ENDNOTES

Introduction

1. In case there are no Oriental markets in your area, addresses of select shops that accept mail orders are included in appendix 2.

2. The one exception is raw bitter apricot kernel, used in a cure for asthma. It is toxic only when eaten raw, and must not be consumed in large quantities or over a long period of time. For more information on bitter apricot kernel, see pages 38 and 69.

3. Some famous medics went as far as to systematically test the effects of all known medical substances on themselves. One of these, Li Shi Zhen (1518–1593), tested 1,892 ingredients and, on the basis of these, went on to prescribe over ten thousand preparations. The result was China’s definitive illustrated pharmacopoeia of medicinal ingredients, Li Shi Zen’s Ben Cao Gang Mu (Compendium of Materia Medica), published in 1590.

4. Many hospitals and clinics in China provide a combination of therapies. Western allopathic cures are prescribed where these work best, and traditional medicines are suggested for chronic conditions that need time and patience to remedy.

Chapter 1

1. The Yellow Emperor was so called not because of the color of his skin but because he ruled over the earth. In Chinese tradition, yellow is the color associated with the Earth element.

2. Oracles written on bovine hip bones and tortoise shells indicate that it was understood as early as the Shang dynasty (c. 1750–1100 B.C.) that disease could arise independently within various organs of the body, or as a result of external causes, such as in the case of an epidemic.

3. Lao tzu is reputed to be the author of the Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching (The Way and Its Power). Zhuang Zi (perhaps recognized more readily by Western readers as Chuang-tzu) was the author of a work bearing his own name that had considerable influence on Chinese Buddhism, landscape painting, and poetry.

4. As is common in English-language writings on traditional Chinese medical theory, the names of the individual Elements are capitalized to remind the reader of the more expansive meanings of the words.

5. The Lei Jing, or Systematic Compilation of the Internal Classic, was compiled by Zhang Jie Bin during the late Ming dynasty, in 1624. It is recognized as the most important book of reference in the study of the Huangdi Nei Jing.

Chapter 2

1. Although these various causes of illness have been referred to since antiquity, it was not until the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) that the three categories of pathology were formally classified. In 1174, Chen Yan (also known as Chen Wu Ze) published an eighteen-volume text, the title of which translates as A Treatise on the Three Categories of Pathogenic Factors of Diseases. He based his classifications on those originally suggested by Zhang Zhong Jing between A.D. 159 and 219 in another of China’s most famous medical classics, Synopsis of Prescriptions of the Golden Chamber. Zhang Zhong Jing’s three categories of causa morbi were:
1. Endogenous cause of disease, when pathogenic factors invade the channels and collaterals;
2. Exogenous causes, when external pathogenic factors invade the four extremities and the nine body orifices and then circulate through the blood vessels, thus obstructing the flow of qi;
3. Intemperance in sexual life, various traumata, animal and insect bites (from Synopsis of the Golden Chamber, chapter 1, clauses 1–2).

2. Xie qi is often called the liu yín or “six aberrations.” This yín is not the same as the yin for cause (as in wai and nei yin) nor, indeed, as the yin of Yin and Yang. It is sometimes translated as “devil.”

3. Yin qiao pills are febrifugal pills of lonicera (honeysuckle), forsythia, balloonflower root, burdock fruit, Lophaterum, Schizonepta, soybean, peppermint, and licorice.

4. The first official pharmacopoeia, which included reference to fungi, was published during the Tang Dynasty in A.D. 659.

5. The first reliable reference to inoculation is by Chen Zhong Yang, who lived during the tenth century A.D. Some authors affirm that the practice actually began in the sixth century.

6. The method was not, of course, without its dangers. Since Pasteur’s ninteenthcentury discoveries that a virus can be weakened for use as an inoculation, modern Western methods of immunization have entirely taken over in China.

Chapter 3

1. This is true everywhere but in Guangdong (Canton) province in the south, where soup is eaten first, as in Europe and America.

2. The famous dish Cantonese fried rice originated as a way to use leftovers. When in a hurry, you throw some rice into a pan together with whatever remains from a previous meal.

3. Contrary to popular belief, rice is not the staple dish all over China. It is consumed in larger quantities in the south, where it grows faster. Northern Chinese cuisine tends to prefer wheat (bread or noodles).

