Traditional Chinese Medicine Dietary Therapy - Traditional Chinese medicine - Natural sweeteners
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In Chinese medicine, because we talk about the different flavors and how they associate
with the organs and sweet being the main flavor that affects the energetic spleen, its important
to know how sweeteners may affect us. So we don't want too much, too strong and we don't
want too little of anything. So we talk about natural sweeteners and what may be the best.
In actuality, in Chinese medicine, anything that is extracted and intensified and sweetened
is really isn't the best thing for us. So there's debate as to whether the brown sugar
or the white sugar or whether the cactus sugar or even the natural sweeteners like Stevia,
how they may effect us. Ultimately if they're very, very sweet and even more sweet than
sugar, we find that it?s detrimental over time. So, from a Chinese perspective, we want
to minimize our sweeteners because we don't want to overreact on the spleen causing a
dysfunction in the chi and ultimately hurting our immune system and our digestive function.
But from a more practical standpoint, we do like our sweeteners and so in general I recommend
that people use Stevia in particular from a natural perspective grow the plant yourself
and use the fresh leaf. The more that we extract things, the more we refine them, the less
nutrients and the greater the potential for harm both from an energetic perspective as
well as a truth perspective of extracting chemicals.
