General Dietary Recommendations in Skin Conditions
1. Always eat breakfast in the morning! It is ideal to drink the Beverage of Chinese sages (code 900) along with millet or cornmeal porridge, flavoured with cinnamon and fruit.
2. The greatest sinner and creator of dampness and heat nowadays is sugar,in any form. Thus, even brown sugar, although it is unrefined, which means that it contains more minerals and trace elements, but it is still a disaccharide (beet sugar, sucrose), which is cleaved into 2 monosaccharides – glucose (grape sugar) and fructose (fruit sugar). After cell saturation, glucose is stored (with the help of insulin) as storage glycogen, and fructose, when in excess, is deposited directly into the liver as fat storage and our body is swelling cheerfully … Without us realizing it, sugars are contained in a variety of food and beverages, not only in confectionery, but even e.g. in bread. Particularly concentrations of sugars in beverages are considerable! Grape sugar, glucose (contained even in e.g. honey) matters, just as fruit sugar, fructose, and therefore, also fruit juices. We can even paraphrase: Traditional Chinese Medicine warns – sweetening harms your health and causes dampness and heat in your body! Sugar can be generally successfully replaced by barley malt, Sladěnka, or Sladovit from health food stores or by good-quality dried fruit (e.g. unsulphured raisins or dried apples). More can be found on our website in the article Sugar not only from perspective of Chinese medicine.
3. Milk and dairy products from pasteurized cow´s milk should be avoided in case of skin conditions. It is just the process of pasteurization, what matters (and sterilization and homogenization and emulsification and flavourings and …), what makes the food unnatural for our bodies and hard to digest, causing ultimately dampness and heat again. However, you can use goat’s and ewe’s milk, as well as cow´s milk in reasonable quantities, but unpasteurized (i.e. directly from domestic sources, either from cows or from container). We do not need to worry about calcium deficiency, because animal calcium from pasteurized products is poorly absorbed anyhow and can be substituted by sufficient supply of vegetable calcium from green vegetables, especially legumes, sprouts, lettuce, etc.
4. Absolutely inappropriate is black coffee, hot and pungent spices (pepper, chilli, dried ginger, clove), as well as grilled, fried, and fatty foods. Also any alcohol adds fuel to the fire and always increases internal, in our case the already high heat. Beer warms least (if any, so unpasteurized, from a tank), then wine, and hard liquor most. Conversely green tea cools, thus it is recommended not only in skin conditions during the day, to be sipped tepid, whereas the best is the Beverage of five stars (code 850), which drains the heat from the inside of the stomach and intestines and cleans heat toxins from blood, thus cools the blood.
5. Pastries, bread, and pasta should be eaten sparingly, mainly because of gluten and yeasts, which swell up the already incurred dampness and heat to even greater ferment. If anything, then rye bread (preferably sourdough) and wholemeal egg-free pasta from amaranth, corn, as well as wholemeal rice and polenta are very suitable. Sausages, canned food, fast food (hamburgers) are also warming and strongly advised against in these conditions, as well as red meat (particularly lamb, venison, and beef).
6. It seems to you that, after elimination of these foods and drinks, your diet shrank only to “dry water”? Absolutely not! There is a lot of goodies in reserve, sometimes yet unknown for you, such as white fish, domestic animals (rabbits, poultry), a plethora of green vegetables, legumes, rice, polenta, soya (tofu, tempeh, etc.). Simply, imagination is not limited in this case, and if so, go to the nearest good vegetarian restaurant or health food store with delicious cooking, and you will find that it is something about even that diet. You will get to know new dishes and new tastes and most importantly – you will begin to feel better and gradually also your health will improve, not only in case of skin conditions. Not to mention shopping at farmers’ markets and genuine organic products, if you do not produce them yourselves at home, which is always the best.