The Five Energies of Foods

The importance of knowing the energies of food

Suppose on a cold rainy day, on your way home from work, your car breaks down. You walk to a service station to hire a tow truck and by the time you get home, you're soaked to the skin and shivering with cold. You suspect that you caught cold. If you have some knowledge of the Chinese diet, you prepare a bowl of fresh old ginger soup and drink it hot. You feel much better, because fresh old ginger has a warm energy that warms you and a pungent flavor that makes you perspire.

Let's use another example. Suppose you develop hives with severe itching. You cannot cook your meals, because the heat in the kitchen makes your itching intolerable. If you have a fair knowledge about Chinese diet, you cook a bowl of mung bean soup and stir in some sugar. After drinking the soup a few times, your symptoms disappear, because the cold energy in both mung beans and sugar heal your hot symptoms. Of course, many other factors need to be considered as well, but the energy of foods is important.

Suppose you suffer from hemorrhoids and know about Chinese diet. You eat two cooked (underdone) whole bananas (with the peels) every day. The bananas should improve the symptoms, because banana has a cold energy.

On the negative side, let's suppose you have no knowledge about Chinese diet and you happen to make a mistake. In the first example, when you had the cold, instead of drinking hot ginger soup, you drank a bowl of mung bean soup. That would have made your symptoms worse. With the hives, had you taken hot sauce at dinner instead of mung bean soup, your itching would probably have become much worse. With the hemorrhoids, if instead of eating bananas, you drank whiskey every day, that too could make your symptoms deteriorate. 医学 全在.线提供www.med126.com

Food of different energies

• Cold:
  bamboo shoot, banana, bitter gourd, clam (sea and freshwater), clamshell, crab, grapefruit, kelp, lettuce, lotus plumule, muskmelon, persimmon, salt, sea grass, seaweed, star fruit, sugar cane, water chestnut, watermelon.

• Slightly Cold: hops, tomato.

• Cool:
  apple, barley, bean curd, chicken egg white, Chinese wax gourd, common button mushroom, cucumber, eggplant, job's-tears, lettuce, lily flower, longevity fruit, loquat, mandarin orange, mango, marjoram, mung bean, oyster shell, pear, peppermint, radish, sesame oil, spinach, strawberry, tangerine, wheat, wheat bran.

• Hot:
  black pepper, cinnamon bark, cottonseed, ginger (dried ginger), green pepper, red pepper, soybean oil, white pepper.

• Neutral:
  abalone, apricot, beef, beetroot, black fungus, black sesame seed, black soybean, cabbage (Chinese), carp (common carp, gold carp), carrot, castor bean, celery, cherry seed, chicken egg, chicken egg yolk, corn, corn silk, crab apple, cuttlefish, dry mandarin orange peel, duck, eel blood, fig, grape, guava leaf, honey, horse bean, hyacinth bean, kidney bean, kohlrabi, licorice, lotus fruit and seed, milk (cow's and human), olive, oyster, papaya, peanuts, pineapple, plum, polished rice, pork, potato, pumpkin, radish leaf, small red or adiuki bean, rice bran, saffron, shiitake mushroom, sour plum, string bean, sunflower seed, sweet rice, sweet potato, taro, taro flower, white fungus, white sugar, yellow soybean.

• Warm:
  apricot seed (bitter and sweet apricot), brown sugar, caraway, carp (grass carp), cherry, chestnut, chicken, chive, chive seeds, chive roots, cinnamon twig, clove, coconut, coffee, coriander (Chinese parsley), date (both red and black), dill seeds, eel, fennel, garlic, ginger (fresh ginger), ginseng, grapefruit peel, green onion leaf, green onion (white head), guava, ham, kumquat, leaf mustard, leek, litchi, longan, maltose, mutton, nutmeg, peach, raspberry, rosemary, shrimp, spearmint, squash, star anise, sunflower seed, sweet basil, sword bean, tobacco, vinegar, walnut, wine.

• Slightly Warm:
  asparagus, cuttlebone, hawthorn fruits, malt.

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