Show Notes
TC asks TK about Chinese nutritional guidelines for patients that can be easily followed and integrated into everyday life with an eye to creating a stable base for treatment and health.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Nervous Herbalist, a podcast for Chinese medicine practitioners who like herbs and want to learn more about their function, their history and treatment strategies to use in the clinic. Let's get into it.
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Nervous Herbalist. My name is Travis Kern and I'm.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Here with Travis Cunningham.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: And we are going to talk to you guys today, the inaugural episode or the initial episode of season four. Now with the Nervous Herbalist, we're going to be talking about dietary choices and their impact on treatment.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Yeah, we figured many of you out there maybe do some dietary consult, but want more information about it. We've had a couple of requests from people to just ask us, like, how does this work? Because we do our own appointments for dietary consult for patients and Travis K. Handles all of that. I have no interest in doing talking to people about foods. I love, I love referring people to him for him to do that.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's interesting, right, because everyone knows that food matters, right? I mean, that's, that's an obvious thing, you know, Everyone knows that.
But the truth is, is that the difference between our advice and what I would consider more kind of standard biomedical advice, which by the way includes like naturopathic advice. Right? So like naturopathic viewpoints, dietary viewpoints that all come from a biomed angle, which is to say we're thinking about food in terms of their micronutrients, in terms of their protein density, their shocks. Yeah. All this stuff, the micros, the macros, the listable things, frankly, how most people think about food, right? I mean, how a food label on a packaged food thinks about food. Right. Protein, fat, calories, et cetera.
Obviously, the classical Chinese did not have that point of view, Right. I mean, that's just. It's modern science. I mean, it wouldn't be part of the classical viewpoint. But that doesn't mean that they didn't have a valuable, and from my point of view, more easily understandable and manageable system just because they didn't have protein as a concept. Right. So I think what we wanted to do today was not just, you know, talk to all of you listeners about kind of what we counsel patients on, but just sort of. It's not necessarily to say like, hey, this is the nutrition advice that you should for sure be giving your clients. But I do think that what we're going to talk about today improves clinical outcomes, particularly on an herbal side. But I would say also for an acupuncture side, 100%, because. Because the bodies that Result from this kind of advice are more inherently predictable.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: And we'll talk about, I think, what, what we mean by that as we get into it. So I wanted to start, I think basically with just the core, what I think of as the core Chinese nutritional basics. Right. Because it's a rabbit hole.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: It is.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: You could, I mean, get deep into it. Like, this food is this flavor and this quality and this nature. And you know, I'm mixing and matching damp foods with warm foods and creating balanced plates and like, it can definitely get super deep.
I'm going to say for your patients, it doesn't need to be.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: It doesn't need to be. Like some patients. In fact, it's important to remember that the same Qi that we use to digest physical food is the same category of Qi that we use to digest knowledge and information. Right. Spleen qi works in both place.
So when you give people a little bit information to help guide them. Excellent. We can actually create efficiencies in that outcome. But if you give them too much information or if they dive deeply into it and themselves become kind of monomaniacal about it, you know, like, I've got to count my, my grams of this and my intake of that and weighing food and what am I going to plan? You are actually expending, consuming the same Qi that you need to physically digest the food, thinking about all the food that you are going to eat. Right. Which can very often in the case of deficiency patterns, be like wildly counterproductive.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: So you know the classic phrase from our teachers at ocom, right? Like, pay attention but not too much.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: Right. Applies yet again in this context. So I like to give people three basic Chinese medicine rules. Number one, food should be mostly cooked.
Okay. Number two, food should be mostly warm.
And number three, food should be mostly regular.
And in this case, regular. I don't mean like plain or uninteresting. I mean, timing wise, it should be predictable.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: So rhythmic. Exactly. So cooked, warm and regular.
Those are the three kind of guidance pieces. So like, let's take each of those on their own. The first one, food should be mostly cooked. Actually, the first two really cooked and warm are the place where we get into the most. Like, patients are like, what.
Because, you know, biomedically, what's the most healthy food, Right. Like fruits and vegetables, salads, stuff that's like raw and straight from like the earth, just as is, you wash it and eat it and like, oh my gosh, all these nutrients in this apple, you know, and the thing is, is that like I mean, I don't, I don't think science is like definitive on the quote, unquote nutrient difference between like a cooked app apple and a raw apple or whatever.
And I'm not here, I'm not an expert on that. I don't know. But what I can tell you is that, like, if you think about food in that way, like in terms of nutrient density, nutrient density is a measurement of the object itself and has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you can do anything with those nutrients.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: And this is an important distinction. Right. Like, the reason that we're talking about these basics as we get into them is because the nature of the food itself, from a biomed point of view or from a Chinese medicine point of view, it doesn't really matter is relative to that food. Right. But can you get what you need out of it? Right, Right. To use biomed terms, it's like, is it absorbable? Right. Can you metabolize it? Right. It's the same in Chinese medicine. Like, can you actually convert the Gucci of the food that you're eating into usable Jiang Qi in your body?
[00:06:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: Right. Because that's a mechanism, we know, that's the primary function of spleen and stomach. Right. To actually separate clear from turbid, to do this process. So the fact is you could eat all of the best foods, quote, unquote, best foods in the whole world all the time, constantly, and just poop them out as liquid on the back end, and it doesn't make any difference.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: Yeah. I think one of the big things that I learned when I lived in Los Angeles, where the raw vegan stuff is so prominent, there is the, the difference in view because there, there will be people who use this idea of life force, like, oh, the, the raw foods have more life force in them. Right. And then they'll assume that that means the same thing as chi, right?
[00:07:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: It's one of the clearest places where QI does not equivocate to the idea of life force as those people are talking about.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: No. Yeah. Because that stuff gets quashed by cooking, Right.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: It gets quashed by cooking because it's. Oh, the enzymes. Right. The big thing is, though, the enzymes get cooked out.
Some of the different nutrients and stuff get cooked out. Right?
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Yeah. And look, I mean, you know, if you've built your life around this and you want to die on that hill, like, fine, like, I'm not going to fight you about it. You know what I mean? But if you are the patients that I see, which are patients who have digestive problems, right? So you got ibs, you got Crohn's, you got irritable bowel, you got ulcerative colitis, you got any number of things, or frankly, maybe you don't have anything that's that bad, but you just don't feel good after you eat.
From my point of view, that pathway, the raw food pathway, is not gonna get you there.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: Right?
[00:07:53] Speaker A: Right.
And, you know, look, the Internet's gonna be full of people like, screaming to be like, no, it'll do it for you. I'm like, okay. I mean, try it. It's fine. Figure out what works for you. But from our point of view, that pathway, for many, many, if not most, maybe even all digestive problems, especially weakness based digestive problems, deficiency problems, you're just not going to be able to overcome what's necessary to convert those guys into actual usable qi for you. Right?
[00:08:21] Speaker B: Well. And what we're going to talk about eventually more with the rhythmic thing, I think, is how, let's say suboptimal diets can still work because of rhythm. Rhythm, yeah.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: It's true.
[00:08:33] Speaker B: And also, I think. I don't know if we'll talk about this today, but belief, the meaning that we make out of food, too.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Because narrative matters. Narrative always matters. You can never escape the power of a specific narrative. Like, it's always there, you know?
So let's take this first rule, right? That food should be mostly cooked. So I don't mean to suggest that all the food you need to eat has to be, like, stewed into paste or something, right? Like, people here, like, mostly cooked. And like, oh, my God, it sounds so depressing. I'm like, no, man, I also said mostly cooked. Right?
[00:09:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: And that mostly part is doing a fair amount of heavy lifting here because it's one of the things that is kind of how we calibrate all of these rules relative to bodies and seasons, you know?
So the classic example in my mind is like, we're recording this in summer, and, you know, summer right now in Oregon, it's beautiful, right? You can get basil and tomatoes and cucumbers. And so it's like, hey, if you want to have, like, a beautiful caprese salad, you know, sliced fresh tomatoes, sliced mozzarella, maybe you're putting basil on there, maybe you're adding cucumber to it, a little olive oil, little balsamic vinegar with a fresh slice of sourdough bread.