4. On average, Chinese people obtain 87 percent of their total calories from plant sources and only 13 percent from animals. In the United States, 39 percent of all calories consumed are obtained from animal sources; in the United Kingdom, foods from animal sources account for 35 percent of all calories consumed. Source: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization yearbook. Rome, 1992.

5. A kang is the traditional hollow brick platform found in peasant homes. It is heated from the inside. The entire family eats, works, and sleeps on top of the kang during the cold season.

6. This questionnaire is based on one drawn up by Dr. Henry C. Lu in his excellent book Chinese System of Food Cures: Prevention and Remedies (New York: Sterling, 1986).

Chapter 4

1. Combining traditional therapies with modern Western medicine is a practice frowned upon by most traditional doctors. Nevertheless, today few people are in fact patient enough to wait for traditional remedies to take full effect. It is common, therefore, particularly among city dwellers, to resort to a quick antibiotic “fix,” combining that with traditional food therapies to counteract resulting toxic imbalances.

2. Tannins and alkaloids react biochemically with protein-based tonics. Although ancient Chinese doctors had no understanding of biochemistry, experience taught them the negative effects of some ingedients when combined with others.

3. Our sources are various nutrition handbooks, including Bowes and Church’s Food Values of Portions Commonly Used, 15th ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).

4. Ying Jianghe, et. al., Icones of Medicinal Fungi from China (Beijing: Science Press, 1987). This book describes 272 varieties of medicinal fungi.

5. Private communication with the president of Italy’s rice growers’ association. Shortly after our conversation in 1985, this man died of cancer of the liver, caused (it is suspected) by eating too much (poisoned) rice.

6. K. Napier in “Taking Soy to Heart,” Harvard Health Letter, November 21, 1995, 1–2.

7. In India beef is not eaten for two basic reasons, both of them economic. First there is the question of space. Cattle need space. Five hundred percent more land is needed to provide the same amount of nutrients from beef as from agriculture. Clearly, therfore, in an overcrowded land like India or China, cattle ranches are not the norm. Second, cattle are more useful to the Indian (and Chinese) peasant alive rather than dead. Cattle pull the plow, provide milk to babies, and turn pumps and grinders, and their dried droppings are used both as insulation and as a smokeless fuel for cooking.

8. As far back as B.C. 4000, a daily ration of garlic was handed out to the workers on the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt in order to keep them fit and healthy. Garlic was used extensively by the Romans and the ancient Indians. Hippocrates, from the Greek island of Kos, founder of medical science, recommended garlic against infectious disease and for intestinal disorders. Louis Pasteur confirmed its antibiotic effects in1858.
    Finally, a poem written in England in 1607 by Sir John Harrington makes for educational and amusing reading:

Sith garlicke then hath power to save from death,
Bear with it though it make unsavoury breath.
And scorn not garlicke like some that thinke
It only makes men winke and drinke and stinke.

9. Drinking an extract of garlic in water appears to slow the growth of bladder cancer in laboratory mice. Dale R. Riggs, Jean I. DeHaven, and Donald J. Lamm, “Allium Sativum (Garlic) Treatment for Transitional Cell Carcinoma,” Cancer 79, no. 10 (1997): 3.

10. The greatest production of ginseng in the world is in the Kamloops area in southern British Columbia, Canada.

11. The precise date of the first use of tea is not known. We do know, however, that by the first millennium B.C. tea was already an old and well-established drink.

12. According to one story, tea was created by the compassionate Buddha for the benefit of Buddhist monks who fell asleep during meditation. Bodidharma was an Indian monk who went to China in the sixth century A.D. to teach meditation. During an early morning meditation he fell asleep. So angry was he on awakening that he cut off his eyelids. (Bodidharma is always depicted with wide, staring eyes.) The Buddha took pity on him. Where Bodidharma’s eyelids had fallen there grew two green plants. The leaves of these plants brewed in hot water would, from that time forward, ensure that Bodidharma and other monks would never again fall asleep during meditation.

13. Chen Junshi, et. al., Diet, Lifestyle and Mortality in China: A Study of the Characteristics of 5 Chinese Counties, Beijing: Oxford University Press, Cornell University Press, and People’s Medical Publishing House, 1991.

14. Soybeans are low fat, fiber-filled, and able to clear cholesterol from circulation. According to the Harvard Health Letter, regularly eating five ounces of firm tofu may lower bad cholesterol by up to 25 percent. Medizin November/ December 1996 issue.

