Food is the key!

Comment by Chad J. Dupuis, L.Ac.

From the Chinese Medicine side I would recommend reading our “tcm dietary theory” section. There are no hard and fast rules, just like all aspects of Chinese Medicine. The true idea behind Chinese Medicine is to do what you need at this point in time to regulate your body, which could be something very different from what you need in a different time, season, emotional state, etc. The key is to understand more deeply the effects of food on you, not to follow a “menu” so to speak.

The book I recommend the most even though I don’t agree with every aspect and it’s a little dated at this point is . I feel it gives the best relationship with food and its medicinal factors. Personally I ate nearly every meal with this book for years when it first came out.

Comment by Archived User

About grains being hard to digest. The Weston Price Foundation has much info on why whole grains, anyway, should be prepared in certain ways to inactivate antinutrients, about which much has been written. The whole “brown rice is better for you” business is not true (unless, and this is just my opinion, you are overmineralized and thus for a period of time useful to drain the excess).

The people of the far East knew what they were doing when they refined their brown rice to a greater or lesser degree. And our ancestors here figured out somehow that - wait for it - wheat was far more digestible when fermented, soaked, sprouted or whatever other technique. Look at how the Africans thoroughly changed the nature of their grains through much processing - fermentation, long cooking, this & that.