We are going to do that is by learning about how to give our patients advice about food. And that’s why I call this presentation, Food as Medicine.
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Hi, this is Dr. Martha Lucas, and I am happy to be here today with you to present a presentation called Food is Medicine. And first, I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for this opportunity. And I want to remind you that good health is easier to maintain than it is to acquire. And part of how we are going to do that is by learning about how to give our patients advice about food.
And that’s why I call this presentation, Food as Medicine. So let’s go to the slides. Now, first of all, language creates experience. For example, I have a lot of patients, as we all do, who are doing PT and they will sometimes whine a little bit about it Oh, every night I have to spend blah, blah, blah time doing my PT.
So I have tried to change their language about it to say they are pampering their body or they are pampering themselves. Like when you go to PT, you’re pampering your body. When you get a massage, you’re pampering your body, even when it’s a deep tissue massage, because As we get older, our body needs more and more pampering for most of us, especially if you’re athletic, if you’re active, you’re going to occasionally have some muscle aches.
As we get older, maybe we get some bone pain. So I’m, with food, it’s the same way. Believe me, and I’m sure most of you know this, people don’t like you to, what I call, fool around with their diet. First of all, diet just means what you eat. Diet just means lifestyle. People have come to think of it as a negative word with a negative connotation that a diet means some sort of restricted way that we have to eat.
But all of the original meaning is lifestyle. How you are existing with food. Now we, I’m going to present the food advice from a Chinese medicine perspective, but I want to start by reminding you that We, as practitioners, also need to know the Western medicine ideas about food advice because your patients are going to say something like, oh, I don’t know, this list of foods you gave me that’s for springtime looks like it has a lot of carbs in it.
Is that okay? So we need to be able to balance what they are learning from either just general society or Western medicine with what we are going to be teaching. telling them. Now, let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food is a saying that we think came from the ancient Greek medical doctor Hippocrates, who is known as the father of modern medicine.
So foods that we eat can have a profound effect on our health. And that was known many. years and centuries ago when he started talking about medicine and food. And studies have shown that eating a healthy diet can help prevent or manage a pretty wide variety of chronic conditions like heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, certainly heart disease.
Dietary interventions have the potential to have a very large effect on our health. But part of the issue is integrating it into the system. Integrating it into the health care system. Integrating it into our practices so that people will benefit. Listen to us. For example, when I have Mazen Cosmetic Acupuncture patients or Facial Acupuncture patients, like you might have, they’re super willing to eat the foods that we tell them will help their skin.
But for other kinds of health issues, sometimes it’s a little bit harder. We know that besides just giving us nutrition, food can prevent and treat disease. But again, prescribing food is a lot harder than prescribing a pill because the people just, lots of people just don’t want to change. Now in Western medicine, there is a food is medicine movement, and they have what they call medically tailored meals, and they have used those to help treat diabetes, heart failure, Obesity, chronic liver failure, they’ve shown that it helps reduce visits to the ER and generally lowered health care costs.
They also have what is called medically tailored groceries. Now this is where they give participants nutritional advice before they go to the grocery store with a kind of a list of foods of what to buy that mainly they’re studying to help lower blood pressure. And then they even have Produce prescriptions.
And again, that is, they’re starting that with children, produce prescriptions to help reduce diabetes in young children. Again, in Western medicine, what are their, what’s their food advice? One of them is bump up your fiber. Apparently only 5 percent of the U. S. population eats enough fiber, and we know that can help your gut health.
It helps lower cholesterol. It keeps us more satisfied after we eat a meal and it controls blood sugar. That’s one of the ways Western medicine would tell you to change your diet. Okay. Whenever you’re ready. Another piece of advice, which is a little more generic, is eat a variety of fruits and vegetables.
And of course, the amount they tell you to eat every day is almost impossible for people. But we know that fruits and vegetables have a lot of antioxidants in them, vitamins in them, and fiber. So again, we’re back to the fiber thing. They ask you to choose whole grains instead of refined grains. So like whole wheat instead of refined.
what we might call white bread or white wheat. And that helps with blood sugar levels. And again, blood sugar levels going up and down can create havoc with what we’re trying to do with our diets. Include healthy fats in your diet. So healthy fats like avocados, nuts, and seeds rather than unhealthy fats.
Limit processed foods. This means if you go to the store and buy a box that says, add chicken. That’s processed food. The only fresh food in there is going to be the chicken. Okay, sorry. Okay, that’s okay. Read food labels carefully. And again, this is the way Western medicine looks at it. And in just a minute, I’m going to get to the way Chinese medicine looks at it.
I just wanted to remind you that we need to know both medicines. Drink plenty of water. Water, enough water, staying hydrated, can even help with joint pain. Like your arthritis patients may just need to drink more water. And then have people make gradual changes. And even when I start the slides to Chinese medicine advice, have people start gradually.
