Healing with Food Newsletter

Tao of Healthy Eating

Book Review

Here’s a great book that I’m recommending to almost everyone. If you wish to understand basic principals of healthy eating; if you’re ready to modify your diet for maximum well being then Bob Flaws wrote The Tao for you. Don’t bother with this book, however, if you’re holding out for a pat answer, a one-size-fits-all dietary formula.

The Tao of Healthy Eating: Dietary Wisdom According to Chinese Medicine, by Bob Flaws.  Blue Poppy Press, paperback, 132 pages, $14.95.

Flaws is probably the most luminous Western practitioner, teacher and translator of Traditional Oriental Medicine. He uses everyday metaphors to explain to basic Chinese dietary theory—a foundational aspect of Chinese medicine—and its direct relevance to your health.

This slim volume touches upon key contemporary issues such as raw versus cooked foods, food allergies, high cholesterol and candida-type yeast infections. It includes the Chinese medical descriptions of 200 Western foods. You’ll learn, for example, the type of constipation, dysentery and abscesses that sunflower seeds treat.

More practically speakiing you'll learn why the Chinese formula for dietary health is to favor:
  •    Freshly cooked, warm (versus cold) foods
  •    An abundance of fresh veggies
  •    A variety of protein
  •    Moderate fruits, seeds, nuts, sweeteners & fats.

Traditional Chinese medicine observes that the qi or energy a food imparts comes from the purest of the pure part of the food, its flavor and aroma. As food becomes stale, both its aroma and flavor dissipate along with its ability to supplement qi.

Stale foods are called and considered “wrecked”. The difference between a freshly made and packaged cookie is profound. The wrecked cookie provides calories but not much qi.  It is, therefore, ideal to eat food that is freshly prepared and less than 24 hours old.

I’d hitherto not seen the energetic functions of vitamins and nutritional aids and appreciate Flaws wedding the east and the west in this list. Vitamin D, to name one, supplements the kidneys and invigorates, yang, strengthens the sinews and bones, brightens the eyes and quiets the fetus.

If you’re a Bob Flaws fan, as am I, you’ll find The Tao of Healthy Eating, invaluable. It is, incidentally, a far more accessible book than were his earlier books on Chinese dietary therapy.

May you be well nourished!

Rebecca Wood