15. At the Research Institute of Epidemic Diseases at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing.

Chapter 5

1. It is worth pointing out that, although aluminum does enter the bloodstream at what might be considered dangerous levels through cooking in aluminum vessels, a far greater quantity of the metal is ingested every time one swallows a buffered medication—approximately one hundred times as much as is introduced through cooking with aluminum pots.

2. Some of these ancient pots are on display at the Banpo Neolithic archaeological site and museum on the outskirts of Xian.

3. If, when you need to make a decoction, you find that your pot is broken or missing, the customary thing to do is to borrow your neighbor’s. You use it until you are cured. When you have finished with it you do not return it; if you were to do so, superstition decrees that you would be passing your ailment on to your neighbor. Instead, when he needs it, and only when he needs it, the neighbor will come to your place to ask for the pot.

4. Sake is the Japanese word for rice wine. The Chinese word is jiu.

5. Diet, Lifestyle and Mortality in China. The figures are: 0.073 to 0.247 mg/dl in Chinese males and 0.064 to 0.146 in Chinese females compared to 0.060 to 0.150 mg/dl and 0.050 to 0.130 in American men and women, respectively. The difference between iron counts in men and women is due to women’s blood loss during menstruation.

6. In June, 1997, one of the authors photographed a tiger paw for sale in Guangzhou’s (Canton) crowded public market. It was not on display in one of the stalls, but was instead placed on the ground at the end of the market by two men who said that they had traveled to Canton from Xinjiang region, in the remote west of the country. Nobody around them seemed to be disturbed by the nature of their wares.

7. In the West it is widely believed that dogs are eaten in China. However, in actual fact the consumption of dog meat in China is not, by any means, a common occurrence; neither of the authors has ever tasted it or seen it cooked. Only two people of our acquaintance in China have ever eaten dog. One of those people ate it once in his sixty-year-long life because he was suffering from a cold-disease syndrome and because, as he told us, he was curious. The other had eaten dog on half a dozen occasions and boasted that he liked it.

8. Yogurt was first introduced in northern China in the late 1980s. The Chinese took to it at once. Today it is sold at street stalls in all large northern cities. In the south of China (south of the Yangtze River) yogurt is still virtually unknown. A recent response there to my request for yogurt (called suan nai [sour milk]) was met with open-mouthed incredulity. “What do you want sour milk for?” I was asked. “It’s bad for you!”

9. Milk contains large quantities of the amino acid tryptophan, which is a natural sleep inducer. Other foods containing tryptophan, and which might thus be useful taken before bedtime, are chicken, turkey, tuna fish, beef, cheese, yogurt, and buttermilk.
    Traditional Chinese dietary measures for counteracting insomnia do not include milk and dairy products simply because these are not common in China. However, we did hear that a cup of steaming milk is a common nightcap in the central Asian and predominantly Muslim western province of Xin Jiang where milk is an integral part of people’s diets.

Chapter 6

1. This is true everywhere but in Guangdong (Canton) province in the south where soups are taken at the start of the meal as in Europe and the United States.

2. World Health Organization Yearbook, Rome, 1989 and 1996.

3. The recent improvements in living standards means that “special occasions” for many families are becoming the norm, thus leading to an increase in meat eat-ese is pronounced zen. Bodhidharma ing. This fact is beginning to cause some can thus be considered the founder of health concerns among Chinese dieti-Zen Buddhism. tians and doctors.

Chapter 7

1. The earliest known reference to qi gong is from the Warring States Period (476–221 B.C.) However, there exists pictorial evidence from the Shang and Zhou dynasties (1122–770 B.C.) that qi gong breathing exercises were being used then for medical purposes.

2. Bodhidharma is the founder of the Chan school of Chinese Buddhism. The word chan comes from the Sanskrit dhyan, which means meditation. Chan in Japanese is pronounced zen. Bodhidharma can thus be considered the founder of Zen Buddhism.

3. More commonly known in English as tai chi. Tai ji quan literally translates as: “the grand ultimate equilibrium,” in reference to the Taoist theory of Yin and Yang. The word quan means “boxing style.”

Appendix 1

1. It was only in 1963 that it was realized that zinc was important to the human metabolism; it took another ten years for RDA guidelines to be issued. Because of the uncertainty regarding zinc, some authorities suggest that 15 milligrams may be too high.