We’re not going to be like, Oh, and today, in today’s visit, I’m going to change your whole diet behavior and your whole water drinking behavior. So make sure that we’re doing everything in a gradual way. And then Western medicine also recommends things like berries, again, lots and lots of antioxidants.
They have fiber, beans, Fiber again, green tea, which is something for the skin too, so your amazing cosmetic acupuncture or facial acupuncture patients. Green tea has a ton of antioxidants in it, although be careful about the caffeine of it, and then nuts and whole grains. So let’s look now at the west, the Chinese medicine way.
So when we see people in our clinics, a lot of modern medicine, modern, ways of eating and a lack of nutrition can impact my treatment of the patient, right? I mean if we have a person coming in for weight loss or an obesity related condition we need to give them nutritional advice. We need to give them lifestyle advice because that’s going to affect how effective our treatments look.
And we know that a lot of modern diseases, what they call modern diseases, can be helped with nutrition like hypoglycemia, insulin resistance, diabetes, food intolerance, adrenal fatigue, hormonal imbalances. So all of these, the treatment is going to be way slower. Our successful treatment plan is going to take way longer if we don’t.
add food as medicine, food advice as medicine. For example, kidney deficiency is very closely related to adrenal fatigue in allopathic or western medicine. We might prescribe herbs and acupuncture, and again, some lifestyle changes, but One of the major causes of that is blood sugar imbalance. So that again is not only what the person is eating, but how frequently they are eating.
So these are the things we need to know. So when I prescribe specific nutritional supplements and Chinese herbs to support the adrenals, I have to look at specific styles of eating of each different patient, because Acupuncture and herbs can improve the patient’s kidney deficiency, but we’re going to also be adding food into that.
When we add food in, the patient’s improvement can continue after we take them off herbs, or as we wean them off the frequency of acupuncture, because we’ve added that level of food as medicine, or nutrition as medicine. Now in Western, the Western diet foods are evaluated for things like proteins, calories, carbs, vitamins, and other nutritional content.
But in the Chinese diet, which includes herbs, we’re not only looking at vitamins, But also the energetic properties of the foods, like the energy, the flavor, the movement of the food energetically into some channels. Other aspects include organic or common actions of the food or the herb. Which organs does it affect?
Which meridians and which organs does it affect? For example, celery acts on the stomach and the liver and carrot acts on the lungs and the spleen. We need to know that sort of information in order to know which foods to recommend to our patients. The energetics of food refers to the capacity to generate sensations also.
Heat or cold, usually, in the body, so yin and yang. The five kinds of energy are cold, hot, warm, cool, and neutral. And this isn’t the state of the food, like I just made it warm physically. This is its effect on our bodies. For example, tea, in general, has a cold energy. This means that when we drink hot tea, Even though we heated it up, it can still generate cold energy and may therefore, according to Chinese medicine, be considered a cold beverage.
Now, we know that shortly after you drink the heat, the tea, that we have warmed up physically, the heat begins to fade, and quickly, according to Chinese medicine, it can start to generate cold energy internally and allowing our body to cool off. Other cold foods include bamboo shoot, banana, clams, crab, grapefruit, kelp, lettuce, persimmon, salt, seaweed, sugarcane, water chestnut, and watermelon.
So we might give those cool or cold foods to our patients who are suffering from a heat condition or this list of cool foods. Which includes cucumber, apple, barley. I don’t need to read the whole thing to you. Again, cool foods you might recommend to a patient who is having some sort of heat issue, some sort of too hot, or during the summer they live in a really warm climate.
Maybe we need to add Some cooler foods to their diet. Now remember, cold foods can damage the digestion or negatively, we won’t say damage, that’s a strong word, negatively affect the digestion, which is why we tell our patients, or sometimes we do, to stop drinking iced drinks because our digestion, our spleen, stomach, our earth, does not like iced foods, does not like iced drinks, it prefers warmer foods.
So again, with the cool and the cold food advice, you’re going to have to balance that with how much you drink. Am I going to be asking the spleen and stomach to tolerate when they prefer warm, energetic foods, and warm physical foods, to be honest with you. There’s a list of neutral foods. Okay, these are somewhere in the middle, energetically.
And again, there’s a list. Corn, apricot, beef, red bean, rice bran, sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are a great herb. Sorry, food that I often recommend to my patients because not only is it neutral energy, so it’s neither cold nor warm, but the earth loves earth tone foods, our earth energy, spleen and stomach.
So brown foods, orange foods, yellow foods. Then we have warm foods, which include chicken, abracadabra. seed, brown sugar, all the way up to walnut and wine. And again, these are warmer energetically. So if the person has more of a cool condition or a cold condition, we might start recommending warmer foods.