That sounds great. You should eat that. You know what I mean? Like, you should definitely eat it. Especially if you grew that cucumber, you grew that tomato, or you're pulling it from the farmer's market. This is seasonal. This is delicious. This is fitting with the season. It's warm out. There's lots of available yangchi. This is the time of the year for you to take advantage of the food that grows in that season.
You should not eat that caprese salad in January.
Just not at all. Not even, like, I'm gonna have one bite of it in January, it's like no man in January. Firstly, none of those foods grow, right?
[00:10:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: And secondly, in the northern hemisphere, at least, and none of those foods grow. And then secondly, like, there is not a sufficiently available amount of yang qi to metabolize and convert the raw Gucci of those foods into something usable for your body.
And so what we're talking about here is, like, this idea of food being cooked. I think the best image I've always had is that your stomach is a bit like a. Like a cauldron, right? With a fire underneath. This is the sort of classical metaphor.
And so when you eat food, like, no matter what goes in your mouth, right, it goes into the cauldron in your stomach, and your body is going to have to break down those foods from the whole material that came into your stomach into something that it can use, right? So whether you're thinking biomedically or Chinese medicine doesn't matter. Like, the same process has to occur.
So if you cook that food in a pot on the stove, you will have begun the process of breaking down those food items into something that can be metabolized, right? But if you put it in your mouth raw, then your body will have to do the work that all of the fire on your stove did, right? Because no matter what, the food has to go from how it was to being usable, someone's gotta do that work.
Someone's gotta do the breakdown. Either you do it on the stove or you do it in the body.
If you have very strong digestion and you're eating seasonally and you're following the rules that we're talking about here, and you've got great, you know, starting point with some really powerful ancestral jing, right? And this is all working great for you. Then you have a salad in July and you feel fine because you have sufficient resources for your body to convert those raw ingredients into usable ingredients, no problem, right?
But if you have a salad, if you have a cup of yogurt, if you have, you know, these raw food items, and you feel bloated, you feel Gassy, you've got loose stools, you feel fatigued after, right? Something's happening here, right? Like something's happening. That's not how you're supposed to feel. Something's happening. Yeah. I wonder what exactly. Like something is happening from what you're eating. It's where it's coming from. And what's happening is that your body knows that there's food in the cauldron and it goes, oh snap, we gotta do something with this, right?
The body is an amazing, an amazing instrument, right? It's a really cool thing to be embodied in a human flesh suit, right? Because it's super cool. And what I mean by that is it's always gonna look for ways to prioritize the most essential elements of being alive, right? So for example, like you can't just stop yourself from breathing, right? Like you can hold your breath for a while, but at some point you will pass out and your body will start breathing, right? And the body will always prioritize the muscles and the qi necessary to breathe, right? Because you have to, okay? Similarly with eating, you know, you need to eat. It's the only way that your body can repair itself. And so that means that of all the systems that are happening at any given time, the body's going to say, hey, we got to make sure we can digest.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: Right?
[00:13:04] Speaker A: So if you dump a bunch of raw food into your cauldron, your body, whether you're healthy or not, your body is going to have to pull resources from other aspects of your physiology to digestion because there's more work to do. The, the sort of base level digestive fire is insufficient to deal with raw food. So it says, okay, turn up the flame.
We turn up the flame. The fuel's gotta come from somewhere.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: If your total body resources, shall we say, are somewhat deficient, right. You're run down, you've had illness, you work too much, you have high levels of stress, you're a modern person. So, I. E. A lot of people, right, have insufficient total body resources.
When your body goes to pull resources to turn up the digestive fire, other stuff gets affected.
So maybe cognition, maybe you're a little foggy headed, you're a little bit tired, right? Maybe that sort of, that bruise that it's been working on in your lower leg doesn't get as much attention right now because we got to focus on the digestion, right? Maybe the nutritive repair of your skin and your hair is deprioritized because we gotta pull resources to digestion.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: And we start to see secondary tertiary systems start to break down or to. To function suboptimally. Right.
And then the wildest part is that in the early days, your body can pull those resources and get the fire hot enough in our metaphorical cauldron to break everything down. And so digestively, you actually feel okay. Like, you're not bloated, you don't have loose stool, you're not constipated, whatever.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: At some point, though, the total resources are insufficient to even get the fire hot enough in digestion.
So now two things are happening. Those secondary and tertiary systems are suffering. Skin, hair, blood repair, healing, whatever, cognition. And also the body isn't digesting well.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:50] Speaker A: And now we've got this image, like, I love this little metaphor of sort of like your spleen in there as like a digestive manager. And, like, stuff's just coming into the warehouse constantly. Right. And it's like, I don't know, we don't have the manpower. We don't know what to do with it. Stuff it in the closet, put it under the carpet, throw it out back and set it on fire.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: Like there's. It becomes this kind of wild, unpredictable inefficiency that happens with metabolism. And so you end up with gas and bloating, maybe acid reflux, Strange weight gain, even though your caloric intake is low. And you're like, I thought it was calories in, calories out. It's like, yeah, but there's more to it than that.
So digestion starts to become weaker and weaker.
[00:15:34] Speaker B: It's like trying to recycle plastic.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: Yeah. You can't really.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: It takes so long. It's like, really hard to do it.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: And mostly someone's just gonna pack it into a cube and hide it in the ground.
[00:15:44] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: Actually going to recycle it.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: Actually going to recycle it.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: You know, one of the things I. I find clinically is true of people that are starting to have some signs of this is when they eat cold food, the first thing that happens is their hands get super cold. So let's say their normal temp, they go and they eat that salad.
And then their hands get ice cold.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: So their digestion is still mostly normal. If you ask them about their bowel movements and stuff like that, they'll say, oh, yeah, it's fine. But their hands get ice cold.
That is a really good sign that the body's yang qi is not strong enough to support the metabolic fire in the stomach and the spleen and be able to maintain warmth through the extremities, so that warmth is getting pulled into the middle to help digest that food.
And what could start to happen for that person, which they might not connect is let's say they have arthritis, let's say they're like an older person, they can start to develop up problems with their hands.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Yeah, pain.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: Pain, Right. And from our perspective, that's because, oh, there's a flow problem, like the blood isn't flowing, the qi isn't flowing. It's especially having a hard time moving through the joints. So if we, if we continuously pull that blood back into the stomach and the spleen to help digest and there isn't enough warmth to stay out in the extremities, the circulation in the extremities will go down and then there will be problems there eventually.
[00:17:17] Speaker A: And think of all the problems we see in those contexts, right? Like you have the pain presentations in, like, hands, right?
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: But then also you've got neuropathies in feet, you've got slow healing wounds.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Skin. Skin stuff.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: Skin stuff, Right. Start to see lots of spider veins in the periphery. Like, these are the indicators that stuff's not happening correctly. And, you know, with our, our little industrial metaphor here, what's happening is like your, your body's master systems are saying, like, look, we gotta, we gotta redirect these total resources. So we're gonna minimize the flow to the extremities so that they don't.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: It's less essential.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: Just less essential in this moment. Right. And you're still gonna be able to use your hands. It's not like your hands are gonna fall off or something. Right. It's just that, like, these underlying efficiencies are being diminished because everything's being pulled to digestion. Right?
So all of this, all of this is mitigated by eating cooked food that is also warm. Right. And this is why rules one and two go together. Right?
So I had a patient the other day ask me because they eat sandwiches for lunch every day and they're like, oh, I should probably stop eating sandwiches. And I was like, well, actually, sandwich is mostly cooked. You know, like, there may be a little lettuce and tomato on it, but like, the bread is cooked, the meat is cooked, the cheese is raw, I guess, and the, you know, if you have cheese on it or whatever, but it's kind of, it's kind of like a fusion food because you eat it cold, but it's cooked.
So again, like depending on when you eat that and what your digestion is Like. Like, maybe we want to actually warm up your sandwich, panini it or something.
Or maybe it's fine because most of the constituents on your sandwich are cooked. It's not too cloying, not too damp, et cetera. But that's a good example where, like, you know, cooked and warm are kind of on a. They're kind of on a same parallel continuum. You know what I mean?
