Roasted Vegetable Stew

Over the past few months, I've been prescribing slow-cooked root vegetables as an addition to many of my patients' diets. Root vegetables, particularly yams and sweet potatoes, are very nourishing and tonifying of Spleen energy. The Spleen in Chinese medicine falls under the domain of the Earth element, creating the foundation for the production of new, utilizable energy and all of the physiological processes in the body.

I realized today that all this time I have failed to provide any good recipes to go with my advice!

Here's a delicious and simple recipe for a Roasted Vegetable Stew that I've adapted from a recipe I found in a book on soups:

4 Parsnips, cut lengthwise into 4 pieces and then quartered

2 Red Onions, cut into thin wedges

3 Garnet Yams, cut into chunks

1 Large Leek, cut thickly

1 Fennel Bulb, cut into chunks

3 Celery Stalks, cut into diagonal slices

1 Butternut Squash, skinned, seeds removed, and cubed

2 Whole Heads of Garlic

4 Tablespoons Olive Oil

Herbs du Provence (or just Thyme), Salt, and Pepper for seasoning

4 Cups Vegetable Broth

Handful of Cherry Tomatoes

Pre-heat oven to 400 F. Put all of the cut veggies into a large roasting pan (I need to use two separate 9" x 13" pans for this recipe, but that's only because I don't have a bigger pan!). Drizzle 3 tablespoons of the Olive Oil over the veggies and toss to cover evenly. Put the last tablespoon of olive oil in a little bowl or mug and dip each whole head of garlic into it, being sure to entirely coat it. Place the two oiled heads of garlic on top of the pan of veggies, and moderately sprinkle Herbs du Provence over everything. Place the pan in the oven for at least 45 mins, or until the veggies are roasty browned and tender.

While you're waiting for the veggies to cook, you can make some delicious bread to go with your stew!

1 Loaf crusty bread, I would recommend Ciabatta or Thick Baguette

3 Tablespoons butter or butter substitute (I use Earth Balance)

2 Cloves Raw Garlic, chopped

4 Pieces Sun-dried Tomato

Paprika, Parsley, or in my case Mexican Spiced Chili Seasoning for taste and color

Take your loaf of crusty bread and cut diagonal slits into the bread without cutting all the way through. Mix 3 Tablespoons of butter stuff with the chopped garlic and sun-dried tomatoes. Use a butter knife to stuff and spread the mixture into the slices of the bread. When you're done, sprinkle some seasoning across the top of the loaf and put the bread back together, wrapping the whole thing in foil. When you're ready to bake, put the foiled loaf in the oven at 400F for 10 mins covered so that it can get flavorfully buttery infused, and then uncovered for 5 minutes so that it can get golden brown. I would recommend waiting until the stew is done to toast the bread so that you can serve it up immediately all warm and delicious and whatnot.

Once the veggies are done and you've removed them from the oven, take one head of garlic and squeeze the roasted cloves out. Save the other head for serving with your meal. Take half of the roasted veggies with the squeezed garlic and mash it all up with the 4 cups of vegetable broth with either a food processor or blender until it is almost smooth. Mix the rest of the roasted veggies into this stew and heat on the stove until boiling. Add salt and pepper to taste. When ready to serve, place a few cherry tomatoes on top and garnish with some herby green things (like thyme or rosemary sprigs) for looks and aroma.

It's plenty meal for 4-6 people when served with toasty bread and roasted garlic. What's more, when made with Earth Balance this recipe is vegan!

Tonight we complemented our meal with peach champagne avec fresh strawberries for a fun and tasty beverage. Bon apetit!

Disease Smells

This short National Geographic video here shows how dogs can smell certain diseases and can be trained to help those in need. One researcher in the video talks about how one day we humans might even be able to use the dogs' sniffing skills to diagnose disease.

Chapter Four of the Huang Di Nei Jing had stated thousands of years ago that a medical diagnosis could be made or confirmed by the presence of certain smells, ones that humans can detect. According to the five phases theory:

In the five odours, the odour of liver is stink. (urine)

In the five odours, the odour of heart is scorching.

