Food as Medicine

Food as medicine — the Eastern wisdom of building health through what you eat.

No account of eating in monsoon Asia can leave out this idea. Each cultural sphere has its own tradition of medicine — Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, the medicine of the Miao people — and their content varies with their social and environmental setting. One important thing they share is the conviction that what you eat day by day leads directly to the maintenance of health and to treatment.

“You are what you eat,” a phrase widely known today, traces back to the thought of the nineteenth-century French gastronome Brillat-Savarin, who wrote in The Physiology of Taste that a person is made of what they have eaten.

Live on sweets with little nutrition, or on heavily refined and processed foods, and the body becomes skewed in appearance and in substance. In time the disharmony reaches the mind as well: speech turns aggressive, moods sink more easily. On this way of thinking, that mental state is less a person’s essential character than the strong reflection of a temporary diet. Grasping the human condition holistically through food, analysing it, and improving it — the founding idea behind that is food as medicine. It is on this basis that the various traditional medicines were built up from antiquity.

To achieve health through diet, what is eaten has to be made optimal for the particular person. A diet that is good for one person is not necessarily good for another. So the first thing consulted, in working out what to eat, is the person’s constitution.

Ayurveda classifies people by dosha, or vital energy, into three types: kapha, with the qualities of earth and water; pitta, with the quality of fire; and vata, with the qualities of wind and space. A person is held to have one of these, or several.

Chinese medicine works with three components — qi, which governs vital energy and functional activity; blood, which carries nourishment through the body; and fluids, which govern bodily liquids other than blood (lymph, saliva, sweat) and keep the body moist — together with yin and yang. Constitution is judged by combining which of qi, blood and fluids is deficient or stagnant with which way the balance of yin and yang is tilted.

The ingredients that make up a diet each have their own properties too. These are determined by observing how a thing acts on each constitution. Knowledge of the properties of ingredients was formed out of practical experience accumulated in many places since antiquity, and as it was placed within philosophical systems, a systematic set of criteria was built.

Ayurveda classifies ingredients by attributes such as cooling, heating or neutral; light or heavy; oily or dry. Chinese medicine likewise classifies them in detail by the four natures — cold, cool, neutral, warm, hot — and the five flavours: sour, bitter, sweet, pungent and salty.

Ingredients are also mapped within philosophical frameworks that set out the basic constituents of the universe. The five-phase theory of Chinese medicine, for example, treats everything as a combination of wood, fire, earth, metal and water, and the balance of these elements in each ingredient is taken into account.

An example of prescription

In Chinese medicine, green tea has the properties of being slightly cold or cool, and bitter and sweet. For a constitution in which heat and damp are strong — qi stagnation, damp heat — green tea can be used on its own for its effect, smoothing the flow of qi and clearing surplus heat.

For a constitution marked by cold or weakness — qi deficiency, yang deficiency, yin deficiency — green tea is not used alone. Combined in a prescription with warming ingredients such as ginger or dried tangerine peel, which adjust its slightly cold and cool nature, it can be turned into something that warms the body and moves the qi. The theory of generation and restraint within the five phases is kept in mind here as well.

So even a single material such as green tea can, by changing how it is drunk and what it is combined with according to the theory of Chinese medicine, become a prescription made to measure for the person.

Once the constitution has been judged and the diet decided, the food actually has to be prepared. Ingredients must be gathered, and the proper procedure — cooking — has to be carried out. In the next lesson we look at the wisdom of cooking, accumulated since antiquity, for bringing out the properties of what we eat.