🌿 Folk Prescriptions

Saying goes, "If you don't observe dietary restrictions while taking medicine, even the doctor will run himself ragged." This fully illustrates the importance of dietary restrictions. Many classical TCM texts contain records on dietary restrictions. However, current folk practices regarding dietary restrictions are often overly strict and blind. For example, I once saw a cancer patient who came for consultation due to poor appetite and requested some herbal medicine to stimulate appetite. When I asked about his daily diet, I was truly shocked—he ate almost nothing but congee and pickled vegetables every day. When I asked why he didn’t eat chicken, fish, or eggs, he said, “My family told me these are all ‘promoting’ foods and should not be eaten.” I asked, “Do you want to eat them?” He replied, “Yes, very much so.” I said, “Your appetite is good; you don’t need medicine—just eat these ‘promoting’ foods, but in moderation each time.” Then I explained to the patient and his family the importance of dietary diversity and balanced nutrition, as well as the scientific principles behind proper dietary restrictions.
1. Dietary restrictions must be scientifically grounded. Cancer consumes large amounts of body nutrients, leading to varying degrees of nutritional deficiency. Relying solely on congee and vegetarian food cannot meet nutritional needs, which significantly affects 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 foundation for growth, tissue repair, immune function, and normal physiological activities, and they serve as the essential energy source for all human life activities and a necessary condition for recovery. Of course, illness requires dietary restrictions—for instance, when having a cold, one should eat light food; with gastrointestinal diseases, easily digestible food is preferred, avoiding hard-to-digest items like dog meat or spicy peppers; liver cancer patients should avoid fried foods and alcohol, etc. However, dietary restrictions must have scientific basis and should not be excessive, as too many restrictions can hinder recovery. Folk notions of “promoting” foods usually refer to high-protein, high-nutrient items such as scaleless fish, shrimp, crab, sea cucumber, lamb, beef, and Chinese toon. The belief that these “promoting” foods cause disease recurrence or worsening lacks scientific validity. Nutritionists believe these “promoting” foods stimulate the body’s immune response, awaken immunity, and promote functional recovery. For example, loach contains protein, fat, calcium, phosphorus, iron, and various vitamins—it is excellent for liver protection and recommended for both acute and chronic hepatitis patients. Sea cucumber, seaweed, kelp, and cuttlefish are not only common foods but also frequently used medicinal agents in cancer treatment. Chinese toon has astringent, hemostatic, drying, and consolidating effects, making it suitable for conditions like bloody stools, hemorrhoids, enteritis, dysentery, leukorrhea, and spermatorrhea. Therefore, dietary restrictions must be scientific, based on specific diseases, and not blindly applied.
2. TCM Dietary Therapy Based on Syndrome Differentiation: TCM dietary therapy is part of TCM treatment. TCM theory emphasizes treating illness through “dietary nourishment,” not merely relying on medication, highlighting the importance of using food to treat diseases. TCM believes that herbs possess four natures (cold, cool, warm, hot) and five flavors (pungent, sweet, sour, bitter, salty), and food shares these properties. 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 beans, etc.—they share the same origin. Substances that are both edible and capable of preventing or treating diseases are called “food medicines.” 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 Food Nature*, and Ming Dynasty’s Wang Ying’s *Herbal of Foods* are specialized books on this topic. The hallmark of TCM treatment is “syndrome differentiation and treatment.” Similarly, TCM dietary therapy follows syndrome differentiation theory, emphasizing “syndrome-based dietary therapy.” This means choosing foods according to the patient’s condition and nature of illness. Food selection should consider the four natures, five flavors, and meridian affiliations of the food itself, combined with disease conditions, seasonal climate, geographical environment, and lifestyle factors. TCM’s treatment principle is “coolness treated with warmth, heat treated with coldness”—selecting appropriate foods or dietary restrictions based on the cold or hot nature of the disease. For example, if the patient’s syndrome is cold, avoid cold-natured foods like duck, asparagus, lotus root, watermelon, pear, mung bean, etc.; if the syndrome is hot, avoid hot-natured foods like lamb, dog meat, shrimp, eel, scallion, ginger, garlic, chili, orange, lychee, etc.; if the patient usually suffers from spleen-kidney yang deficiency prone to diarrhea, avoid raw, greasy, and hard-to-digest foods; if the patient has lung-stomach yin deficiency with dry mouth and red tongue, avoid pungent, hot, and aromatic foods, etc. It is not true that anyone with acute or chronic illness must avoid all “promoting” foods.
3. Dietary Restrictions After Medication: After taking medicine, certain foods may enhance the potency of some drugs or reduce the efficacy of others. For example, if a patient is taking herbs to strengthen the spleen and stomach and warm the middle energizer, consuming cooling, laxative foods would be inappropriate and counterproductive. After taking decoctions containing Schizonepeta, avoid fish and crab; after taking formulas with Atractylodes macrocephala, avoid peach, plum, and garlic; after taking formulas with Smilax glabra, avoid honey; after taking ginseng, avoid radish, etc.
In summary, TCM dietary restrictions are based on syndrome differentiation and dietary therapy, fundamentally different from the folk practice of avoiding all “promoting” foods. Yet in real life, people often mistakenly believe only TCM involves dietary restrictions, conflating folk taboos with TCM dietary rules—this is a misunderstanding of TCM dietary therapy.