In the five odours, the odour of spleen is fragrance.

In the five odours, the odour of lung is stinking. (fishy)

In the five odours, the odour of kidney is rancid. (rotten)

The above was quoted from: Yellow Emperor's Canon of Internal Medicine by Wang Bing (Tang Dynasty), translated by Wu Liansheng and Wu Qi.

I've found that after I leave a patient in the room with the door closed, their distinctive smell is always much more noticeable when I come back. I've definitely smelled the scent of burnt or scorched, but I haven't yet encountered a person smelling like stink and urine during treatment. That's probably a good thing.

Dissociative Fugue: Is Your Hun Out Partying?

Jason Bourne, Matt Damon's fictional character from the movie series Bourne Identity, is the most famous 'person' who suffers from this rare amnesia. The name Bourne was taken from Ansel Bourne, the first recorded case of the dissociative fugue in 1887.

Dissociative fugue is a very rare form of amnesia, whereby the person loses complete memory of their identity and personality, but have full mental functioning for all other purposes. It's so fascinating, especially since the fugue state is associated with travel, and people sometimes end up across continents, not knowing how they got there. Psychiatrists attribute the onset of a fugue state with extreme stress, resulting in the person 'running away' or 'hiding' from their problems. In a recent story, a woman in a fugue state was able to go into an Apple store and check her email, but not remember who she was or what she was doing. She was eventually found three weeks after she went missing, floating in the water miles from where she lived.

In modern TCM theory, there is not one soul or consciousness, but five separate and distinct ones, each housed in the five major organs of the body. The 神 Shen, 意 Yi, 魄 Po, 志 Zhi, and 魂 Hun have their independent characteristics, but work together to form the mental-spiritual aspect of an individual.

From The Foundations of Chinese Medicine, by Giovanni Macciocia:

The Mind (Shen) is the consciousness that is responsible for thought, feeling, emotions, perceptions, and cognition. The Mind resides in the Heart and it is primarily for this reason that the Heart is called the 'Emperor' in relation to all the other Internal Organs. As the Mind is the consciousness that defines us as individual human beings and that is responsible for thinking, willing and feeling, the Heart plays a leading role among the Internal Organs.

The Intellect (Yi) is responsible for memory, concentration, thinking, logical thinking, capacity for studying, and application. In pathology, the capacity for thinking may become pensiveness, overthinking, obsessive thining, fantasizing or brooding. The intellect resides in the Spleen.

The Corporeal Soul (Po) is responsible for physical sensations, feelings, and generally somatic expressions. It resides in the Lungs and it plays a role in all physiological processes of the body. It is formed at conception, it is Yin in nature, and, at death, it dies with the body returning to the Earth. The Corporeal Soul is described as the 'entering and exiting of the Essence (Jing)'.

The Will-power (Zhi) resides in the Kidneys and it is responsible for will-power, drive, determination and constancy.

The Ethereal Soul (Hun) is a soul that is Yang in nature and that, according to Chinese culture, enters the body three days after birth and is imparted to the baby by the father. After death, the Ethereal Soul survives the body and returns to a world of spirit. The Chinese character for Hun confirms the spiritual, non-material nature as it is made up by the radical gui, which means 'spirit' or 'ghost', and the radical yun, which means 'clouds'. The Ethereal Soul resides in the Liver and particularly in the Blood and Yin of the Liver where it should be 'anchored'; if Liver-Blood is deficient and the Ethereal Soul is not anchored in the Liver, it 'wanders' at night and causes the person to dream a lot. The Ethereal Soul is described as 'the coming and going of the Mind (Shen)'.

So if a person were to lose complete memory of their identity, which soul would be the one affected, and how would Chinese medicine proceed in the treatment of an individual who has had a fugue state experience?

My guess would be the Hun. If the Shen were to go on vacation, all mental faculties would cease. If the Po were to leave the body, the person would die, since it is in charge of all things physical and only returns to Earth upon death. The Hun is the only one known for 'wandering', and is the one most immediately affected by stress and deficiency. A person in a dissociative fugue state could be said then to be suffering from a case of their Hun going out to party during the day when it should be at home in the Liver. It's like being in an extended dream that ultimately can't be remembered.

