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Food is considered medicine. Everything we eat is a kind of medicine Every substance has its own influence on excesses and deficiencies in our bodies. Certain foods are more influential than others, particularly when they are excessively yin or yang in nature.
In TCM herbs and foods are classified according to their taste, movement and nature.
Taste may be Bitter, Salty, Sweet, Pungent and Sour; the QI energy’s movement is the direct consequence of the herb or food action, it may be descending, ascending, floating, dispersing, expanding, astringent or contracting. Nature relates to temperature effect of the herb or food:
Hot (Yang), Warm (Yin within Yang), Cool (Yang within Yin) and Cold (Yin).
All three of the above categories are used in defining herbs or foods properties.
Pungent is often associated with Hot or Warm, sometimes with Cool; it is dispersing and activates Qi.
Sweet is usually associated with Warm and Hot; it is stimulating and harmonises or regulates Chi (floating).
Sour is associated with Cold; it is astringent, contracting and descending.
Bitter is often associated with Cold, but it can also be Warm; it is descending and affects the blood.
Salty is associated with Cold, it is descending and can be astringent.
Sour, Bitter and Salty are Yin; Pungent and Sweet are Yang.
QI’ movements in the body are either ‘ascending’, ‘descending’, ‘expanding’ or ‘contracting’; (ascending and expanding movements may combine and cause profuse sweating; descending and contracting QI may manifest as diarrhoea with abdominal pain).
For example, eucalyptus is said to ‘descend the lung’s Chi’ and stop coughing; it is also cool and helps in dissolving (expel) ‘hot’ phlegm.
Plants have also a direct effect on meridians: a single herb may act upon as many as three of the body meridians.
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