And cooked is, I think, more important than warm if you were had to. To stack them. Right. Because you can have a cooked food that's now room temperature or cool, that's still easier to digest than a raw food that was also cold.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Right. So, like, there's a. There's a kind of continuum here, but when we're talking about warm, I think there's an extension there where we're really, in my mind, talking about beverages and. And the temperature of liquids that people consume.
[00:19:33] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: Because in the west in general, but I think especially in America, we have an obsession with ice.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Right. And so everything is iced, you know, so, like, you go sit down at the restaurant and you might even order like, beef stew or something, and you're gonna have chilled iced tea.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: Or a soda with ice. Right, right. Or even ice water. I just had water, but the whole cup is full of ice.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: And like, as Chinese medicine people, you know, you guys are listening to this. I think most people listening to this are practitioners. And you're thinking, like, yeah, we learned about this in school.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: And you may have experienced. What I experience all the time is like, I go to a restaurant and like, I don't really have a choice about my water.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: Like, it's already full of ice, you know, and now you can be, like, difficult and be like, excuse me, could I get this water without ice?
Now it's like a whole thing, but it's a little bit challenging because the default maneuver in the US Is cold drinks. Right. And then consider when you sit down to eat, how much cold drink are you eating, Drinking while you're eating. Right. A lot of people might throw down three pints of iced tea with their salad. Right, Right. So you had a lunch salad and three glasses of cold iced tea.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: You just dumped literal cold material into your system with raw food that now your body has to heat up to body temperature.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: And then break down.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: This is something I think, that people just really don't spend a lot of time looking at.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Like, what does it take to actually. Because, like, your body is not going to let that water go through you cold? No, it's got to be warm, got.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: To be processed somehow.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: So how's that work? Right. Everybody knows how that works. Right. Like in your house, if you. If you leave the doors open and cold air is blowing in and you want the temperature to be warm, you're going to have to turn up the heat. Right, Right. And at some point, it doesn't matter how high you turn up the heat, you got to.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: You got to get rid of the cold, get rid of the water.
[00:21:27] Speaker A: Absolutely. Right. You got to do it. So, you know, you have both a volume of liquids that people drink in the US which is very high just in general, and they also tend to drink them cold. Right.
So the, you know, that classic example, if you go to, you know, you've been to the Chinese restaurant in your town, everyone's got a Chinese restaurant in their town, and maybe they have like, kind of like a not great lunch special that's like one meat, one vegetable or rice, and it always comes with that kind of sad soup. Yeah. You know, it's like kind of clear, salty soup.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: You know, not like miso at a restaurant, but, like, I think you guys know what I'm talking about. Anyway, that is actually a nod to the beverage that would have traditionally gone with that meal.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: Right. So, like, you're thinking of it as like an appetizer soup, but actually what would have happened is people would have just eaten the food, and as they felt like they needed to, like, lubricate their. Their mouth and their throat, they would take a little sip of the soup.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: Which is warm and a little bit salty.
[00:22:29] Speaker B: Right.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: You know, which is moving fluids, you know, so that is, you know, we don't do that. Right. Like, you get your ice water and your Coke and you eat the soup, and then you promptly drink the Coke and then eat the food, and you drink the ice thing all the way through. And so this is what happens when you're pushing against this digestive piece. So, so cooked and warm are these pieces that kind of go hand in hand.
And it's important to remember, too, that one of the things that happens often with people who have poor digestion is they start to accumulate dampness. And so many of the formulas that we use in digestive stuff are dealing with damp accumulation.
And of course, coldness encourages dampness. It slows things down. It allows things to accumulate, and that blocks the smooth flow of qi and blood and water in the system. And if that goes on long enough, the dampness can then become substantial. Right. And so we start to see like polyps and nodules and cysts and all of these very substantive damp, phlegmy things.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: Which then of course stagnates itself, generates its own heat. And now we're in a damp heat presentation. And now I've got, you know, bleeding ulcerative colitis.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: That came out over, you know, 15 years of eating in a way that someone may have maybe thought was healthy, but in fact was damaging their digestion this whole time.
So the third rule, food being regular, in this case being rhythmic, like when you eat should matter.
I think you can break it down in a simple way. Basically you're eating like within two hours of waking up, within the same two hour window in the middle of the day and within the same two hour window at the end of the day. So like for most people, that's like breakfast somewhere between like 7 and 9, lunch somewhere between 11 and 1, dinner somewhere between 5 and 7. If you're on a sort of standard circadian rhythm, it's somewhere in there.
The variation is going to differ based on when you get up, when you go to bed, what season it is. Like all of these things are going to shift. So it's not like that the number of the hour is a hard and fast rule, but it's somewhere in there probably if you're eating very, very late.
So you're eating at like 10 o' clock at night and then going to bed at 11, that's working against you on a sort of digestive fire level too, because your resources are weaker at night.
Yeah, but as you said at the top, rhythm does matter. Right. And so even if you're eating super late and then going to bed, it might affect your sleep, it might affect a whole set of other things, but it turns out that actually your digestion feels okay. Right. And you're like, yeah, my dust, my digestion is fine. I eat dinner at 10 o' clock every night, I go to bed at 11.
[00:25:28] Speaker B: But they're never hungry in the morning.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: Never hungry in the morning. That's true.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: That's the payoff.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: They don't eat breakfast.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I have a need intermittent fasting.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: Right, Exactly. By the way, you guys, everyone, intermittent fasts every night. It's called sleeping. Right. Fun fact. We call the first meal of the day break fast.
That's. This is literally what we call it in English. Like every time someone's. I'm like, dude, you do that every day. Like also remember for all the intermittent fasters out there, that your digestive fire is strongest during the day.
So if you want to fast, if that's something you really want to explore, skip dinner, extend your evening fast. Right, where the last thing you eat in the day is at like 2 or 3, and don't eat again until the following morning.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: That's what the monks do.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Especially in summertime, you know, it's like two meals a day instead. But they're always daytime meals. Yeah, you skip the dinner one.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: Right. For sure.
So there's, you know, there's challenge there, though, Right. Because culturally we're a dinner culture as opposed to a breakfast and lunch culture. And so a lot of people put that emphasis on dinner, you know.
But the point about this rhythm piece is that rhythm creates predictability inside of your body systems. So to use our ongoing industrial metaphor here, right, like if the. The factory manager of your body knows deliveries come at the same time every day, then they know how to staff for it. They know how much time they need between deliveries, they know where everything's going to go.
But if the deliveries show up randomly throughout the day, then all of their systems are going to be impacted by that randomness. So they're not going to be able to produce at the same schedule, they're not going to be able to staff at the same schedule. And so sometimes they'll be overstaffed and sometimes they'll be understaffed. Sometimes they can produce 20 units an hour and sometimes they can produce five. And so everyone lives in a place of disorganization and unpredictability because the inputs are coming in badly. And so what happens is, then is you get strange metabolic outcomes. And from a biomed point of view, this is where we start to see insulin resistance. This is where we see strange weight gain. This is where we see phlegm accumulation, respiratory problems, eczema, all kinds of stuff that can cause sleep apnea. Sleep apnea, absolutely.
From people whose systems are deeply unpredictable. Yeah, you know, and so all three of these rules are working together, cooked warm, predictable, cooked warm, regular, in an effort to build a system that has predictable rhythms so that they can be predictably manipulated.
So what I mean is that when you eat the same, roughly the same foods when roughly the same time of the day, that follows a seasonal variability.
The body knows what to do with that and therefore it becomes its own kind of predictable outcome.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: Now, I don't mean to suggest that people have to eat literally the same food, because that's not really true either. This is one of my favorite things about Chinese Medicine, nutrition is. It sort of creates this set of parameters that are fairly rigid, cooked, warm, regular.
But within those parameters we actually encourage a lot of diversity.
So that's why you should eat Caprese salad in summer and not in winter, because now there's diversity.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:28:46] Speaker A: You literally eat the same exact thing every day, all year long. Right. You're thinking, oh, that's rhythm and good, that's true. But your body is going to, your appetite is going to be like, I think maybe I should. And you'll ignore it and suppress it. And then at some point you'll freak out and eat like three pieces at once, you know, so there's a rhythm, there's a rule set, but within the rule set we encourage diversity.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: You know, and so that's the, I mean, it's yin and yang, right? Like it's yin is the substantive, reproductive, repeatable, predictable component. Yang is the diversity, the appetite, the interest.