To treat this individual, one would have to Nourish Liver Blood and Yin, and Soothe the Liver. Without a look at the tongue and pulse, I would guess that the base formula for such a condition would be 酸枣仁汤 Suan Zao Ren Tang, with the addition of herbs like 熟地黄 Shu Di Huang, 夜交藤 Ye Jiao Teng, 白芍 Bai Shao and 当归 Dang Gui to more strongly tonify Blood. 柴胡 Chai Hu could be added and 赤芍 Chi Shao could substitute for Bai Shao if there is more Qi stagnation, and 茯神 Fu Shen for 茯苓 Fu Ling to more strongly calm the shen. 远志 Yuan Zhi and 石菖蒲 Shi Chang Pu can be added to calm the spirit and clear the head, in the same way they're used in 定志丸 Ding Zhi Wan.

Acupuncture could include points like 曲泉 LV-8, 太冲 LV-3, 三阴交 SP-6, 足三里 ST-36, 手三里 LI-10, 四化 Four Flowers, 神堂 UB-44, 魂门 UB-47, and 四神聪 Si Shen Cong. Other points would be added or subtracted according to tongue and pulse and symptom pattern.

Book Review: The Face Reader

I highly recommend Patrician McCarthy's The Face Reader for anyone interested in what our faces say about our innate gifts and misgivings. It is a very quick read, especially if you already have an understanding of Chinese medical theory, but is also easy enough to follow if you don't. The book includes a summary of personalities based on the five elements, with a full-color insert of each of the types of faces and combinations of those types. It has pictures and descriptions throughout, highlighting the major differences between facial features. My only criticism of the book would be that it is too short!

A really fun thing about the book is that a handful of the models are former Yo San students. Patrician McCarthy used to teach a course on Mien Shiang here at Yo San, but now does lectures and seminars all over. It's too bad I missed it; the class had been described to me as "life-changing."

Here are excerpts from the book that describe some of my features:

The little wispy hairs that some people have along their hairline are what I call the Veil of Tears. Those delicate hairs act as a veil, hiding the true shape of the hairline, just as these people hide their true feelings when they are hurt.

A rounded nose belongs to the material girls or boys. They are not greedy, but they appreciate things of quality. They would rather go without than put up with an inferior substitute.

If you love good-quality food and drink, you most likely have a gourmand's nose, one with a fleshy tip. If you don't have one yourself, these are the people to dine with.

Microcosm/Macrocosm

I'm not sure the origin of these pictures, but they were found at totallylookslike.com, one in the family of lolcat websites.

One of the principles of Daoist medicine is that the body is a microcosm of the universe. Just as there are five planets visible to the naked eye, so there are five major organs in the body, each corresponding to one of those planets (Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus, Mercury to go with the Liver, Heart, Spleen/Pancreas, Lung, and Kidney). Click here for a fun website where you can check other Five Phase correspondences.

In some systems of Daoist meditation and cultivation, there are techniques for bringing the universe inside yourself, harmonizing your energy with that of the universe, and ultimately gaining the awareness that there is no separateness between your "self" and everything else that is.

These lofty ideas have not been included in modern, materialist TCM and certainly would seem out of place in any American university science course - it sounds too much like astrology. The closest you'll find is the idea that the weather has an influence on your health. If it's cold, you could catch a cold. But the link is there - if the sun, at least 91 million miles away, can grow plants here on earth, why shouldn't Jupiter and Mars have some kind of influence on us as well? Why not the moon, smaller and colder but so much closer? We already know the moon influences the tides and menstrual cycles.

It's easy to dismiss these ideas because there is no scientific evidence for them yet, but it's quite possible that our instruments just aren't advanced enough yet. In the Daoist tradition, your body can be the most finely tuned instrument in the universe, and physical practices such as qi gong and dao yin are the methods of refinement.

