🌿 Folk Prescriptions

China’s culinary culture is vast and profound. Ordinary plants and animals, when properly combined, can prevent and treat diseases—these are called medicinal cuisine in traditional medicine. These dishes harness medicinal properties without drug side effects. Some foods not only prevent and treat illness but also enhance beauty.
Same medicinal cuisine affects different people differently. To use it effectively, understand your constitution and apply it wisely to achieve health, disease prevention, and beauty.
Consuming medicinal cuisine is a unique TCM beauty method.
Even in Han Dynasty, Zhang Zhongjing was skilled in using animal and plant medicines for beauty treatments. His "Essential Prescriptions from the Golden Chamber" contains many formulas treating illness and enhancing beauty, such as Gancao Xiaomai Dazao Tang, Danggui Shengjiang Yangrou Tang, and Zhusi Tang—showing Zhang’s expertise in combining food and medicine.
Zhusi Tang – An Important Formula in "Treatise on Cold Damage"
This formula treats diarrhea, sore throat, and restlessness in Zhang Zhongjing’s clinical practice. He used pork skin, honey, and rice flour boiled together to clear deficient heat, strengthen the spleen and stomach, stop diarrhea, relieve irritability, and clear heat—a crucial formula among the 112 in "Treatise on Cold Damage."
Pork Is a Treasure
Using pork organs and herbs together for treatment and beauty is common in Chinese medical prescriptions.
Experts note that pork skin and trotters are rich in protein, primarily collagen and elastin. Consuming pork skin and trotters is an excellent choice for beauty-conscious women—affordable, easy to prepare, and visibly effective, hence very popular.
In beauty practices, TCM often uses "sentient substances" like animal skin and fat—not mere roots and bark—to achieve beauty. Examples include donkey-hide gelatin (E Jiao), pork trotters, and pork skin—all known for beauty benefits. Their mechanism lies in nourishing yin and blood, moisturizing skin, improving skin environment, thus achieving beauty. These formulas are preserved in ancient imperial secret recipes and remain widely used in modern TCM.
Beauty via Pork Skin and Trotters Has Over a Thousand Years of History
Zhang Zhongjing recorded in "Treatise on Cold Damage" that pork skin and trotters "harmonize qi and blood, moisturize skin, and enhance beauty." Beauty experts recommend women eat more pork skin and trotters—proving pork is truly a superb beauty ingredient.