So of course that's here in this system too. Right.
I do want to mention while we're on this topic, because I recently came across this, this idea of flavors in body systems. Right. So we talk about this all the time. We've got an episode on flavors.
So many listeners maybe are familiar with a documentary that came out in like the early mid aughts called Food Inc.
It was kind of one of the first sort of major far reaching exposes on factory food systems and ultra processing and Monsanto and like all this stuff. Right. It's kind of how I think a lot of people became aware directly of what was going on in America's food systems.
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: Well, the makers of that film released a Second one, Food Inc. Two, cleverly named, I guess in 23 or 24. And I just recently watched it. So they're basically like about 20 years between the first two films, you know, and just sort of like what's changed and what's going on and you know, you should go watch it. It's interesting. Sad answer. Not that much has changed, right? I mean, some stuff has changed. Long story short, not that much has changed. But in that documentary they feature a Yale researcher, a woman by the name of Dana Small, Dr. Dana Small, who's a Yale researcher on a variety of nutritional subjects.
And she was commissioned by PepsiCo to study the sweetness factor, like the level of sweetness in artificial sweeteners. Because PepsiCo was looking for aspartame and things like that. Exactly. They were looking for new chemistry that could satisfy the consumer's need for sweetness with different flavor profiles. Because all of those Chemicals have slightly different aftertastes, and so they're always messing with them in the labs to try and, you know, make it work. So Dr. Small starts running this research where she's comparing the taste, the. The literal flavor of sweetness. Like when you put it in your mouth and you go, oh, that's sweet, with the calories that are attached to it, right? So, of course, if you just eat sugar, the level. The way a human being perceives that level of sweetness tracks with about how many calories are in it, Right? And she determined this by survey, right? It's like, eat this thing. How many calories do you think is not how many calories? You know, so this has this many calories. Calibrate your flav. How many do you think? Back and forth, back and forth, right?
And it turns out that the perceived level of sweetness is very near to the actual caloric density across different foods.
[00:31:47] Speaker B: Right?
[00:31:47] Speaker A: So if I give you a cake that has a level of sweetness, I give you honey, I give you plain sugar, I give you a date, I give you a cookie, Your perception of how sweet that is tracks very closely with the caloric density of it when controlled for other ingredients like fats and whatever, Right?
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:32:04] Speaker A: That's interesting. It's just interesting.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:32:06] Speaker A: Okay, cool.
What's more interesting, and the reason I bring it up here is because when Dr. Small gave people foods that tasted very sweet but did not have very many calories, right? So artificial sweeteners here, right? Aspartame, et cetera, the body reacted chemically to the flavor of sweetness as if there were going to be a lot of calories to come with it. Specifically sugar, calories in the form of the OSAs, glucose, sucrose, fructose, et cetera.
So what that means is like, okay, I drink this thing that tastes very sweet, but it doesn't have any real calories in it. And the body, because of the taste in my mouth, triggers a cascade of metabolic functions, including insulin release, metabolic changes in energy use in cells, changes in respiration, changes in gut motility, all kinds of stuff that she measures, that change in reaction to sweetness, right? And you're like, hmm, that's also interesting, right? Because now we're talking about the taste of a food triggering biomedical systems that are measurable, that have nothing to do with whether or not the thing has calories in it. Because the whole promise of diet soda, right, Was like, drink all you want and don't get fat, right?
[00:33:25] Speaker B: Don't get fat.
[00:33:26] Speaker A: Don't worry about it. There's no Sugar in it. Right.
But there was no acknowledgment of the idea that the flavor itself would matter.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:35] Speaker A: Right. Now again, at this point it's still just interesting. Like, okay, body systems trigger.
Fine, who cares? Right. Well, the reason it turns out that it matters is because those body systems being triggered facilitated a variety of metabolic reactions whereby. This is wild.
So let's say you're having your diet soda with your hamburger.
Right?
Because of the perceived level of caloric density from the total sweet flavor of the meal, the body reacts, anticipating a certain level of caloric density that isn't there. Right. And this creates a mismatch. Basically. Dr. Small's describes it as a mismatch between inputs and metabolic outputs.
And similar to our little analogy earlier of our factory, you know, where the deliveries come at a weird time. Basically the body staffed up for all of this calorie delivery.
[00:34:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:29] Speaker A: And it didn't show up.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Right.
[00:34:31] Speaker A: And it went, Hm, that's weird. That's strange. All right, so then you do it again. And the body staffed up again. And then it didn't come. Right. And you do it again. It didn't come. Do it again. It didn't come. And eventually, because bodies are wicked efficient, they stop staffing up.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Right?
[00:34:45] Speaker A: Right. So now all of a sudden you got calories coming in still. Right. Because you still had a hamburger and fries, but with a diet soda. And the system didn't staff up to deal with it.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: Right, Right.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: Because it thought, well, this is, I'm actually, it's self calibrating to be like, oh, this level of sweetness actually is only this level of calorie density. And so therefore I actually don't need all the staff that I need to break this down, but in fact they do because there's still quite a lot of density there.
And so all of a sudden you end up with this metabolic breakdown where people start ending up with strange weight gain. And so then even if they're eating things that are not super calorie dense, but the body thinks they're calorie dense, but then it's saying like, well, I guess I was wrong all those other times. So we're not going to staff up. All of a sudden someone having their diet iced tea with their lettuce wrap with grilled chicken is somehow putting on pounds and they're like, I don't understand, like, I'm only eating like a 400 calorie sandwich in my diet drink. Right. There shouldn't be any issue here, but I'm gaining weight or I'm gaining weight in real places, or I'm holding on to fluids, or I'm bloated, or I'm having loose stools or any number of metabolic problems. Right.
And Dr. Small's assertion is that this is because the body is reacting to the taste enough times to essentially be like, ah, you're not gonna fool me this time. And it starts behaving inappropriately for what's actually coming into the system and you get unpredictable metabolic outcomes.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:36:09] Speaker A: So the, the assertion in the end is that calories and sweetness should match.
[00:36:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:18] Speaker A: And so the, the strange thing ultimately is that it's like, you know, if you're gonna have a soda, just have a soda.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: Like drink the soda, drink the soda. Also, it'd be great if the soda was made just from sugars of some kind as opposed to hyper calorically dense sodas like high fructose corn syrup, because those also match the predictable relationships between sweetness and calories. But by processing foods, you can trick the body systems. And this is just in the context of soda. Right. Because she was doing this research for PepsiCo, but in the documentary she extrapolates beyond that to a whole host of other foods that have lots of calories but don't taste sweet, or taste very sweet, but don't have calories. And that this impact, this mismatch between what's happening creates this quote, unquote, my metaphorical staffing inside your metabolism. And so eating ultra processed foods is not just a question of calories, it's not just a question of even sugar. It's not just a, it's a, it's a complex picture that food manufacturers are not addressing at all.
[00:37:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:37:23] Speaker A: They're only addressing mouthfeel, taste predictors, caloric density. And then now things like, you know, protein and fiber or whatever, they're just, they're just selling a story to the public.
[00:37:35] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: You know, and the problem is that our patients are out there thinking they're doing themselves a service by buying tea that tastes sweet but is just sweetened with aspartame.
[00:37:47] Speaker B: Right.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: Because it's like. Well, I'm not. Yeah, I hear sugar's real bad.
[00:37:50] Speaker B: Or stevia.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: Stevia doesn't matter.
[00:37:52] Speaker B: Or.
[00:37:52] Speaker A: Pick a thing.
[00:37:54] Speaker B: Xylitol.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: Yep. Right, Yep, exactly.
[00:37:56] Speaker B: Oh, it's sugar free.
[00:37:57] Speaker A: Xylitol. Yeah, yeah. If you drink a lot of xylitol, it'll definitely give you the shits too.
That's a byproduct. It's one of the reasons we don't sweeten Large quantities of food. With xylitol.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: With xylitol, yeah.
[00:38:10] Speaker A: Tree sugars.
[00:38:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
The image of what you're describing to me where your body is training in a sense to not react to the sweet flavor.
