Are you cool as a cucumber?

Whew!  It has been HOT HOT HOT for over a week now and I've been chatting everyone up about foods that can help us stay cool and beat the heat.  So many times, in fact, that I thought a blog post was in order!

In traditional Chinese medicine, food therapy is one of the founding elements of good health and healthcare. There are lots of very intuitive and easy to use aspects to this (note to self... another post needed), but one of the more foreign (to most) ideas in Chinese food therapy is that foods have energetic temperatures.  

Huh?!  Energetic temperatures is a pretty strange concept, I'll admit, so let's phrase it a little differently... regardless of how they are prepared (cooked, raw, room temperature, frozen, etc.) Chinese medicine says that each and every food has an innate and natural tendency to either warm or cool the body down to various degrees. 

So, if you are a person who is always freezing, you can use this knowledge to your advantage by eating foods that are naturally warming.  Or, say for instance, you are a person who is suffering through a massive, record breaking heat wave (just saying...) You too can put "food energetics" to use for you!  There's a reason we say "cool as a cucumber!"

So below is a very basic chart with some of the most common foods and they are broken down by their energetic temperatures.  The idea is, you'd want to eat more of the foods in the column that could help you out.  Always cold and trying to warm up... eat more foods from the hot, warm & neutral columns.  Sweating up a storm and can't cool down... eat more foods from the cold, cool and neutral columns.

Of course, you should BY NO MEANS go and overhaul your entire diet to be made only of the foods in the columns that apply to you (silly).  Just tip the scales in the right direction.  Oh, and one more thing (because I see it WAAAY too often) don't fixate on the foods that sound unappealing and try to force yourself into eating them, just don't do it!  This should be fun and helpful and enjoyable AND make you feel better, if it's not, then you need to take a step back and reassess and change things up :)

Bon Appetite!
Nicole

PS. Even though this sounds a little strange, it really IS intuitive a lot of the time.  Check out this article on the TOP 7 Foods to Eat in the Summer Although they are recommending these 7 foods for totally Western/medical reasons, each of the foods they recommend is on the cool/cold list in Chinese food therapy (I love it when the East and West come at it from totally different angles and end up concurring!)

Hot	Warm	Neutral	Cool	Cold
Garlic, Scallion	Bell pepper, chives, green beans, kale, leek, mustard green, onion, parsley, parsnip	Chard, lettuce, shitake mushroom, sweet potato, taro root, yam	Alfalfa sprouts, asparagus, beet, bok choy, broccoli, cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, celery, corn, cucumber, eggplant, potato, pumpkin, spinach, turnip, zucchini	Chinese cabbage, mung bean sprout, seaweed, snow pea, water chestnut, white mushroom
	Cherry, Chinese prune, coconut, dried papaya, grape, litchi, pineapple, plum, raspberry, tangerine	Dates, loquat, mango, olive,  papaya	Apple, apricot, fig, lemon, orange, peach,       persimmon, strawberry, tomato	Banana, cantaloupe, grapefruit, mulberry, pear, pear-apple, watermelon
	Oats, sweet rice, wheat bran, wheat germ	Buckwheat, brown & white rice, corn meal, rice bran, rye	Millet, pearl barley, white rice, wheat
	Black  beans, brown sesame seeds, chestnut, lentil, pine nuts, walnuts	Almond, adzuki bean, black sesame, filbert, kidney bean, lotus seed, peanuts, peas, sunflower seed	Mung bean, soy bean, tofu, minter melon seed	Pumpkin seed
Lamb	Beef, chicken, freshwater fish, shrimp, turkey	Ocean fish, gelatin, oysters	Chicken egg, clam, crab	Pork
Black pepper, cinnamon, dry  ginger	Anise, basil, cardamom, carob,  clove, coriander, fennel, fresh ginger	Licorice, lycii, poria mushroom	Cilantro,  corn silk, mint leaf	Bamboo, cassia, chrysanthemum, mulberry leaf, lily bulb
Alcohol	Brown sugar, coffee, molasses, rice vinegar, wine	Malt, honey	Tea	Salt, vitamin c, white sugar