Medical traditions across all cultures, until recently, put higher value on the doctor's ability to wring information from the body with her questions, hands, eyes and nose than the ability to order tests. What will you do if you have no X-rays, no MRI machines? Throw up your hands and give up? In TCM, we learn to pull information by palpation, feeling the abdomen and the pulse, looking at the tongue, even observing a particular patient's odor. There is a wealth of information there - it's just a matter of sorting and ordering it with this system we call Chinese medicine and giving a diagnosis, which then gives us a roadmap for treatment.

Behold the Power of the Sun

This incredible display of yang energy comes to you courtesy of the sun. Scientists call it a spreading coronal mass ejection. I call it freakin' awesome!!!

Click here for even more jaw-dropping pictures of the sun.

Late Summer

In Chinese medicine, the five elements - Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, and Wood - can be used to describe all patterns that occur in nature, including the change of seasons. Spring is the season of the Wood element, of new growth and fresh movement. Summer is related to the Fire element, being the hottest season of the year, and Fall to Metal, the time of contracting and consolidating. The Winter season is associated with the Water element, the most dark and yin time of the year.

So where does the Earth element fit into the seasons? Some people say that the Earth element is represented in the change of seasons from one to the next, that time when things feel kind of still and grounded as hot turns to cold and dark turns to light. Another idea is that Earth is represented in the Late Summer, the time of the big harvest when the days are no longer unbearably hot, but the leaves have yet to turn and blow away in the autumn wind.

Walking through the Mar Vista Farmer's Market this morning made me feel like Late Summer really is the time of the Earth. As the last of the berries, peaches, and plums were being sold, their seasonal decline marked by the smaller and smaller tables taken up by the farms that grow them, there have been some new arrivals to the market to take their place. Today there were baskets full of summer squashes of all kinds - zuchini, cousa, yellow, and those cute little flat ones that look kind of like UFO's. There were also the first of the pomegranates, persimmons, asian pears, and so much delicious corn. Huge yams the size of my cat were pulled from the Earth and placed for sale in delicious piles of deliciousness.

The Earth element in the human body is related most closely to the digestive system, the place in which we take in from our surroundings and process what we need. It is the foundation of our bodies, being anatomically the physical center of ourselves as well as the center in which we can spiritually "stomach" what the universe gives us.

In celebration of my Spleen and the spirit of late summer, here's a simple recipe for a delicious seasonal soup I had for supper. All the produce can be found at the farmer's market, and ingredients in the soup have the Chinese nutritional properties of tonifying the Spleen and Stomach:

4 Garnet Yams, cut into large chunks
3 cloves Garlic, chopped
1 bunch Spinach, cleaned and cut
1 bunch of Baby Bok Choy
1 bunch On Choy, cut into thirds
2 large handfuls of mushrooms
6 slices fresh Ginger
6 pieces of Da Zao
3 pieces of Huang Qi
1 lb Jumbo Shrimp
*serves 3 hungry people who can really get down, with enough left over for lunch the next day

Put the cubed yams and garlic in a pot with plenty of water (at least a gallon). Bring to a boil and cook until the yams darken in color. Turn the heat down halfway and throw in the spinach and baby bok choy. Add the ginger, da zao and huang qi and cook for 5 minutes. Add the mushrooms. You can season to taste with some salt, lime, or soy sauce, or nothing at all if you like it the way it is (I happened to have some prepared nước mắm for such an occasion. I am Vietnamese... that stuff runs in my veins!). Right before serving, blanch the on choy until it just gets soft, and cook the shrimp just long enough for it to get pink. Enjoy with some rice or noodles!

How Much Sugar Should I Eat?

The short answer is: just a little.

The long answer? Well, you could turn to this misleading website by the Corn Refiner's Association for some incomplete answers on the "benefits" of high fructose corn syrup (thanks to Jason Moskovitz for the link). For instance, in the Q&A section, there's this helpful information...

Why do we crave sweetness?
People have evolved from the hunter-gatherers when sweetness indicated that a food was safe to eat. Sweetness was and still is a key taste marker to survival and good health. Sugars as carbohydrates are an important supply of energy to the body. This energy was essential to our survival in our not-so-distant, hunter-gatherer past. However, over the last 12,000 years our way of life has changed significantly. In contrast to our past, an abundance of calories is not essential, but the craving for sweet things remains.

