Tag: digestion

I’m quite torn this evening about which topic to write about; it has to be either heat (for obvious reasons if you live in the UK and are sweltering in our first Summer for years!) or what to do with bumps and bruises.

The latter topic is close to my heart because at the weekend I had a fall from a lovely horse that I was riding. It wasn’t the horses fault at all and I wasn’t badly hurt at all, but I was quarter way through the best riding that I’ve ever done in my life and determined to make sure that I could carry on!

Hmmm….

I’ll start with heat because, even though I think the clouds are building after a month of non-stop sunshine, it looks like it’s going to stay warm for a while.

And, of course, I don’t imagine I’m going to have many more opportunities to write about Heat in the near future up here in the Lake District!

As always, Chinese Medicine has a whole range of views about Heat; there’s humid or Damp Heat and Dry Heat for example, which are quite different challenges, and all types of Heat can be treated with acupuncture, Herbs, lifestyle changes or dietary adaptations.

When it comes to foods that help different conditions, Daverick Leggett has written a couple of excellent books. He lists different foods which alleviate different conditions in his book Helping Ourselves. You’d need to get a TCM practitioner to tell you what your conditions were to work in this way as Chinese Medicine diagnosis is a real art and nothing is ever as clear as it seems from a laypersons point of view.

Daverick’s other book, Recipes for Self Healing, gives recipes based on the different properties of different foods.

In TCM there isn’t the view that we take in the West (on the whole) that certain foods are healthy and others are unhealthy. More that certain foods are more appropriate for certain conditions. An additional complexity would then be that those conditions would be very varied. For example a season would bring one set of conditions, the weather on a certain day would involve another layer of consideration, and a persons own internal pathology and lifestyle choices would need to be weighed up too.

So saying, if your digestion is reasonably ok and the weather is consistently hot then great coolers and thirst quenchers are water melon, cucumber, lettuce and peppermint and elderflower.

Yum! You could just throw some, or all, of those together, blend them, and drink! Leave out ice if you can resist it and just let the natural coolness of those ingredients do their work!

So it looks like it’ll be the turn of treating bumps and bruises next time!