It would make sense to me then too that when sweet flavor is genuinely applied, like let's say you eat a piece of cake, your body may also not respond to that.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:38:34] Speaker B: And then like you're almost training yourself for diabetes.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:38:38] Speaker B: Right.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:38:39] Speaker B: Like your body is practicing for diabetes in that, in that state.
[00:38:43] Speaker A: It's practicing to fail at metabolizing sweet flavor properly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, so Dr. Small's research, she, she got shut down. According to her, in the, in the documentary, PepsiCo was like, oh, actually this is not what we were, this isn't what we were paying for. We were looking for. So they shut down her research.
I don't remember. In the documentary, I think PepsiCo, you know, classically like failed to respond to questions or something, you know, so we, we just have this report from this one woman. She doesn't have a published paper on this subject, but we have her direct testimony in the.
[00:39:18] Speaker B: She had to know.
[00:39:19] Speaker A: Of course she knows. Yeah, yeah, she knew, she knew this was going to happen for sure. Yeah. I mean, she knows who is, who is paying the bills right at the end.
So again, this is not, this is not consensus research. This is not far reaching. But I think it's interesting, right, A couple of levels, right? One, because I see all the time patients who have, quote made, quote unquote, all the right choices, right? They are eating vegetables and salads and low calorie and diet yogurt.
[00:39:49] Speaker B: Fat free yogurt.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Fat free yogurt with fruit and granola that's not sweetened with regular sugar. Like they're doing all this stuff, right?
And they feel tired, bloated, they have loose stool and they're gaining weight, right?
And they're just, they're, they're so frustrated, you know, and they're thinking like, well, what, what am I supposed. So then of course you get increasingly fad diets, right? So we get keto stuff, we get intermittent fasting. We get, you know, people are just hunting for a solution everywhere and some of those solutions will work for them.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: Elimination.
[00:40:22] Speaker A: Diet elimination. Yeah. God, poor people come in here and they're like, I can, I can eat white rice and salmon and salmon and cooked celery and I just eat that at every meal. And you're like, oh man, that sounds terrible. And the thing is, is that like when these basic rules are ignored for a long time and metabolism is allowed to deteriorate so dramatically, it's not surprising that people find themselves with such a limited toolkit.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: Right?
[00:40:50] Speaker A: But it's important to remember that that is not. That is not.
It's not the way it has to be.
[00:40:57] Speaker B: It's not a permanent state of affairs.
[00:41:00] Speaker A: Yeah, it's not a permanent state of affairs. Like, this is where you're at now for sure. And we're going to lean into what, you know, works. Because of course, the other thing to remember is this problem. None of these problems happened overnight, right? They took sometimes, like decades for people to get where they're at. And now people have such a deep story, right, that they're like, well, I'm just hypersensitive. I can't even look at gluten. I'll start, you know, pooping randomly.
[00:41:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:24] Speaker A: And like, this is just me now, you know, I can't go out. I can't eat at friends houses. I can't do anything, right? I just. I have to sit here with my carrot sticks and that's it for the rest of my life. And the thing is, is that a lot of biomed solutions are not great. In fact, they almost don't exist, really, in those circumstances.
And then a lot of the other ones that I, you know, as, you know, and I think the listeners will now learn that I am critical of, in some cases strongly critical of, is some of the ways that we talk about food relative to the. The naturopathic approach here, right? The SIBO questions, the harsh supplements, the things that are just, you know, we've got to purge these things, we've got to remove these toxins. Like, it just.
It feels so punitive to me, right? And it doesn't feel human and it doesn't feel reliable, you know, I mean, how. How long can you really expect people to take these harsh, destructive supplements? How long? Oh, well, you've got to change the methane output for your Sibo and kill off the bacteria and rebuild this thing and.
Nah, man, I just. It doesn't feel. That doesn't feel sustainable to me. Right? And that story also includes, like, permanent prohibitions, right? Like, you'll never eat gluten again because it's terrible. You'll. You'll never eat, you know, refined sugar again. Right? Birthday cake. If. If you even think about it, you'll probably set yourself back 10 years of work, you know, and I hate that. I hate that. Just philosophically, I don't like it.
[00:42:55] Speaker B: Well, this is A really good point to illustrate the difference between classical Chinese medicine thinking and modern thinking about a biomedical thinking about diet and nutrition and things. Things like this. We had. I don't know if we told this story before, but this. Did we tell the story from Greg and the teacher in China that the food sensitivity.
[00:43:17] Speaker A: If we did, you should just tell it again.
[00:43:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:18] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:43:19] Speaker B: So our first herbal teacher, Greg Livingston, this is one of his stories.
So shout out to Greg. But when Greg was training in China, he, One of his.
The doctors that he studied with there was. Had a specialty in GI disorders.
And he one day said to Greg something to the effect of, you know, these food sensitivity tests, they're a big joke.
And Greg was like, what? What do you mean? And he goes, well, the patient goes. And they get a food sensitivity test and they get these markers for inflammation for all these foods, right? And then they change their diet to totally different foods and they get another test in six months and the sensitivity markers move to all the foods that they're now eating.
[00:44:05] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:44:06] Speaker B: And so the foods are not the problem. It's the function of the body that's the problem. And we need to change the function of the body to, to get the person healthier.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:17] Speaker B: If you focus on elimination only, Right. We're not saying that you shouldn't, let's say, lean away from things that you're actively reacting to for that time. You will need to, you'll need to. To get some ground back. But the idea that you're in a permanent state of affairs, that this thing that you react to is the way that it is forevermore, that is lunacy. And that is something that we've definitively seen to be not true time and time again in the clinic.
Sam.
[00:45:18] Speaker A: You know the reason that we're talking about all this, right. Is ultimately because you guys are practitioners, you deal with patients. And the problem comes in, right, is that if a person is eating in a way that is working against these predictable rhythms. Yeah, right. And then you combine that because that is almost never on its own, Right. Like someone is also sleeping five hours a night, right?
[00:45:43] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I'm a five hour a night person.
[00:45:46] Speaker A: That's just how. That's just how I am. Yeah, I'm just like that. It's like, no, man, you're not.
[00:45:50] Speaker B: You're programmed, but you have huge bags under your eyes and you're always tired.
[00:45:55] Speaker A: And you're depressed and six cups of coffee to get going. But I don't. I just can't. I'm just a night Owl. Yeah, it's like, okay, man, but that may be true at the moment, but it might be time to like, re. Examine what's going on there. But that's, that's the thing, right, Is like almost never. And you guys know this, right, as practitioners, is that like almost never someone walks in off the street just with one thing.
[00:46:16] Speaker B: Right.
[00:46:16] Speaker A: That's like never the case.
But in it doesn't matter if you're treating something other than digestive stuff as I do. Right. I mean, this is true for treating cold and flu. This is true for feeding, treating pain. This is true for treating any condition in the body that, especially ones that use herbs. But also with acupuncture, if bodies are unpredictable, like their chi moves erratically, their. Their metabolism is weak and disorganized, everything follows from there, you know, and so you end up in a situation where you put the needles in and you try and solicit the chi response that you're looking for and it, it doesn't work, you know.
[00:46:54] Speaker B: Right.
[00:46:54] Speaker A: And you're sitting there going, well, I guess I got it wrong, or I guess I. I missed it, you know.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: Or, or it does help, but then it comes right back.
[00:47:03] Speaker A: Comes right back. Yeah. And of course, you know, we have to acknowledge it's certainly possible that you did miss it and that you have it wrong. Of course, that's certainly possible. But once you've been doing this long enough and you're like, I don't know, man, I've done this like a lot of times on a lot of people, and this should, this should respond better. Right. Like, I've seen it work, not just once or in a class, but like over and over again. And it's not.
When you're talking to the patient, exploring what the status of their rhythms is, is really going to matter. And food is one of the most substantive ones.
[00:47:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:32] Speaker A: Particularly if you're dealing with herbs.
[00:47:34] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:47:35] Speaker A: You know.
[00:47:35] Speaker B: Yeah. There are certain conditions. Like when I, when I got out of school, I was under the impression, I think that you really couldn't help people with herbs until they had some kind of regularity with their diet.
And I think in most cases that's actually not true.
[00:47:52] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah.
[00:47:53] Speaker B: The better I've gotten with herbs, I.
