Chinese food therapy
| Alternative medicine | |
|---|---|
| Claims | Health claims relating to Chinese diet |
| Related fields | Traditional Chinese medicine |
Chinese food therapy (simplified Chinese: 食疗; traditional Chinese: 食療; pinyin: shíliáo; literally: "food therapy", also called nutrition therapy and dietary therapy) is a mode of dieting rooted in Chinese understandings of the effects of food on the human organism, and centred on concepts such as eating in moderation. Its basic precepts are a mix of folk views and concepts drawn from traditional Chinese medicine. It was the prescientific analog of modern medical nutrition therapy and now qualifies as alternative medicine.
Food therapy has long been a common approach to health among Chinese people both in China and overseas, and was popularized for western readers in the 1990s with the publication of books like The Tao of Healthy Eating (Flaws 1995a) and The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen (Young 1999), which also cites Flaws 1995b, Zhao & Ellis 1998, and Simonds 1999.
A number of ancient Chinese cookbooks and treatises on food (now lost) display an early Chinese interest in food, but no known focus on its medical value. The literature on "nourishing life" (养生; 養生; yangsheng) integrated advice on food within broader advice on how to attain immortality. Such books, however, are only precursors of "dietary therapy", because they did not systematically describe the effect of individual food items.
The earliest extant Chinese dietary text is a chapter of Sun Simiao's Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold (千金方; Qiānjīn fāng), which was completed in the 650s during the Tang dynasty. Sun's work contains the earliest known use of the term "food (or dietary) therapy" (食疗; 食療; shíliáo). Sun stated that he wanted to present current knowledge about food so that people would first turn to food rather than drugs when suffering from an ailment. His chapter contains 154 entries divided into four sections – on fruits, vegetables, cereals, and meat – in which Sun explains the properties of individual foodstuffs with concepts borrowed from the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon: qi, the viscera, and vital essence (精; jīng), as well as correspondences between the Five Phases, the "five flavors" (sour, bitter, sweet, pungent, and salty), and the five grains. He also set a large number of "dietary interdictions" (食禁; shíjìn), some based on calendrical notions (no water chestnuts in the 7th month), others on purported interactions between foods (no clear wine with horse meat) or between different flavors.
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