中醫觀點

Our eating habits are always the very first things that affect the state of our health. As part of our culture, Chinese people have put a lot of emphasis on choosing the right food to eat according to the season and our own body conditions. Chinese people believe that men are part of nature, and the human body is tightly coupled with climate change throughout the year. The annual climate cycle is believed to be an important ingredient that tones our body and promotes proper metabolism. Winter is the time for storage and the body is supposed to lower its activity and intake more "warm" food and store more energy. Summer, on the contrary, is the season for disposing body waste, and the body is supposed to expel waste through sweating and more vigorous metabolism. Hence, the choice of food to eat should also follow the seasonal variation, and the best rule is to eat whatever is available. In fact, Chinese people have a long tradition of consuming different kinds of soups and foods in different seasons. For example, winter melon soup for summer, hot-pots for winter, etc.

Importance of Balanced Flavours

If you pay regular visits to traditional Chinese markets, it is not difficult to discover that spring onions, garlics, gingers, chili, etc. are sold in huge quantity. Sometimes, stacks of spring onions are just given to the customers along with the vegetables they buy. All these spring onions, garlics and gingers are actually used in cooking and eventually consumed. This very basic cooking habit, putting "different flavours" in our food, is a central part of Chinese diet. In fact, Chinese meals are always shared, with a variety of dishes of different kinds of vegetables and meats, and Chinese people believe strongly that good health can only be maintained with a balanced diet according to flavours. This differs from the western concept of balanced diet, which usually refers to a balanced selection of meat, carbohydrate, fibre, etc. Our emphasis is not just the type of food but also its "flavour".

In Chinese medicine, the basic five flavours, i.e., sweet, sour, bitter, pungent and salty, enter our five sets of organs. "Sweet" goes to spleen and stomach (脾、胃), "sour" goes to liver and gall-bladder (肝、膽), "bitter" to heart and small intestine (心、小腸), "pungent" to lungs and large intestine (肺、大腸), and "salty" to kidneys and bladder (腎、膀胱). If our diet has a bias towards one particular flavour or intentionally avoids one, we fail to maintain balance in our internal organs. Obesity is one common problem for people who have an extreme preference for sweet food. Illness or bad health, from the Chinese medical viewpoint, is a result of imbalance.

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