900 Foods for Health and Healing in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Food cures are to cure diseases by foods, and it is the basic intent of this entire book to show you how this can be done, but a number of general principles may be discussed here. First of all, there are prima facie applications of food cures which means that sometimes you can readily apply a given food cures menu, because the relevance of that menu to the disease under treatment is self evident. For example, if you have high blood pressure, it is self evident that you should be on the blood pressure reducing menu; if you have high blood sugar, it is equally self evident that you should be on the blood sugar reducing menu. Secondly, as you continue to improve your knowledge about food cures, you will be more capable of applying food cures menus to cope with your illness effectively. Thirdly, you should distinguish between attacking the disease and building up the strength of your body, which is often called increasing the immune system. When the disease is relatively light which means that the strength of your ody is relatively weak, it may be wise for you to attack and get rid of it once and for all. Fourthly, you should also distinguish between negative healing and positive healing both of them may be necessary under different circumstances, but it is definitely worth your while to understand the difference between the two and apply them intelligently and flexibly. The use of liver to cure night blindness, for example, is positive healing. On the other hand, when a diabetic has to depend on a daily injection of insulin or a patient of hypertension has to take medications to control blood pressure all the time, it is negative healing, because the patient virtually has no chance of recovery, he is only controlling his symptoms. This book introduces many foods that have been clinically proven to be effective for dealing with the causes of diabetes, such as pork pancreas, yam, black fungus, etc. and also foods that have been found to lower blood sugar by laboratory experiments, such as black sesame seeds and corn silk, and walnut leaves, etc. which are positive healing.