad and ice-cream, fall into the same category from the hot/cold perspective: too cold for overweight and sick people.

Here is a brief list of Hot/Cold associations:

In the body, too much heat could look like: fever, red face, red eyes, nosebleeds, canker sores, hemorrhage, dry stools, yellow or green mucus, anger, over-excitable, cant sit still or pay attention, …

Too much cold: cold in the body resembles ice: hard & motionless; many arthritis type conditions, copious clear urination, thin & watery mucus, lowered libido, lack of energy, cold limbs, sluggish digestion, …

The best way to get good nutrients is through whole foods. Vitamins and supplements are sometimes necessary but don’t rely on them for your main source of nutrition. Eating well should be one of your primary concerns when sick, working on fertility,  or during pregnancy.  Eating well means that the food you eat should not only be ‘good’ nutritionally, but it should be in a state that your body can accept and easily assimilate.  This is where hot and cold come in.  Basically life is a warm process. Metabolism is a warm process and Traditional Chinese medical theory lends great importance to keeping digestive fire strong, but not out of control.  This is one of the main reasons why I am not too excited about raw food diets – most people’s digestions are not strong enough for it.  Its just the reality of the place and times we live in.  These days what most people need is to eat half digested warm food: soups & porridge.  I think I tell every patient to not eat salads for a meal by itself, salads are fine but eat it with something warm like a soup.

The diet plan I gave you gives specific details for you. Use the information above to understand why I classified foods for you the way that I did; that will empower you to make wise, holistically educated decisions about what you eat and how its going to affect you.