And then hot foods, again, you need to be careful because these hot foods can, for some people, be a little too hot, but they include foods like peppers, cinnamon bark, ginger. And ginger is interesting because we often like to give that to people for things like nausea, or I’ve Actually prescribed it for acid reflux, which doesn’t seem to make sense because it’s a warm or hot food.
But I tell people to just take a potato peeler on the fresh ginger and just that much of it in 8 or 10 or 12 ounces of water to just help get control their acid reflux because it’s so good for healing the digestion. So it’s important to know about the energies of the foods because they are going to act on the body in different ways and therefore affect our state of health in different ways.
If a person suffers from cold rheumatism and the pain is particularly severe on a cold winter day, then obviously you would be recommending to them that they should eat warm or hot foods because the According to our theory, that will help warm up the body and relieve that cold pain considerably. Or, I have down if a person suffers from skin eruptions, acne, or rosacea, things that worsen when exposed to heat.
then we would recommend cooling foods to them. So consider whether a food is more yin or more yang. If it grows in the air and the sunshine, it is probably more yang. If it grows in the earth or darkness, it is probably more yin. If it is soft, wet, and cool, probably more yin. And if it is hard, dry, and spicy, or needs heating up, then it is probably more yang.
TCM is, in TCM, when talking to your patients, it is essential to talk about nutrition, just like we need to talk to them about engaging in some sort of meditation or relaxation every day. And, they are probably, especially your weight loss patients, already talking to you about nutrition. TCM. What diet they’re on, whether they’re eating organic or not, whether they still drink soda or not, so they’re open to it.
And it’s not going to be a magic pill. It’s everything takes some time to heal. They’re not going to be, we’re not giving them a magic pill or a magic pill. Prescription like they think they can go and just buy at the grocery store. So they’re already asking you questions So this is a good time to start asking them about how their digestion is and what they are eating What is their like I just have a I just have a weight loss one of my weight loss patients Gave up soda a few months ago.
Yay, too much sugar probably drinking with ice in it and she recently had been telling me that she used to go to a coffee shop and every day or four or five days a week and get a drink and a piece of some like pumpkin bread. So I needed to talk to, I said you need to read those labels, read the nutritional advice about those things that you’re buying and see how much sugar is in them, how much saturated fat is in them, and She was able to stop doing that also because she is committed to losing weight.
Now, we know that the ability to build qi and blood is directly related to our digestion, so we may be giving a patient herbs for this, or again, look up blood building herbs, look up qi building herbs. Foods, blood building foods, qi building foods because again, those would be the building blocks for digestion.
1st things 1st, we want to hear how their digestion is, and we want to advise them on food that will help build their digestion. And reading labels, because a lot of our food is much less nutritious than it was. 40 or 50 years ago. According to a study published in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 70 percent of adults do not eat at least two fruit servings and three vegetable servings a day.
As I said in the introduction, The Western medicine, just in general, we hear that we need to be eating that many fruits and vegetables. And as we know, about 70 percent of adults do not do that. So this is partly why people in Western medicine started to look at nutrition when they started to study what people are actually eating.
So health is not created in a vacuum and nor is disease. We know in Chinese medicine that lifestyle affects health. How healthy we are and how much disease or how many conditions or how many symptoms we have. If the patient has a poor diet, we know acupuncture and herbs can work, but also we need to give them advice for at home.
And a lot of times that’s going to be food. When acupuncture was first developed all those thousands of years ago, people lived and ate closer to nature. It was easier to eat nourishing food back in the days of Hippocrates. But today, processed foods and those containing large amounts of hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, and dyes have de vitalized our food, literally made it less nutritious to eat.
So eating a lot of de vitalized. Food can lead to devitalizing blood. And that is in processed foods. Processed foods are the most de vitalized foods and the ones that are probably most closely linked to diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. So this is our challenge, both for ourselves and the people with whom we work.
For the first time in human history, we can make conscious decisions. We must make conscious decisions about our food and lifestyle habits because we have so many choices. I remember the first time I taught over in Turkey years ago and was in the European side of the city, there was a beautiful mosque with the first floor was a McDonald’s and I thought, Oh my goodness.
Look at that. Mosque, ancient history. Back in the days when food was more vital, had more vital energy in it. And now we have, no offense to McDonald’s, but McDonald’s underneath. So that’s what has started to happen with our foods. We have left the old world style. And now we are eating what you might call more unnatural food.
So we have, Sources to guide us, like the collective wisdom of our ancestors, and that’s from generation to generation, right? And in the West, like I said, we are starting, Western medicine is starting to look at lifestyle and food. But, we have a much greater history of that to look at in our medicine.
This is the end of part one. Of my presentation about food as medicine. And again, I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for this opportunity. If you have any questions about this presentation or about any of my teaching, you can look up my website, lucas teachings.com, or my private practice website and my email or@acupuncturewoman.com, and I am always happy to answer any of your questions.
So I’ll see you next time for part two.