Welcome to my blog!

I'm an acupuncturist, teacher, fertility specialist, patient centered advocate, mom, activist and more! This blog is a place for me to write down the things on my mind, the things I discuss over and over, and the things I find helpful, interesting, and inspiring all in the hope that someone else out there, maybe YOU, will find some of these things to be helpful, interesting and inspiring too. I love learning, I love sharing, and I am passionate about helping others lead more balanced, fertile, and healthy lives - while trying to do the same myself. So here goes... The Blogging Life...

7.05.2012

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

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