You can do stuff to help people, especially with acute conditions, regardless of what their diet is like, and they will get better. But there are certain conditions where if the diet is really off, you can't make sustained progress. You might be able to make a little bit of change temporarily, but it won't hold if they're really, really off.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: And you're going to end up in the position that the biomed's in, which is they just have to take these herbs forever.
[00:48:25] Speaker B: They just have to take the herbs forever or whatever. Yeah.
[00:48:28] Speaker A: And that's. That's not. I mean, that's not the goal.
[00:48:30] Speaker B: That is not the goal.
[00:48:31] Speaker A: If you. If you are writing scripts that the patient can never transition off of, you've missed it.
[00:48:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:37] Speaker A: Or something else is going on that's preventing your formula, which is the right formula, from sticking. Right. And it could be something like this. Right. About diet, about predictability, because, you know for sure patients have to take herbs sometimes for a long time.
[00:48:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:50] Speaker A: I've got patients that have been on herbs, different formulas, of course, but they've been on herbs for six months, for a year, for a year and a half.
[00:48:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:57] Speaker A: Right.
But eventually, like that. The goal is never to be like, well, you're just on this now.
[00:49:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:49:03] Speaker A: The goal is always reevaluate, reassist, reassess, transition, modify, titrate, ultimately to be not on herbs. That's always the goal, or at least it should be. And so if you can't make that happen, because every time you titrate them off of them, the symptoms just come flooding back.
What is happening in these other spaces, particularly around food, because if the person's sort of health boat, so to speak, is riddled with holes as a byproduct of diet and stress and sleep, and again, all the strain of being a modern person, your formula and your needles are plugging holes in that boat such that they can continue, which oftentimes is what we have to do. You have to triage. Right. Someone comes in and they're just in the shitter, and you're like, okay, here's a formula. Let's stabilize you. Basic rule here. I just want you to stop having a smoothie for breakfast. Let's not worry about the rest of it for now.
[00:49:57] Speaker B: Right?
[00:49:58] Speaker A: Just oatmeal, man. We're gonna have oatmeal for breakfast. Or a breakfast sandwich. Honestly, I don't even care. You can even go buy a frigging McMuffin from McDonald's. I don't care. Just let's get you off the smoothies. You know what I mean? Like, just triage. Just very basic. Here's a formula, here's a basic thing. Because the boat is so full of holes that there's no way we can realistically expect the patient to have the bandwidth to make fundamental life change. That's a byproduct of 10 or 15 years of habit, because I told them so, like, come on. No way. That's not real. So you got to plug holes, you got to triage a problem, you got to give people enough bandwidth that they can begin to change. And here's a common theme through all of our work, and we'll continue here in season four, so that they begin to change the narrative, right? The story about how their body works, about what's possible, about what they can achieve, what's good for them. All of that stuff starts to shift. But you've got to. You've got to help the patient get the bandwidth first.
[00:50:55] Speaker B: Right?
[00:50:56] Speaker A: Right. The thing is, you just can't get stuck there. And you. And you got to be honest with them.
Even from the beginning, like, I tell people this, I'm like, all right, here's the deal, man.
There's a lot of things in your daily life that I think are gonna be real barriers to long term health and healing. So in the short term, though, next couple of months, we're gonna get you some more bandwidth. That's the metaphor, the image I use all the time. Bandwidth. We're gonna get you some more bandwidth because until you have it, it's gonna be very hard to like, you know, because people who are busy, they know, like when you talk to them, they know that they should eat better and sleep more and start a meditation practice and go on a walk. Like, they can tell it to you. They'll just give you the list they know, but they can't do it.
[00:51:41] Speaker B: Right.
[00:51:41] Speaker A: And if you just add stuff to their list, you're just another preaching voice telling them all the things that they can't do.
[00:51:48] Speaker B: Right.
[00:51:48] Speaker A: So you got to help them out, Right. You got to begin the process. Like, here's this formula, here's this item. This is what we need to do. But you're going to need to talk to them about the long term vision.
[00:51:58] Speaker B: Right.
[00:51:59] Speaker A: Because otherwise you're just spinning their wheels and yours.
[00:52:01] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:52:01] Speaker A: And you're not going to get anywhere.
[00:52:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, totally. What do you think are some conditions that are particularly difficult to treat if the diet is off?
[00:52:12] Speaker A: Yeah. On the rhythm side of things, particularly, I think insomnia is real gnarly if people don't have eating rhythm. Absolutely. Especially if they eat late.
[00:52:20] Speaker B: Late, yeah. They give themselves heart and kidney. Not communicating patterns.
[00:52:24] Speaker A: Exactly.
Laying in bed, like disrupted, you know, so that. That's a first one immediately that comes to mind. Yeah, I see. You know, patients initially come to Me sometimes with a digestive problem that they don't think of as a digestive problem to start, of course. So, like, I had a whole book of patients last year in particular, that had chronic fatigue syndrome.
[00:52:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:47] Speaker A: They're usually sort of like mid-30s to mid-40s, women who are professionals. They work hard, you know what I mean? And they're just tired.
[00:52:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:55] Speaker A: They're exhausted. They got families, they got kids, they got professional demands. You know what I mean? They're on the fly.
[00:53:01] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:53:01] Speaker A: Everyone's trying to steal their time from them. They eat wildly irregularly. Skip lunch, maybe breakfast in the car, that kind of thing. And they're just tired, you know, and they're tired all the time. And so when we start talking to them, it's like, oh, yeah, you don't eat actually. Like, you. You. And when you do eat, it's not being converted into usable metabolic stuff.
So part of your fatigue presentation is literally, you don't have enough stuff.
[00:53:26] Speaker B: Right. You're just not getting nourishment. Yeah.
[00:53:29] Speaker A: Your body's running on the fumes, you know what I mean? Of what it can actually steal from the random bits of food that you're eating.
And so that, I think, is very difficult to turn around.
Like a shoe Lao pattern, like an overwork pattern, for sure.
When the dietary pieces is out of the mix. Yeah, yeah. And then I guess the very obvious ones that I treat a lot of.
[00:53:50] Speaker B: Like, ibs, ibs, diabetic patients, anything that a diabetic patient's gonna come in for if their diet is really off. It's so hard to make lasting progress. Yeah, absolutely.
Any kind of ob GYN condition that deals with bleeding, like extraneous bleeding, extra bleeding, lots of bleeding. If they're eating smoothies in the morning, it's so hard to change those patterns because most of those patients are cold.
[00:54:21] Speaker A: Right.
[00:54:21] Speaker B: And they're blood deficient. But you can't. You can't build their blood up until their middle jowl's warmer.
Yeah. I'm just trying to think of other. Other conditions that are really hard and.
[00:54:32] Speaker A: You know, look like we're.
We're hating on the smoothies here pretty hard.
And part of me wants to be like. To like.
Well, I'm from Louisiana, so we would say crawfish about it, which is to say, like, back away, because you've ever seen a crawfish. They walk backwards.
[00:54:48] Speaker B: Yeah. That is a Louisiana saying.
[00:54:49] Speaker A: I know no one else says that, but I'm gonna say it. So, like, I have this tendency where I. And you guys can't see me, but I'm making crawfish hands with my. With my hands. But like a crawfish walks backwards and when they do it, they put their claws up. And so it's sort of like, kind of like an aggressive retreat is kind of the energy of it. And so, like, here I am, like, talking shit about smoothies, and I have this tendency to be like, well, but maybe you could. And the thing is, like, you can't, man. Like, don't. Don't drink smoothies in the morning. Like, I, you know, I just. In general, Chinese medicine doesn't really hold that, like, any particular food is problematic. You know what I mean? And if your guts are great and you don't have any problems, you know what I mean? Go ahead then, I guess have your smoothie.
[00:55:33] Speaker B: I just had a banana smoothie the other night for dessert.
[00:55:35] Speaker A: Yeah, don't.
[00:55:36] Speaker B: And it was fine.
[00:55:37] Speaker A: Yeah, right. But you can do that every night.
[00:55:39] Speaker B: No, I would be. I would feel terrible if I did that every night.
[00:55:43] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. Like, it's summer here again. I went and had a mango boba tea smoothie. It was great.
