Vegan diet

I don&#39t think TCM would necessarily say that you need animal protein for health. The general idea with TCM dietary therapy is more focused on the constitution/diagnosis of the person overall and eating with relation to the seasons/weather and energetics of the person.

Our western habits of eating roughly the same things day in and day out all year long is more of the problem than eating meat or not. Additionally as westerners tend to be over-heated (i.e. stressed) they tend to both choose things that help make them feel more comfortable within their stress (i.e. why we choose red bull over chamomile tea as a culture but complain of anxiety and insomnia) and then are drawn to cooling substance such as cold drinks, ice cream, salads, to try to balance extremes so to speak.

My general rules that I offer to many patients are:

<ul>
<li> to avoid dairy as much as possible, particularly lower quality dairy and most particularly drinking milk.</li>
<li>avoid excessive cold and raw foods, particularly salads and fruit juices/smoothies, and most particularly avoid those things in the cooler months. Instead have far more cooked food and warmer drinks.</li>
<li>if you feel weak, cold and low immunity after being vegetarian for months/years - then, unless you are strongly opposed to animal consumption add in small amounts of red meat based on your energy level. This could be something as simple as having red meat once a month following menstruation, as an example. So being 98% vegetarian. From a TCM perspective fish are yin and chicken in neutral, so I like to use small amounts of yang (red meat, beef, lamb) with large amounts of yin (vegetables, legumes, etc.). </li>
</ul>

Thanks for that info, Chad. That makes sense about the possible spleen chi deficiency connection and the gas. I will check with local practitioner on that. I am about due for a check up in any case. What are the signs on the tongue for that? How about the pulse? I will leave it to her to check tongue and pulse for me, rather than try to self-diagnose, but I am interested to learn more about it.

peace

Yes, this is excellent advice. Thank you. I do make and effort to be mindful in my eating, but your advice is a reminder of how much I can improve in this area of health, especially the thorough chewing and mixing with the saliva. I have no doubt that paying more and deeper attention to this aspect of eating will yield positive results.

I know a man in our town who had stomach cancer and had his stomach removed. I was wonering how in the world he would be able to continue eating solid foods. in fact, he can do so, basically by following your advice. The digestion occurs in the mouth and then the contents go directly to the small intestine. It works OK.

I prefer to keep my stomach intact, and to let it have its turn in the process. But I agree that we overload the stomach as far as its share of the work, and tend to neglect the part of the process that belongs to the mouth.

Thanks to you, Boopathi, and to Chad for the excellent advice.

I am glad that I can be of some help to you. It is very hard to imagine that a man&#39s stomach is removed. See what the mankind has done to themselves. Mankind was not affected by cancer this much some 100 or 200 years before. In today&#39s world this has become normal. People started believing that if someone has to die he or she has to die because of some disease and not naturally becoming old. Human or any living being is created to live healthy and to die healthy. I believe that this is all because we are going away from nature. The moment a child is born, we vaccinate, for even common cold and head ache and fever we treat with medicines, we avoid exposing ourselves to rain, sun, we rarely touch our bare feet with the ground and so on.

Like we have energy meridians that carry chi all over the body, the taste is also digested in tongue and is sent to different organs in our body. There are six different types of tastes that each supplying energy to specific organs. Like for example sweet taste gives energy to Stomach and Spleen. Say you are chewing your food and digesting all the taste of food in the tongue and then spitting it out (not swallowing the food). If you do your whole meal like this in your lunch you will not feel hungry until you are ready for your dinner. Taste is very important for us, similarly it is the root cause of all the problems only if you send the taste to your stomach. Stomach cannot handle the taste. Another important aspect is, we always drink plain water or cold water (or cold soft drinks or ice cream etc) along with our meal. Anything cold along with the food is the starting point of any cancer. So do not take anything cold along with the food.

How can we find out whether we can eat a food or not? I will give you simple method to find it. Any food if you keep it in the open air for certain period of time it will start decaying or will rotten. For example, if you keep the apple in open air, it will start decaying after a week or 10 days. These are the food that we should consume when it is in good condition. Take a soft drink or any preserved food or any medicine, if you keep it in open air nothing happens to it for months. This shows that there are chemicals added to it to keep them as it is, but our body cannot understand these chemicals. This is another important reason for Cancer.

Finally, listen to your body and do what it says. If your body brings in hungry then eat, otherwise do not. If your body brings in thirsty then drink water, otherwise do not. If your body brings in tiredness then take rest. If your body brings in fever then allow it to heal. We will not allow all these to happen because our knowledge and the belief that we learnt from our society enforces us to follow certain things and we just ignore what our body says.