+ “Cauliflower has vitamins and minerals, and when eaten with chicken it can make stronger bones.  Combined they also improve the detoxing power of your liver and give your immune system a boost. With that you will fight colds much more easily.” Perhaps a little cauliflower in the traditional Chicken Noodle soup recipe would help.

- Combining honey and Spring Onions can create “attract toxins”, “hurt your eyes”, and “in serious cases even lead to the loss of sight.” Yikes, this is a pretty bad combination!

Here’s a decent recipe for Stir-fry Cauliflower and Chicken at Nibbledish! Take a look:

Stir-fry Cauliflower and Chicken

+ When you eat both mushrooms and toufu together, they help “reduce excess eat and clear toxins”, along with assisting in the “increasing air intake and excreting saliva”. From a Chinese prospective, these reactions are beneficial to your body. A mushroom/toufu dish is also a good combination because they “reduce phlegm/mucus, are anti-cancerous, reduce blood fat and blood pressure.”

- “The meat of shrimp contains [a kind of non-poisonous] arsenic, but when combined with tomatoes it will  restore some arsenic properties, also known as ‘white arsenic’”, and so, this combination should be avoided.

I’m pretty sure this means sliced tomatoes combined with shrimp in a sauce pan, rather than shrimp and cocktail sauce. This doesn’t mean you should stop eating them since any food in moderation won’t hurt you.

Here’s a decent recipe for Sugar Snap Peas, Mushrooms, and Toufu! Take a look:

A simple mushroom and toufu recipe!

+ Shrimp contains “high levels of protein and calcium”, while Chinese cabbage is “somewhat high in nutritional value”. If you eat both of them together you’ll “prevent constipation, gum bleeding, and scurvy”. The best way to cook them is to “lightly fry them in a pan.”

- Eating both chicken and celery together will “do harm to your vitality [energy], and reduce the effectiveness of your immune system.” Because of this you will be more likely to attract various kinds of disease” so make sure you don’t pair these two foods together too often.

At Chinese restaurants you will find celery cooked with other vegetables and meat. Just yesterday I had celery lightly fried with lotus root. Take a look:

Celery and Lotus Root

"The Plan" By Lyn-Genet Recitas

An American friend recently introduced a book to me that is gaining popularity in the US called, The Plan. It describes in detail that certain healthy foods we eat regularly do, in fact, cause us to gain weight. The author uses concepts that are regularly used in Chinese discussions of health and makes them accessible to a Western audience. “Inflammatory foods” cause “inflammation”, which produce negative effects on your body and can effect weight gain and loss.

All of this talk of inflammation reminded me of a poster I saw in a Chinese medical hospital room years ago. It basically outlines both appropriate and inappropriate combinations of food. This Chinese-medicine concept seems to be the foundation of the theories in The Plan book.  It seems this ancient concept, which can help us better understand how our bodies work, has worked its way to the discussion table of American households.

To Eat or Not to Eat?

The most important aspect of Xiangsheng Xiangke is to balance the “5 phases” or elements. In ancient Chinese practice, the five phases are focused more on changing states and their interaction with one another. These are represented as metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. (金、木、水、火、土). The idea that the different foods you eat combine in positive or negative ways is a biproduct of this system. [This system is also called Wu Xing and plays an important role in Taoism-religion, Tai Chi-martial arts, and Feng Shui].

This rabbit hole goes pretty deep, so I’d like to just focus on how food is represented in the 5 Phases and how it can be used for the benefit of your health.

The food we eat can either have a relationship that “generates/creates” or “overcomes/destructs” depending on the food it is paired with. Here are analogous descriptions about how these phases interact with each other *:

Wood feeds Fire
Fire creates Earth (ash)
Earth bears Metal
Metal carries Water (as in a bucket or tap, or water condenses on metal)
Water nourishes Wood

Overcoming/Destructing

By understanding the relationship that is created by pairing certain phases, or elements, together we can see how reactive certain foods are. As far as I can tell, this is directly related to the concepts found in Xiangsheng Xiangke. Let’s take a look at an example of each:

+ In this example, we see mushrooms and toufu are compatible foods which can be eaten together. Traditional Chinese Medicine suggests that mushrooms and toufu can ‘reduce internal heat’ as well as increase levels of Qi, reduce phlegm, improve circulation and the immune system.

“Internal Heat” is refered to as 上火 (Shang Huo) in Chinese. I wrote about this phenomenon a few years ago in an article called “The Two Kinds of Chee”

- Based on the principles of Xiangke, these two foods should not be consumed together because they produce ‘arsenious acid’ when combined and cause harm. You should use them cautiously.

Now, all of this might seem strange to the common person who hears reports about the bad effects of Soy, but eats shrimp with cocktail sauce at special gatherings. Don’t worry – You are doing nothing wrong. The mystery of food is that it combines and reacts in different ways. We can’t constantly be aware of the effects of EVERY healthy thing we eat. That would just be overdoing it. But you could learn more about traditions and how humans have eaten for thousands of years. Before TV and the Internet started telling us what to eat.

For the next few weeks I’m going to disect the poster that you see above. I’ll translate the Chinese and relate what it says to things in our common Western diet. There might be a few hidden gems in there for you!