Food is the foundation of medicine; food has been used as medicine for thousands of years to prevent & heal the body from sickness. Eastern medicine is not alone in using healing foods; one of Western medicine’s greatest antibiotics, penicillin, was discovered in mold growing on an orange!
Traditional Chinese Medicine (or TCM), uses many approaches to healing the body such as acupuncture, herbs, & food energetics. All three of these approaches treat the whole person, not just his symptoms or a part of the body. If you are being treated with acupuncture or herbs, food energetics will help to supplement those treatments. By eating foods that help to balance your constitution, not only will it help you stay healthy, but it will also help the benefits of acupuncture & herbal treatments last longer.
The energetics of the tomato are very cooling in nature. Cooling foods tend to move energy inward & downward, cooling the upper & outer parts of the body. For this reason, tomatoes are an excellent aid in digestion & increasing circulation, especially in the limbs.
Tomatoes have a sweet & sour flavor. The sour flavor helps with absorption of fluids within the body, therefore tomatoes help relieve dryness & thirst. The sour flavor of tomatoes also helps to counteract the effects of fatty foods that tend to cause stagnation. The sweet flavor balances all other flavors in our diets while nourishing us & stimulating circulation.The sweetness of tomatoes are cleansing & cooling to the body which helps to relieve heat.
The sweet flavor is also what gives the tomato its ability to moisten dryness. These are just a few energetic properties of the tomato!
Because of these energetic properties, tomatoes are great for helping high blood pressure, red eyes, headaches, indigestion, low appetite, food retention, constipation, cleansing the liver & blood, & detoxifying the body in general.