[00:55:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:49] Speaker A: But again, that's like intermittent.
[00:55:51] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:55:51] Speaker A: You know, and so that's where the mostly comes in, in all of our rules, right? Like, mostly cooked, mostly raw, mostly regular, because life is life. So sometimes you have a banana smoothie for dinner, sometimes you have a milkshake.
[00:56:02] Speaker B: It's fine.
[00:56:03] Speaker A: It's the predictable. Every day, I always have a smoothie that's frozen and cold made from a bunch of raw stuff. Right. It doesn't matter how many cool powders you put in there. It doesn't matter how much protein is in there. It doesn't matter how much nut butter or whatever. In fact, almost everything that goes into a smoothie exacerbates its cold and cloying nature. From a Chinese medicine point of view, it's like, oh, it's raw fruit, it's frozen and it's bitter. Peanut butter.
[00:56:29] Speaker B: And weird and weird sweet.
[00:56:32] Speaker A: It's so strange, like, those kinds of things. The thing, though, is that there is a huge movement in the mainstream nutritional space. That's like, smoothies are great, right, because you can pack them in, you can get 14 days worth of modern.
[00:56:46] Speaker B: It's the modern person's quick answer to, yeah, Force feeding the body nutrition.
[00:56:52] Speaker A: Exactly, yeah. Yeah. And you're just assuming that because the smoothie is full of these macro and micronutrients that you'll be able to do something with it. And I'm here To tell you that few people can.
[00:57:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And a lot of those people also say, well, it works even better if you take digestive enzymes.
[00:57:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:57:10] Speaker B: You know, like. Oh, yeah, if you put. Take some digestive enzymes, you'll absorb even more of it, which is totally true.
But.
[00:57:18] Speaker A: But it's because you had to, like, supplement your diet because you didn't have enough.
[00:57:21] Speaker B: Right. You didn't have enough.
[00:57:22] Speaker A: Is that food is hard to digest.
[00:57:24] Speaker B: Right.
[00:57:24] Speaker A: I know. You just suck it down out of a straw and you're like, oh, this is so good. But like, actually it's hard. Like, it's small parts of very hard things to digest.
[00:57:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:33] Speaker A: So I suppose it's better than if you just tried to chew all of the kale that you put in your smoothie. But like, even still. Yeah, it's. It's not great.
So that's probably like, that's the most hardcore position you're going to hear from me on foods that you should avoid. Because otherwise, like, again, a healthy, balanced body can e anything in moderation. Like, there's no, there's no fundamental prohibition of any kind of food, including raw and cold foods in moderation in the right context. But if you have any of these conditions, like, if, if you're not walking around feeling like a superhero most of the time, you should pay a little bit of attention to how much cold and raw stuff you're eating.
[00:58:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:09] Speaker A: It's just that. It's just that simple.
[00:58:10] Speaker B: Totally. You know, I have a couple of quick questions for you.
[00:58:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:14] Speaker B: Things that have come up.
So we talked about diversity in diet, including different ingredients, including different things at different seasons.
Do you think this is just a hypothesis of mine that people do better with more diversity in a season like the summer than they do in the winter?
[00:58:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. Like, in general. And I think that's just from my point of view, I think that's just a kind of yin yang.
[00:58:41] Speaker B: Right.
[00:58:41] Speaker A: Sort of thing. Right. The diversity, like in the world of yin yang. Right. Diversity belongs, I think, to the young side of stuff.
[00:58:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:49] Speaker A: Right. And so therefore, like, changing, moving, adjusting, seems to work better when there's more yang chi available.
[00:58:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:56] Speaker A: Diversity is really tricky. You know, as Americans, unless you come from potentially like a recent immigrant background, you probably don't really have much of a food culture.
[00:59:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:59:06] Speaker A: Except that I would say that perhaps our food culture is that we eat a lot of different stuff. Right. So it's like, oh, you have tacos on Monday and pho on Tuesday and sushi on Wednesday. And I don't know, went for Ethiopian on Thursday and cooked chana masala. Yeah, there was burrito. We had burritos at lunch. And, like, you just, like, all over the place, right? Because that's. That is what America is like. We're an immigrant country. We have access to all of this stuff, right? And so people grow up with a diversity of inputs. You know, when I lived in France, French people eat French food, right?
[00:59:37] Speaker B: All the time.
[00:59:38] Speaker A: All the time. You know, like, they're not like, man, we gotta go get that burrito. Like, you don't want to eat a burrito in France.
[00:59:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:59:43] Speaker A: It's terrible. They're gonna put, like, Swiss cheese inside of it. It's awful. So, like, the point, though, is that, like, there's a kind of. There's a internal rhythmic predictability that comes with a food culture that we don't necessarily have. And so I think it's one of the. One of the actual challenges is because, like, we have a palette for that change, though. I feel it, right? Like, I love eating food from all over the world.
What's nice, though, is that if you learn to cook those foods, which is different than always eating them out, because, you know, restaurant food is always saltier, always fattier, always richer than if you make it yourself. If you learn to cook a lot of those foods, what you find is that they often. Even though the seasonings, for example, might be wildly diverse, there's a lot of commonality, right?
[01:00:24] Speaker B: Sure.
[01:00:24] Speaker A: People are eating a grain. A grain is always the base of those foods, right? It's rice, it's teff, it's wheat, it's something always polento. It could be corn. There's always a staple grain.
And that staple grain is supplemented primarily by vegetable matter that's largely seasonal and also staple. So, for example, beans.
Beans are, like, everywhere. Lentils and beans, right? So legumes and beans, it doesn't matter. You pick a culture on the planet, people are eating legumes and beans. They're all over the place.
And so those are good because they are a dense, fibrous protein, rich, if we're using the biomed terms, supplement to a staple grain. And both of those things can be stored. So you can eat beans all year.
[01:01:06] Speaker B: Long and you cook the crap out of them.
[01:01:08] Speaker A: Exactly.
[01:01:09] Speaker B: That's the other thing about beans.
[01:01:11] Speaker A: They're soft, it takes hours, they break down. And so your staple grain and your staple legume or lentil all year long.
And then you layer on top of that seasonal vegetable and then regional spice.
And so I actually think that when you start to cook it at home for yourself, you start to see that there's actually a whole lot more similarity to what appears on the surface to be diverse. Because, like, you know, garam masala tastes a lot different than Berber spice does. You know what I mean? And so you're like, oh, these are really different, but actually they're stewed.
[01:01:42] Speaker B: Yeah, no, no, no.
[01:01:43] Speaker A: It's a good point. You know what I mean? Like, you have a change of spices for sure, but at its base, it's kind of the same thing. It's like an allium plus a lentil cooked for a long time. Right. And some, you know, variety in place. So I think the problem is that when you eat out a lot that way, though, that it can kind of pull your appetite in lots of different directions. That can contribute, like we say, diversity, but then you can almost feel a little scattered.
[01:02:06] Speaker B: Sure.
[01:02:06] Speaker A: Because you're sort of eating in all these various ways.
But I actually think that the base rhythms of even different food cultures is still the same stuff.
[01:02:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:16] Speaker A: Grain plus bean plus seasonal vegetable plus a little meat.
[01:02:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:20] Speaker A: You know, that's sort of the same.
[01:02:21] Speaker B: What about fermented foods? People are big on probiotics and love those fermented foods. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:02:28] Speaker A: So from a nature and flavor point of view, fermented foods tend to be sour and they tend to be acrid. Right. And sour and acrid are helpful flavors to mitigate damp accumulation.
Right.
But sour can also congeal and hold. Right. So if you're.
If you're eating too much of those things. So I'm thinking immediately to kombucha.
[01:02:56] Speaker B: Yeah, right, right.
[01:02:56] Speaker A: Everyone's like, oh, yeah, gotta get that kombucha. I'm gonna drink 64 ounces of kombucha today. Kombucha is soda, y'. All.
[01:03:03] Speaker B: Right.
[01:03:03] Speaker A: It's hippie soda.
[01:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:03:05] Speaker A: There's a lot of sugar in it. Like, yeah, it's. Yeah, it tastes sour, but it's because, like, the kombucha mother was converting sugar into, like, acetic acid. Right.
[01:03:13] Speaker B: I think. I think it's. Even sometimes it's. It's more damp than soda.
