Why diet is so important in Chinese medicine

The food we eat is the fuel in the tank. You can run your car on high octane gasoline and drive for hundreds of thousands of miles, or you can run it on moonshine and quickly blow up your engine.

In Chinese medicine, we look to the Spleen as the driving force behind digestion. Its job is to transform the food we eat into vital body substances: Qi, Blood, Body Fluids, Yin, and Yang. The classical texts describe the Spleen's role as "separating the clear from the turbid." So consider what you put in your body and where it fits on the clear-turbid spectrum.

Whole foods, particularly fresh produce and meats, are great. Things with lists of ingredients typically are listing things your Spleen has to work through to get to the Qi of the food, that is, lots of turbid to separate out. These can be sugars, additives, preservatives, chemicals, or even excess dairy or certain grain products. Long-term consumption of these foods means the Spleen is chronically overtaxed, busy separating clear and turbid all the time, and this leads to Spleen Qi deficiency. A weak Spleen is less efficient at it's job, so what ends up happening is that the turbid that gets separated out, instead of being transformed and transported out of the body as waste, becomes dampness that lingers and stagnates in the body. Translation: we get fat.

Obviously this isn't revolutionary information, but it's always helpful to think about things in different ways!

Chew on that!