The Tao of Healthy Eating: Dietary Wisdom According to Traditional Chinese Medicine [Paperback]

Bob Flaws (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1999 | ISBN-10: 0936185929 | ISBN-13: 978-0936185927 | Edition: 2nd

Chinese dietary therapy is one of the most important aspects of Chinese medicine. The Tao of Healthy Eating illuminates the theory and practice of Chinese dietary therapy with emphasis on the concerns and attitudes of Westerners. Commonsense metaphors explain basic Chinese medical theories and their application in preventive and remedial dietary therapy. It features a clear description of the Chinese medical understanding of digestion and all the practical implications if this for day-to-day diet. Issues of Western interest are discussed, such as raw versus cooked foods, high cholesterol, food allergies, and candidacies. It includes the Chinese medical descriptions of 200 Western food and similar information on vitamins, minerals, and amino acids.
NEW features in the SECOND EDITION include Chinese characters and pinyin throughout the text for important terms. Not one, but several healthy eating pyramids for different dietary styles. New discussions of the modern Western diet, trans-fat, corn syrup, pesticides, and chemical additives. Recipes for pattern discriminations and a concise history of Chinese dietary therapy.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

This is a best seller for us at the moment. We have more sales of this title than any other. It is an easy to understand beginning approach to diet. (September, 1998)

From the Author

This is one of my favorite books. I wrote it specifically to answer all the most frequently asked questions my patients ask me regarding diet. Improper diet is probably the leading cause of disease in patients seeking help from acupuncturists and professional practitioners of Chinese medicine in the West today. If the diet is not regulated for the individual, no amount of acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine will get a complete and lasting treatment effect. Therefore, it is vitally important that patients seeking acupuncture and Chinese medical treatment understand both the importance of a good diet and how to select foods for their particular pattern of imbalance. This book can also be used by anyone interested in achieving a higher level of health through modifying their diet. It seems that every few months someone comes out with a new wonder diet that supposedly will cure everyone's ills. Often these diets disappear in a matter of another few months. Chinese medicine is the oldest, continuously professionally practiced, literate, secular medicine in the world today, and its theories on a healthy diet have been honed and tested by more than 100 generations of highly trained and intelligent professional practitioners. In other words, Chinese dietary therapy has stood the test of time.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 148 pages
• Publisher: Blue Poppy Press; 2nd edition (July 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0936185929
• ISBN-13: 978-0936185927
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #28,479 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bob Flaws is the most prolific writer on Chinese medicine in the English language. He is author, translator, or editor of over 80 books on Chinese medicine and scores of articles published in both professional journals and the popular press. Among his other credits, Bob is a past president and lifetime fellow of the Acupuncture Association of Colorado, a fellow and director of the National Academy of Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine as well as a past editor of that association's quarterly journal, a founder of the Council of Oriental Medical Publishers, and the founder of Blue Poppy Enterprises. Bob is also the co-author and co-director of an NIH-funded research project working with AIDS-related peripheral neuropathy.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

80 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book on healing I've seen in a while, October 21, 2005

By 

Moe Webster (Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Tao of Healthy Eating: Dietary Wisdom According to Traditional Chinese Medicine (Paperback)

In this world of fluff and sound bites, this book says it all without sacrificing space. For those that need the big picture in order to grasp a concept, this is your "in" into Chinese dietary rules, as well as being the answer to most of what ails us. This is the book you read BEFORE you go see an accupuncturist, and the one that keeps you going back to measure your progress.

It takes quite a book to knock my socks off, and this one left me standing naked. This is the book that I want to put the in the hands of all those people who get on the Atkins diet and within a year later hit a wall, from the excess of cold and damp foods. This book stresses the importance of balance and the problems that excess or lack of restraint can cause to health. Even though there's not a recipe in the book, it's the important book that brings understand to the quality of the energy of food, that's perhaps of greater value even than it's carb or protein content. After reading this book, I immediately took all the other Chinese books out of the bookcase combing them for recipes. With my internal lights switched on, the importance of various foods stood out and made sense as they never had before.

As Chinese medicine dictates, each food and emotion enters a channel in the body, not unlike a river. And like salmon that swim out to sea for years only to return to an exact spawning ground located in a tiny freshwater creek, so do our foods and emotions nourish our bodies in very specific and necessary ways. Excessive use of cooling foods is brought home in his section on Spleen Vacuity and dampness. For those dealing with long term food allergies, candida, and obesity (that should cover about 4 out of 5 people, if the current polls mean anything), there's salvation in this book. The quality of the food in creating a energy in the body is far more important to healing, than it's perhaps it's protein values. Reading on you'll find that even reducing protein due to inabsorbtion is probably lifesaving.

My big epiphany came as I realized that what The Tao of Healthy Eating suggests, is a heart happy diet. In fact, all that is suggested to reduce spleen dampness in Chinese remedial therapy, is exactly what produces a happy heart. And as I thumbed through the now famous by Ophrah's endorsement Perricone Promise, a book on Beauty and Longevity by an expensive MD, I had to laugh to myself. All the dietary recommendations of the Perricone diet, can be found within this tiny book of Bob Flaws, the Tao of Healthy Eating! I even renamed Perricone's book, the Happy Spleen diet book, with a new label that I made and taped to the cover. Because for those that chase beauty creams and wonder herbs, the shortest way to tighter, firmer wrinkle free skin, is simply this: Reduce stress and take care of your spleen. Nothing ages you faster than our fast food, modern, highly cooling and phlegm producing diets in solidifying and packing on the inches of girth. If truth matters as much as beauty, then learn the Tao of Healthy Eating and change your life, and your appearance too!

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Invaluable dietary advice, November 28, 2001

By 

kyara - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Tao of Healthy Eating: Dietary Wisdom According to Traditional Chinese Medicine (Paperback)

Bob Flaw's book "The Tao of Healthy Eating" applies Chinese wisdom to modern Western eating habits and food-related health problems such as food allergies, candidiasis, cholesterol, and obesity. Included is a list of 150 foods with their characteristics in terms of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The strength of this book lies in its explanation of how and why certain foods are healthy, not healthy or have certain effects. After reading this book you will certainly think twice before reaching for a cup of coffee! I would, however, have liked to have seen a few examples of case studies of how to apply this valuable information.

One reviewer complained that the author self-promotes his other books. That is true. And the reason is that in his books Bob Flaws takes one topic within TCM and focuses on that to help readers new to this vast field appreciate one small aspect without being overwhelmed. And a natural consequence is to point the reader to books on related areas, which he has written about - and we should be very grateful for this because Bob Flaws is a very experienced and successful TCM practitioner. If I have one complaint about his books, it is that they seem a little dry. It would be nice to see a more user-friendly page design including a few illustrations here and there, with summaries as appropriate to help the reader consolidate the information in their heads.

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Text for General Readership, March 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Tao of Healthy Eating: Dietary Wisdom According to Traditional Chinese Medicine (Paperback)

Personally, I found this book extremely well written for the audience it was intended and the purpose its author set for it. I liked its conversational tone. It made a complex subject clear and simple to understand. In fact, I think Bob Flaws is one of the best writers out there on Chinese medicine, especially for lay people. I often recommend this book to my patients with questions on Chinese dietary therapy. This book was not meant to be an exhaustive professional discussion of this topic. I also think the author covered the types of health care issues American patients most frequently ask about. If another reviwer has a problem with such popular diagnoses as candidiasis, take that up with the American public. In short, I would strongly recommend this book to any Westerner who wants to understand the distilled essence of Chinese medical dietary therapy.