[01:03:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:03:19] Speaker B: Because have you ever had a kombucha soda? They have these. There's a. There's this new thing out.
[01:03:25] Speaker A: You're, like, combining these things together.
[01:03:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's called kombucha soda.
[01:03:28] Speaker A: Great.
[01:03:29] Speaker B: And my body reacts horribly to that. Like, I have a pretty strong stomach with stuff, you know?
[01:03:36] Speaker A: But.
[01:03:36] Speaker B: Yeah, but that, like, I drink it. I Get congested and I like get a headache and feel phlegmy like right away it's, I think it's even more damp than soda is.
[01:03:46] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, like if you look at classic fermented foods, like I think like sauerkraut or kimchi or honestly like these days everybody's pickles are vinegar pickles. But historically they were fermented. Right. Like you ferment the pickles and all of those foods. Lactic acid ferments are very salty. Yes, super, super salty. So you've got salt, you've got acrid and you've got sour that are sort of all working together.
But because they're so salty, they were always used as sort of like supplementary foods. Right. Like you're eating them on top of other foods.
[01:04:19] Speaker B: Other things.
[01:04:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:04:20] Speaker B: So like especially in wintertime, especially in.
[01:04:23] Speaker A: Wintertime you need preserve and you're holding those foods. You know, they have summer versions of all those ferments. But then there's the long stay ones that you use in the wintertime and those are supplemental flavors to the, the formula that I was describing. Right. So like the base grain plus legume plus seasonal vegetable plus meat is then supplemented by a fermented food that carries. And not just fermented, but really just preserved in general. So like dried things, jammed things, stuff that you're holding from one season to the next, those things are always very, very dense in a particular flavor. Right. Like jam is crazy sweet.
[01:04:58] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:04:59] Speaker A: You know, and sauerkraut's very salty.
[01:05:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:05:02] Speaker A: And so you shouldn't be eating like pounds of them. Yeah. Like they joke, they add to something. Right. From a biomed point of view, there's a lot of, lot of love for fermented foods, which I appreciate.
But a lot of it has to do with like enzymes, adjust the structure, sugar structures and that makes the stuff more digestible. And that's really good for you or whatever. Yeah. Fermented foods are great. You should eat them in the appropriate context, you know.
[01:05:30] Speaker B: So like you've got to consistency in small amounts.
[01:05:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Like you're having like Korean bulgogi or whatever. You're definitely going to have a pile of kimchi on that because bulgogi is kind of sweet and there's a lot of rice, but there's going to be pickled vegetable because you're going to need sour and you need salty to like cut through these complex flavors. Like when you look at a classical, like a, like a classic food from any particular culture, the individual plate of that food when fully composed, tends to be very balanced from a nutrition point of view. Right. Even like western stuff. Like if you think of like roast leg of lamb, right. With. With potatoes and parsnips is going to be served with mint jelly.
[01:06:10] Speaker B: Right.
[01:06:11] Speaker A: Because lamb is hot and you need to cool it off and it's going to come with mint jelly. If you go to the Central Asia, lamb, for example, is always served with like yogurt and mint.
[01:06:20] Speaker B: Yogurt. Yeah.
[01:06:21] Speaker A: This stuff's balanced. Right. Like you and. And it tastes good. That's the other thing. Right. Remember appetite. And like when you put it in your mouth, you're like, that tastes good.
That's not random.
Dana Small's research links together sense of sweetness with caloric density and a sense of satisfaction that goes along with them. Like your appetite is absolutely informing what things go together.
[01:06:43] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:06:44] Speaker A: And we see this everywhere. It's like even in the farming world, it's like what grows together goes together.
That's the same kind of thing. So we co. Evolved with the world around us. I think it's just so easy to forget that as a modern person.
[01:06:58] Speaker B: Totally.
[01:06:59] Speaker A: Oh, you can't trust you, your body, your silly body. You gotta like run a blood platelet analysis and see like, what. How much iron is in. Like, you just can't trust yourself and that. That's a failure. Right. And part of our role as practitioners is to make sure that our patients understand that they can trust themselves. In fact, they do it all the time. They just maybe ignore it or forget about it.
[01:07:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:07:21] Speaker A: And that they can lean into these feelings that they have around food. That can actually not be pathology. Right. That's not. They don't have to deny themselves and hide from things. They can set these basic parameters. Right. Cooked, warm, regular, and then experiment inside of that, play inside of that, try different stuff, see how it feels. What do you like? What do you not like? What is your appetite drawing you to? You're saying with inside the parameters of cooked, warm and regular, and within that, leaning into. So that's the yin side of things. Right. The substantial side of things. And then you lean into the yang side where you try out this diversity question.
[01:07:57] Speaker B: Right?
[01:07:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:07:57] Speaker B: Makes sense.
[01:08:00] Speaker A: Well, anything else we want to hit for, folks?
[01:08:03] Speaker B: I think we covered a good amount.
[01:08:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And we picked this topic again because we watch all the time in our own patients and when we talk to other practitioners where people will write a formula and.
And it doesn't land the way that it ought to or that it has with other people.
And again, you could be wrong, you could have picked the wrong thing, you could have misdiagnosed it for sure. We always have to keep that. But if it's a condition you've seen before, something you've treated, something you've got a lot of advice on, and it's just not working how it seems to have worked before, it's worth exploring this, thinking about food and other aspects of being a human as the primary medicine.
Right. And that what we do, herbs and acupuncture, they're supportive, they're transformative, hugely important. But like, the most important thing a person's going to do is eat and sleep and breathe.
[01:08:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:08:54] Speaker A: Right, right. And like, if those things are out of order, eat, sleep and breathe, you're gonna have. You're gonna have trouble.
[01:09:00] Speaker B: It's tough.
[01:09:01] Speaker A: It'll be harder.
[01:09:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:09:02] Speaker A: You know, and the goal ultimately is to help people get better faster so they spend less time and money.
They love the work that you do more. They tell their friends and family about it. Right.
This is aligning everyone's interests. Right. The patient's interests for speedy recovery, our interests for more patients to work with. And we're putting those things in alignment when we're honest and clear with patients about what we think is going to be most effective, to get them where they need to go.
[01:09:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
I do want to say too, that if you can get somebody who has one of these conditions that's really dietary specific and they're really far off the mark, they're like actively doing damage to their health from our point of view. And you get them to move from that to just being neutral, like having their food, their diet be a neutral force. So not even a positive force, just a neutral force.
My experience is that almost always, if they make that movement, you can help them.
[01:10:00] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:10:01] Speaker B: They don't need to be great at their food, they don't need to have a great diet if they're just not actively doing damage.
It's okay.
[01:10:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:10:10] Speaker B: It's good enough, like for our work.
[01:10:12] Speaker A: Most people are just normal.
[01:10:15] Speaker B: Right, right.
[01:10:16] Speaker A: Like, they don't. You don't have to be like killing it every day at everything that you do. Like that is some like, you know, post capitalist, postmodern programming, man. It's just like if you're not, you know, just hitting the numbers on your diet every day, you are a screw up. It's like, come on, man, most people are normal. Most people are average. All we just need here is for you to not be wrecking everything we're doing every day.
[01:10:43] Speaker B: Right.
[01:10:43] Speaker A: You know, and that's. That's relatively easy to accomplish. Cooked, warm, regular. Yep. No smoothies. Just drop that in there one more time. Put the smoothies.
[01:10:52] Speaker B: Hashtag no smoothies.
[01:10:53] Speaker A: Hashtag no smoothies. Yeah. All right, guys, well, thanks for listening again.
You know, we're in season four now, so we got some great topics coming up for you guys. But. But we also have open spaces for things that are suggested by the listening audience. So if you have some ideas for what you think we should talk about, send us an [email protected] thenervousherbalistmail.Com and we would love to hear from you about any of those topics. And as always, make sure to like and subscribe to the show if you haven't already. It makes it easier for other people to find us.
And we really appreciate you joining us for another conversation.
So my name is Travis Kern.
[01:11:30] Speaker B: I'm Travis Cunningham.
[01:11:31] Speaker A: And we'll catch you guys next time.
[01:11:32] Speaker B: See you next time.