If you can get past the appalling grammar, you may notice the stunted logic and historical inaccuracies. The one sentence that I agree with states that life has changed significantly over the past 12,000 years. We do still have hunter-gatherer instincts. But if you're hunting the aisles of a typical American supermarket for sustenance, sweetness is not a "key taste marker to survival". In fact, avoiding sweetness in this context will help you avoid many of the major "diseases of affluence" (those caused by too much of something rather than too little) such as diabetes.

This site is obviously designed to put you at ease as you wash down your Lil Debbie snack cakes with Dr. Pepper, but regular sugar is not so great either. I went through a phase where I wouldn't drink sodas made with corn syrup, only those made with real sugar. For some reason I thought I was being healthy - and then I realized that I was drinking way more soda than I usually did.

The corn syrup site also bad mouths supposedly natural sweeteners such as concentrated white grape juice. I have to admit that I was taken in by this sweetener at first, particularly in jam and jelly. I found this brand that was sweetened with fruit juice, and I thought "great! natural!". Again, it's what they leave out that gets you. The fruit juice they use is concentrated to such a degree that it's not much better than regular sugar.

The existence of this site is a testament to the popularity of books like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Greg Critser's Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. (The latter book is where I learned about Earl Butz, pictured above. He was Nixon's agriculture secretary and was chiefly responsible for the increase in corn subsidies to ridiculous levels, which in turn ensured the huge surplus of corn that led to the synthesizing of high fructose corn syrup and its subsequent injection into nearly every single packaged item on your supermarket shelf.) Just be aware that the Corn Refiners Association has millions and millions of dollars invested in getting you to eat more crap.

So, where should you get your sugars? Here's an idea: from whole food (which you can get at many places besides the overpriced Whole Foods Market). If you crave something sweet, try eating a piece of fruit. I remember when I was growing up there was always a fruit bowl around. Keep some fruit around all the time and you'll always have sweetness. Another thing you can do is chew your whole-grain rice more completely. Sugars are simple carbohydrates. When you chew your rice or sweet potato or whatever you prefer, salivary amylase breaks down starch into sugar. If you chew incompletely, you don't get the benefit of the full digestive process.

Sweetness is important. In Chinese medicine, the sweet flavor is associated with the earth phase, which in turn relates to the spleen, pancreas, stomach, and the colors yellow and orange. A nice piece of fruit for dessert lifts the digestive energy, or spleen qi.

So don't run from sweetness - run from added sugars both natural and artificial! Most of you have no need of them. By habit many of us are used to eating much more sugar than we need. If you can break the habit, you'll be much healthier!

Medical Music

In traditional Chinese natural science, one way of explaining the universe is through a dynamic cycle of five phases - wood, fire, earth, metal and water. Everything in the universe (and therefore everything in your body) is a manifestation of the interrelationship of these five elements. As TCM students, we memorize certain associations to help us get a grasp of this concept. For instance, the fire element is associated with the Heart and Small Intestine organs, the emotion joy, the direction south, the color red, and so on.

One of the more neglected aspects of our medicine is using the power of these traditional associations as an adjunct to acupuncture and herbal therapy. For instance, if someone is suffering from Liver issues, you might advise them to face west or even take a walk heading west for a certain amount of time each day. More commonly, you might prescribe your patients a CD of traditional Chinese music that balances one or more organ systems via the five phase system. In the Yosan clinic, there is a CD floating around that helps balance the Wood element, but there are also CDs for the other four phases, as well as music that balances all five elements.

Today I caught the end of a story on the radio about music that is patterned after one's own brain waves. From what I heard, it is extremely helpful for people with insomnia, as effective as Ambien without all the scary side effects. The process goes like this: they take a scan of your brain waves and then make a custom designed CD with music composed specifically for you. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some overlap with traditional Chinese music therapy - maybe the brain wave scan is a way of determining your five element disharmonies, and the music a way of setting them right.

If you're in New York City, go get your own brain CD!