INTRODUCTION

To the Chinese, longevity is the greatest blessing of a good life. Consequently, it is a Chinese belief that the central duty of every man and woman is to cultivate health and fitness throughout one’s entire lifetime. Out of that belief has developed a vast system of preventive methods for maintaining health, consisting of exercise, diet, rest, healthy living habits, and preemptive diagnoses.

When, despite efforts at prevention, disease does arise, the cause is sought in some underlying imbalance between the individual and his environment, and is corrected by proper eating. Only when all else fails does one resort to doctors and medicines.

This book is about the role of Chinese cuisine in the prevention and cure of disease. It also examines traditional Chinese methods of prevention through exercise and healthy living. It describes simple recipes, or “prescriptions” if you like, that anyone can prepare at home, with little expense, in order to cure many common and chronic ailments. Most of the ingredients we mention can be found in the nearest supermarket; a few may have to be obtained from a store specializing in Oriental foods.¹ None of the remedies in this book require particular attention to dosages or mode of preparation: all the ingredients but one are categorized by the Chinese as “high-grade” drugs. Basically, this classification means that they are food items: wholesome beyond their purely medicinal function, they can therefore be taken continuously over a period of time with no ill effects.² Examples of such ingredients are garlic, ginger, celery, and coriander, or, when we get more complicated, jujube (Chinese dates) or cardamom seeds.

Traditionally the line separating “food” from “medicine” has never been clear. In the same way there has never been a precise division between popular home remedies and official Chinese medicine. People in China take whatever is available locally to cure their ailments. Even today, more than 80 percent of the population in China live off the land. They eat what they grow in their own fields and when they fall ill they take the traditional remedies of the land. The people have been there for millennia; experience has taught them or their forefathers, or their forefathers’ forefathers. Sometimes by pure chance, or on the basis of an intuitive hunch, someone might stumble across a new and unexpected therapeutic effect of a common spice, fruit, or herb. They tell their friends and family. Others try it. Word spreads until the new remedy comes to the notice of one of China’s traditional wandering doctors. He tries it himself, uses it on his patients, and records it for posterity.³ In this way a home remedy becomes an official remedy. This process of testing and transition is called the empirical method. Over a single lifetime the empirical method does not go far. Over nearly five thousand years of recorded history, the trials and errors of a people bent on staying physically fit must surely yield results.

These results form the basis of the rules, prescriptions, and remedies in this book, which we have collected from original Chinese sources, ancient and modern, published and unpublished. We hope that by publishing them in English we may both further the understanding of Chinese medical theory and practice in the English-speaking world and, above all, provide access to centuries of clinical experience that may improve the quality of life for anybody willing to try the ancient Chinese way to health through food.

There are several circumstances in which this book might prove useful. You may wish simply to prepare good, wholesome Chinese cuisine with a view to keeping you and your family healthy. Or you may wish to follow a Chinese dietary and fitness regimen for generic disease prevention or for weight control. The suggested recipes and prescriptions will provide relief from many minor and chronic health problems—a headache, a blocked nose, an allergy—that often do not merit the time and expense of a visit to the doctor. Other conditions might require surgery (a hemorrhoid problem, for instance) but your preference would be to try alternatives first. There are occasions when you might be dealing with a common illness—influenza or a cold—when you may not wish to poison your body with chemical medicines, the ill effects of which might take at least two weeks to wear off. Or you might be suffering from one of those ailments, terminal or insignificant, most of them chronic, that Western allopathic medicine simply cannot cure. Chinese medicine cannot guarantee results either, but some of these conditions have been known to regress, if not to disappear, under the influence of Chinese natural remedies. Hypertension, asthma, obesity, anorexia, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, and some forms of cancer are but a few of these.

At a time when dissatisfaction in the United States with mainstream allopathic medicine seems to be on the rise and when leading research institutes, as well as many of the “alternative” therapies, seem to do little more than contradict everything we knew last year—Is cholesterol bad or isn’t it? Are eggs good for the liver? Does alcohol damage the heart or guard against coronary disease?—it seems only reasonable to pay attention to what one-fifth of humanity has been preaching, and practicing, for millennia.

This is not to say that one should go completely in the other direction and put wide-eyed trust exclusively in Chinese medicine. It has its limits. First and foremost, Chinese natural medicine takes time to act, often taxing the patience of all but its most resolute adherents. Secondly, it fails to deliver on some occasions when a mere two-week course of antibiotics could provide a quick and permanent cure.⁴ Finally, there is the problem of understanding the theoretical basis of traditional Chinese medicine. When discussing the effects of foods and recipes we refer to imbalances of Yin and Yang or the Five Elements, to “hot” and “cold” syndromes, to the “evil wind,” and to “upward,” “downward,” “outward,” and “inward” movements of foods and drugs. Furthermore, Chinese medicine seems to ignore some of the basics that Westerners take for granted. It makes no mention of familiar terms like bacteria, viruses, vitamins, or enzymes. This can be confusing.

In order to render the concepts of traditional Chinese medicine meaningful we have attempted, in chapter 1, to illustrate as synthetically as possible the underlying theories behind traditional Chinese beliefs regarding health and illness.

Chapter 2 examines the exogenous and endogenous pathogenic causes of disease, and also discusses some of the doubts and misconceptions that might arise from attempting to fit Chinese theory into the Western paradigm. Both the successes and failures of Chinese medicine are considered.

The rest of the book is about Chinese food remedies themselves. Chapter 3 describes the methods of preparing and eating traditional Chinese cuisine for health. It also provides the reader with a questionnaire for recognizing his or her physical characteristics, with a view to selecting the most suitable balanced diet for perfect health.

Chapter 4 looks at the ingredients used in the recipes and prescriptions. Chapter 5 provides the reader with recipes and prescriptions for curing common ailments. Chapter 6 takes the form of a cookbook as it instructs the reader in the ancient art of preparing easy but complete meals for health and longevity.

Finally, chapter 7 describes traditional Chinese qi gong exercises as a means of keeping healthy.

It is with the traditional Chinese augury of a long and healthy life that we leave you to the exploration of the joys and proven health benefits of Chinese therapeutic cuisine. Chang ming bai sui—A long life of one hundred years!