Health-Promoting Porridge for Heat Relief and Cooling
In hot summer months, gastrointestinal functions weaken due to heat stimulation, often leading to symptoms like heavy head, fatigue, chest tightness, poor appetite, and even heatstroke, endangering health. To ensure normal gastrointestinal function, dietary care is essential to nourish the body, enhance resistance, effectively resist heat invasion, and prevent heatstroke—key measures for summer health preservation. Consuming cooling health porridge is one such dietary adjustment.
Green Bean Porridge: Green beans are sweet in taste and cold in nature, possessing effects of clearing heat and detoxifying, quenching thirst, relieving summer heat, diuresis, and moisturizing skin. Cooking green beans together with rice enhances their ability to relieve summer heat, soothe irritability, generate fluids, and detoxify.
Honeysuckle Porridge: Honeysuckle is sweet and cold in nature, with a refreshing fragrance. Use 30g of honeysuckle, boil in water, extract concentrated juice (~150ml), then cook 50g of rice with 300ml water to make thin porridge, divided into two servings daily, warm. Ideal for wind-heat syndrome, headache and red eyes, sore throat, hypertension, and coronary heart disease patients.
Mint Porridge: First, take fresh mint (30g) or dried mint (15g), boil to extract juice. Then cook 100g of rice into porridge. Just before serving, add mint juice and a little rock sugar, boil briefly. This porridge clears heat and relieves summer heat, dispels wind, cools the body, and clears the throat. Mint leaves are pungent and cool, fragrant and delicious.
Lotus Seed Porridge: Lotus seeds clear heart fire, relieve irritability, strengthen the spleen, and stop diarrhea. Cooking lotus seeds with rice forms lotus seed porridge, effective for treating insomnia caused by summer heat.
Lotus Leaf Porridge: Take one fresh lotus leaf, wash thoroughly, chop finely, place in a gauze bag, boil to extract ~150ml concentrated juice. Add 100g of rice and appropriate rock sugar, along with 500ml water, cook into thin porridge. Consume twice daily, morning and evening. Lotus leaf has a fragrant, slightly astringent taste, with effects of clearing heat, relieving summer heat, reducing irritability, lowering blood pressure, and aiding weight loss. Combined with rice and rock sugar, the porridge is sweet and refreshing—a superb remedy for heat relief.
Agastache Porridge: Use 15g of agastache (double amount if fresh), boil in 180ml water for 2–3 minutes, filter out residue. Cook 50g of cleaned rice into porridge, adding agastache juice when nearly done, cook another 2–3 minutes. Consume three times daily warm. Agastache is pungent and warm, a common summer herb, effective for heatstroke with high fever, indigestion, cold with chest tightness, vomiting, and diarrhea.