Does Whole Foods Provide Healing? #3

Healing with Whole Foods Series #3
Paul Pitchford

This does not mean, of course, that these dietary treatments are all that is ever required. Certainly, other therapies from herbology, homeopathy, healing touch, acupuncture, modern medical treatments, and all others are more effective when based on a solid dietary foundation.

Eastern traditions are fascinating to many Westerners, just as our developments in technology have been adopted so enthusiastically by the Japanese and, more recently, the Chinese and East Indians. Even this flow of cultural energy must folIow a basic law of cosmic harmony revealed in diet and health. Most traditions in the Far East conceive this basic law as the dual principle of yin and yang, or as similar polarities when the terms yin/yang themselves are not used. These same principles are understood by people of wisdom in the West, but expressed in different terms. The traditional yin/yang system we have chosen to apply throughout this book is invaluable because it precisely and simply describes the essential features of the realty of natural medicine. Western nutrition ca benefit from the simplicity and subtlety of traditional Chinese medicine; Chinese medicine, in its turn, needs to awaken to the hard lessons learned in the West about denatured food.

Another purpose of this book is to integrate the most important food therapies from both the East and West. In the West we speak of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and other components of food. These are clearly important dimensions also being studied in the Far East. However, as indicated above, various traditions in the East focus on other dimensions: the warming and cooling values of food, the ability to moisten, strengthen energy, calm the mind, reduce watery or mucoid accumulations, and others. Knowledge of these qualities is indispensable for using food as medicine. There are still other advantages to incorporating such a system into modern nutrition: it works with subtle flows of energy, reaching diagnostically far in advance to predict and prevent approaching illness; it benefits people without access to expensive diagnostic tools, since East Asian diagnosis is powerful in its simplicity; and it helps one select the most useful remedies from the myriad possibilities.

*The "we" that appears from time to time in the text represents the especially significant areas of consensus among the author, his teachers, and others who assisted with this work.

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