Chinese medicine health: “absorption” first, “nutrition” second!

What is important if not “nutrition”?

First of all, from the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine, there is no concept of the word “nutrition” in the strict sense. Since ancient times, Chinese people do not talk about “nutrition”, but only focus on whether the food is rich enough, whether it is sufficient, whether it is full enough, and whether it is good to eat ……

Nutrition is an incidental product of modern Western medicine, with the development of micro-reductionist research, to be able to analyze the “composition” of each kind of thing, which is called nutrition. In ancient times, it was not possible to do such “analysis”, so it is not suitable to discuss the issue from this perspective.

If the ancient diet did not focus on “nutrition”, what did it focus on? Chinese medicine places more emphasis on another issue, which in modern language is called “absorption” ability, while in ancient Chinese medicine is called “acceptance and transportation”.

From the perspective of TCM and traditional Chinese culture, more emphasis is placed on the “inner” cultivation of oneself. This is like the “duck-fill education”, every day to instill you with a lot of useful knowledge, but the student itself can not accept, or knowledge level is not enough, no matter how much you spend money to go to the class remediation; However, if the student itself is very smart and diligent, even if you are in the poor rural mountainous areas, there is no good educational environment, you can You can achieve something.

The problem of insufficient nutrition in vegetarian diet comes from shirking responsibility

At this point, perhaps you understand how Chinese medicine looks at the question of whether a vegetarian diet is nutritious enough. “Nutrition” is something foreign, and Chinese medicine places more emphasis on whether people can “absorb” the nutrition themselves than on the nutrition itself.

If the body is healthy, light meals are enough to nourish the body; if the body itself is not good, can not absorb, then the supplement will be useless, but will lead to the occurrence of disease. This is also the reason why Chinese medicine has the saying that “deficiency is not compensated for”, and that a weak body may not be compensated for by eating anything.

The question of whether a vegetarian diet is nutritious enough is not asked by TCM practitioners at all, but rather, “Is your body healthy enough to absorb enough nutrients?” Instead of giving the responsibility to food, Chinese medicine focuses more on one’s own health.

This is a cultural difference between Chinese and Western medical science. Chinese medicine prefers to find the answer from oneself, for example, this kind of disease is mostly related to one’s own emotional and physical factors.

Chinese medicine does not focus on nutrition but on taste

To discuss further, TCM does not focus on “nutrition”, but on “five tastes”, that is, “acid, bitter, sweet, pungent and salty”. The five tastes are the basic flavors of various foods, which everyone eats, and TCM believes that “too much is not too bad”.

If the body is unhealthy, then from the perspective of the five flavors, it is recommended to focus on eating certain aspects of the diet to help the body adjust back to normal.

From this point of view, the five tastes of dietary regimen also emphasizes the need to make recommendations on an individual basis, which is a characteristic of TCM that emphasizes the “internal factors” of dietary regimen.

However, traditional Chinese medicine does not say that every meal must have all five flavors. Five flavors are not the same as “five nutrients”. Nowadays, some health books emphasize eating “five flavors” of food and “five colors” of food at every meal, but in fact, TCM does not have such strict requirements. At a higher level, Chinese medicine advocates a “light” diet, not strong flavors, simple and simple is the way to eat for a long life.

The more you worry about not having enough, the less nutritious it is!

Some people just started to eat vegetarian, as long as the body has some minor problems, will blame the vegetarian diet is not nutritious enough. Here I would like to point out a phenomenon – “the more people worry about not having enough nutrition, the more likely they are to have not enough nutrition”; on the contrary, if people do not worry about not having enough nutrition, they do not have this problem.

Why is this so? Here is an attempt to answer from the perspective of Chinese medicine.

In terms of diet, TCM emphasizes the relationship between the “spleen and stomach”, but many people do not necessarily know what each of them does. (The spleen and stomach in TCM are different from the Western anatomical concept of spleen and stomach organs.)

In Chinese medicine, the “stomach” is responsible for “ripening water and grain”, just like a pot, when food enters the stomach and intestines, the stomach is responsible for “ripening” the food, changing it into “water and grain essence”, in layman’s terms, into the body’s “blood”, “nutrition”.

However, after the stomach has produced these qi and blood and nutrients, it needs the help of the spleen to carry them around the body. The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine says that “Spleen Qi disperses essence” and that the spleen is responsible for transporting the essence, qi and blood, and nutrients produced by the stomach to the whole body, and is responsible for transporting and unblocking them.

In other words, the relationship between the spleen and the stomach is, in today’s terms, a bit like the functions of “digestion” and “absorption”, with the stomach being responsible for digesting food and the spleen helping the body to absorb it.

The point is, if a person worries a lot, it will affect the whole “absorption” ability! In the Huangdi Neijing, there are two sentences that say: “Thinking hurts the spleen”, why does thinking hurt the spleen? It is another sentence that explains “Thinking leads to Qi stagnation”. It is like when a person thinks about something very intensely, the person’s breathing is not smooth and the body is not moving with concentration.

When a person often thinks too much, the “spleen qi disperses essence” function is blocked, that is, although the stomach’s digestive ability is not a problem, but the spleen’s ability to help unblock the qi and blood is blocked, the spleen can not bring the qi and blood to the whole body, then the natural absorption is blocked, resulting in the problem of “not enough nutrition”.

In Chinese medicine, this is called “the stomach is not deficient but the spleen is deficient”, “deficiency not being supplemented”, or in modern terms, “able to digest but unable to absorb”.

In short, a person who is prone to worrying and thinking will start eating vegetarian food and become even more worried and thoughtful, and then blame vegetarian food for malnutrition. In fact, it is not necessarily the food itself, but the choice of vegetarianism that aggravates one’s worries.

As the Chinese idiom says, “The heart is wide and the body is fat.” If you don’t worry about not eating enough nutrition, you can actually eat and live naturally, and you can easily be healthy even if you don’t eat so finely. From this point of view, it is useless to worry. The more you worry about vegetarian food not being nutritious enough, the more nutritious it will really be!

More importantly, vegetarianism is not only about food, but also about simplicity and inner purity. In fact, what we think in our hearts is closely related to our dietary health.

Regarding nutrition, this micro controversial, if we say that Chinese medicine does not focus on nutrition, it is indeed inevitable that some inappropriate. Therefore, with the editorial after the words, and slightly to remember.

To be precise, Chinese medicine rarely uses this word as a noun or a combination of these two words; rather, there is another word that seems to be comparable to this – “Ying Qi”, which refers to the essence of the human body that is produced from diet and water and grain. According to the planning textbook, “Yingqi is the essence of water and grain that is transported and transformed by the spleen and stomach.

In modern times, the concept of “nutrition” is “the process by which the body takes in food, digests, absorbs, metabolizes and excretes it, and uses the nutrients and other beneficial components in food to build tissues and organs, regulate various physiological functions, and maintain normal growth, development and disease prevention and health care. “

Chinese medicine talks about “chemistry” and Western medicine talks about “process”, the matter of nutrition is actually based on our own digestion and absorption ability to show; if we leave the premise of “human” and talk about the “nutrition” of “material”, is it not wrong?