🌿 Folk Prescriptions

Saying goes, "Eating medicine without observing dietary restrictions is like running to exhaust the doctor," which fully illustrates the importance of dietary restrictions. Many TCM classics contain records about food restrictions. However, current folk practices regarding dietary restrictions are often overly strict and blind. For example, I once treated a tumor patient who complained of poor appetite and requested some herbal medicine to stimulate appetite. When asking about his daily diet, I was shocked—he mainly ate congee and pickled vegetables every day. When asked why he didn't eat chicken, fish, or eggs, he replied, "My family said these are 'wind-inducing foods' and should not be eaten." I asked, "Do you want to eat them?" He answered, "Yes, very much." I told him, "Your appetite is good; just eat these 'wind-inducing foods,' but in moderation each time." Then I explained to the patient and his family the importance of dietary diversity, balanced nutrition, and scientific dietary restrictions.
1. Scientific Basis for Dietary Restrictions: Tumors consume large amounts of body nutrients, leading to varying degrees of nutritional deficiency. Relying solely on congee and vegetarian diets cannot meet nutritional needs, significantly affecting treatment outcomes and prognosis. A study of 3,000 cancer patients showed that those whose weight did not decline lived about twice as long as those whose weight dropped. Proper nutrition and diet are the material basis for growth, tissue repair, immune function, and normal physiological functions—essential sources of energy for all human life activities and necessary conditions for recovery. Of course, illness requires dietary restrictions—for instance, during a cold, one should eat light foods; with gastrointestinal diseases, easily digestible foods are preferred, avoiding hard-to-digest items like dog meat and spicy peppers; liver cancer patients should avoid fried foods and alcohol. However, restrictions must have scientific rationale; excessive restriction harms recovery. Folk notions of "wind-inducing foods" usually refer to high-protein, high-nutrient items such as scaleless fish, shrimp, crab, sea cucumber, lamb, beef, and fragrant sprouts. Believing these cause disease recurrence or worsening lacks scientific basis. Nutritionists argue these "wind-inducing foods" stimulate immune responses, awakening immunity and promoting physiological recovery. For example, loach contains protein, fat, calcium, phosphorus, iron, and various vitamins—excellent for liver protection; sea cucumber, seaweed, kelp, and cuttlefish are common foods and frequently used drugs in cancer therapy; fragrant sprouts have astringent, hemostatic, drying, and consolidating effects, suitable for bloody stools, hemorrhoids, enteritis, dysentery, vaginal discharge, and spermatorrhea. Thus, dietary restrictions must be scientific, based on specific conditions, not blindly applied.
2. Syndrome Differentiation and Dietary Therapy in TCM: Syndrome differentiation and dietary therapy is essentially dietary therapy in TCM, an integral part of TCM treatment. TCM emphasizes "nourishing through food, not merely treating with medicine," showing great importance placed on using food to treat diseases. TCM holds that herbs possess four natures (cold, cool, warm, hot) and five flavors (pungent, sweet, sour, bitter, salty), and so do foods. Besides nourishing the body, food can also treat diseases. Many medicinal herbs are everyday foods, such as ginger, green onion, jujube, longan, yam, lily, red adzuki beans—these are "food-medicine dual-use" substances. Ancient physicians already used these accessible food medicines to treat illnesses. Works like Tang Dynasty’s Meng Xing’s *Food Therapy Herbal*, Southern Tang’s Chen Shiliang’s *Herbal for Diet*, and Ming Dynasty’s Wang Ying’s *Herbal for Food* are specialized texts on this subject. The hallmark of TCM treatment is "syndrome differentiation and treatment," and dietary therapy follows the same principle—emphasizing "syndrome differentiation and dietary selection." This means choosing foods based on the patient's condition and nature, considering the four natures and five flavors of food, combined with disease status, seasonal climate, geographical environment, and lifestyle factors. The TCM treatment principle is "coolness treated with warmth, warmth treated with coolness"—selecting foods or restricting certain foods according to the cold or heat nature of the disease. For example, if the syndrome is cold, avoid cold-natured foods like duck, asparagus, lotus root, watermelon, pear, and mung beans; if the syndrome is hot, avoid hot-natured foods like lamb, dog meat, shrimp, eel, scallion, ginger, garlic, chili, orange, and lychee; those prone to diarrhea due to spleen-kidney yang deficiency should avoid raw, greasy, and hard-to-digest foods; those with lung-stomach yin deficiency and dry mouth with red tongue should avoid pungent, hot, and dry foods. It is not true that anyone with acute or chronic illness must avoid all "wind-inducing foods."
3. Dietary Restrictions After Medication: Certain foods consumed after taking medication may enhance or weaken the drug’s effect. For example, if a patient takes herbs to strengthen the spleen and stomach and warm the middle energizer, consuming cooling, laxative foods would counteract the therapeutic effect. After taking decoctions containing Schizonepeta, avoid fish and crab; after taking ones with Atractylodes, avoid peach, plum, and garlic; after taking ones with Smilax, avoid honey; after taking ginseng, avoid radish.
In summary, TCM dietary restrictions are based on syndrome differentiation and dietary therapy, fundamentally different from the folk practice of avoiding all "wind-inducing foods." However, in real life, people often believe only TCM has dietary restrictions, confusing folk practices with TCM dietary rules—this is a misunderstanding of TCM dietary therapy.