A Guide to the Five Flavors and Immune-Boosting Recipes From Traditional Chinese Medicine

Essential Tastes- Written by Lenore Cangeloso LAc. MSAOm.

Healthy digestion is truly the foundation for good health.

Chinese medical nutrition offers an outlook that is not only individualized but focused on balance and diversity within our meals. In our busy modern lives— healthy intuitive eating often gets looked past, and we are seeing that people with compromised gastrointestinal (GI) tracts are leading compromised immune systems—as well as a wide range of conditions such as diabetes, chronic fatigue, depression, anxiety, obesity, and certain autoimmune conditions. There are many ways our GI health can be compromised, such as experiencing states of chronic stress, prolonged use of antibiotics, environmental toxins, a diet full of processed foods, or consuming foods you are potentially sensitive toward— all can bring imbalance to your microbiome.

Luckily, there are simple and easy ways to help boost the body’s vitality, immune system, and digestive health. One of the best ways to help maintain a healthy internal environment is through eating a diet that is unique to your personal needs and constitution. Focusing on boosting your gut microflora to be diverse and resilient will help bring more balance into your overall system and increase your vitality and health.

This is where Chinese Medical Nutrition shines. It emphasizes a diet rich in vegetables, full of broths abundant in minerals and herbs, and eating a diverse variety of foods and colors. It focuses on how foods energetically interact with our body, how they change our internal temperature, and how they ignite a healing response. When we are able to eat in a way that helps to support our individual health needs and goals, our body responds.

Essential Tastes is a nutritional guide that leads you into the tasty and therapeutic depths of flavor science from a lens of Chinese Medicine. These flavors (bitter, sweet, acrid, salty, sour) are more than just a tasty sensory experience, as the Organs' pathological mechanisms and physiological functioning are indivisible from them. Our senses help us learn about the world around us, and our sense of taste especially connects us with our health. Our taste preference changes according to the physical needs of our body and is known to elicit a powerful emotional response. The experiences that flavor can create can be evocative and therapeutic. These flavors can excite our senses, nourish our body and soul, and alter our physiology. Food has the potential to become our greatest teacher and healer. With every bite, we can become more in alignment with nature, taking in its wisdom and bringing more balance to our body.

The Five Flavors

1. Bitter

2. Sweet

3. Acrid

4. Salty

5. Sour

Chinese medicine and its accompanying nutritional theory teach us to treat the body like a garden that needs to be tended, rather than a machine that needs to be serviced. It shows us ways to use the intrinsic properties of the foods we eat and the herbs we choose, to increase our vitality, to promote health, healing, and rejuvenation.

This guide will highlight some basic theories associated with Chinese Medical Nutrition and then dive deeper into the Five Flavors, their associated Organ Systems, and therapeutic actions. It will also offer a few delicious recipes to make this concept easy to infuse into your life. Let this book be a guide to learning, listening, and healing with food. May the way you eat lead you to greater health!

This book is available via Amazon. The EBook version is available via my website linked here.

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