Traditional Chinese Medicine views inbalances in the body as excess ordeficient cold or heat. When the people develop unbalanced bodyfunctions, they get sick. Likewise, when their body’s constitution is restored to a healthy balanced status, the individual can recover. If aperson already has a hot constitution (or an overheated system),consuming foods in the hot or warm category will worsen their condition. Too, a person with a cold constitution who consumes cold or cooling foods will delay their recovery.
Chinese medicine divides foods into several categories by their nature:cold, cool, warm, and hot. That means that they can produce a cold,cool, warm, or hot condition in the body after they are digested in terms of body’s balance. If people mainly eat from one of these food categories for a prolonged period of time, they will break down the Yin (cold)- Yang (hot) balance and develop an imbalance in their body. For instance, onions, garlic, ginger, hot pepper, cinnamon and lamb meat belong to the hot category. If people consume too much from this food category for a long time, they can over-heat the body and stress their internal organs. Other milder symptoms such as constipation and mouth sores can occur. If the body is not adjusted back, or if the individual has the body condition of Yin (cold) deficiency, the condition will further stress the internal organs and many other diseases or problems can develop later on, such as nose bleeding, itching skin, infection,insomnia, fatigue, worsened diabetes, anxiety, sometime even urine bleeding or bowel bleeding.
Therefore, people with an inbalanced overheated (hot) constitution should avoid foods with hot/warm properties
1) hot foods: garlic, onions, hot pepper, ginger,cinnammon, wasabi, lamb meat,mustard
Likewise, people with an inbalanced cold constitution should avoid foods with cooling/cold properties
2) cold foods: raw fruits and vegetables, raw foods, cold (in temperature) foods like ice cream and ice water
