[g_podcast id="10508372"]
Today I'm talking to the lovely TCM nutrition expert Anna Reschreiter about cooling foods for the hot season.
Anna Reschreiter is a nutrition expert based on the 5 elements of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM for short). She shows us the incredibly ingenious effect that the simplest FOOD products have on our physical and mental health - and how you can make clever use of the thousands of years of TCM knowledge. Simple and suitable for everyday use.
In this interview, Anna and Julia talk about why TCM not only works in Asia, but why this knowledge can also be applied here for us and to our circumstances.
In this interview, we also focused a little on which foods can cool you down in summer, how you can preserve your precious bodily fluids even in summer and how you can prevent digestive problems caused by eating food that is too cold.
Finally, Anna also reveals her super simple and super effective TCM tip for headaches, which you should definitely try if you suffer from them, because the feedback is super promising. So be sure to stay tuned until the end.
Today I have the lovely Anna Reschreiter as my guest. Hello Anna!
Anna, you are a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) specialist. That sounds kind of old, I'm thinking of Chinese monasteries. Is it contemporary to deal with it?
Anna: I think it's more contemporary than ever before. It's very original. Not only is it old, but the knowledge that is available to us is actually thousands of years old.
I think it's really smart and clever to take the knowledge that is thousands of years old, which still works, and combine it with our new knowledge.
Combining all this knowledge and, for me, that includes the old knowledge. For me, TCM is also the knowledge of a grandmother - who knew why she sprinkled rosemary over rosemary potatoes or why she sprinkled caraway seeds over roast caraway. That's also TCM for me.
Is it important that it's Chinese? Or is it ultimately a kind of experiential medicine?
Anna: It is absolutely an experiential medicine! We have the same, but unfortunately it was lost back then due to the burning of witches and disbelief.
There is a lot of herbal knowledge and knowledge about our food, the tides, the moon and so on. However, it was demonized (in the truest sense of the word) in our country, but not in China. It was passed on there. The masters memorize these old books and so the knowledge is passed on from one person to the next.
So can you compare European and Chinese knowledge? Is it similar?
Anna: Yes, the knowledge is very similar. Certainly, what is available to us through TCM is much more extensive. It is also influenced by Daoism and Buddhism and there are so many different directions and sources of knowledge that flow into it.
It's not just nutrition that we deal with. There is also acupuncture, knowledge of the meridians, knowledge of astrology. It's very, very extensive! It's simply available to us and my job is to bring this millennia-old knowledge across in a modern, simple and everyday way.
We are not Chinese, we do not live in China. It would be foolish if we only used Chinese herbs as a guide when we cook. We have so many wonderful herbs available to us that grow all around us.
Hildegard von Bingen once said: "What grows around us makes us healthy!". It's clever to translate this knowledge!
And of course it's brilliant if you can translate it for us so that we can apply it in our everyday lives! I think some people are afraid that they won't be able to put it into practice. Then it's worth its weight in gold when someone like you picks out the right things and presents them in a way that's suitable for everyday use.
Anna: That's actually the point. It shouldn't be complicated! You can present any knowledge in a complicated and scientific way, but that's no good. You do it in such a way that you get things across very clearly so that people can put it into practice straight away.
Exactly, that's my goal too. Of course, there are also people who find it too simple, but the majority are happy that I explain it very simply.
Anna: If you read a book, or a blog, or find out about something - everything is clear and logical anyway. That's wonderful, but putting it into practice is the next thing. Having the knowledge is nice, but not putting it into practice is wasted knowledge.
One thing that stands out for me in TCM is the knowledge of "how food works in the body" - thermally speaking, what warms and what cools. And because it's so hot right now, that would be a great topic. I think many people unconsciously eat things that have exactly the opposite effect to what they want.
And that applies to both seasons (hot and cold). We often eat exactly what is not in season. The classic is strawberries in winter. It makes no sense at all, because strawberries have a cooling effect. They also don't taste good because they are imported.
We want to warm ourselves up in winter, not cool ourselves down! Just like tropical fruits - oranges and mandarins, which are eaten a lot in winter! They are wonderful in summer, they are refreshing and cooling.
What can you do in summer if you suffer from the heat?
Anna: We have wonderful foods from nature. I always like to emphasize the LIFE in the foods that accompany us beautifully through the summer. These are all the fruits, including tropical fruits. The tropical fruits grow where it's hot and they cool people down.
Enjoying melons in summer is great! We have berries, apples, apricots - we have so much fruit! Fruit and berries are basically cooling from a thermal point of view. The sourness in berries is good in that we lose precious bodily fluids through sweating and sour draws us together. Sour helps us to keep the precious bodily fluids in the body.
Why are the precious bodily fluids so important in summer?
Anna: I always compare it to the coolant in a car. The precious bodily fluids are like when I add coolant to my car. It cools my car and that's what our body is all about.
All the summer vegetables are ripe at the moment (tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis, eggplants etc.). We should enjoy these, especially in summer! What is growing now in summer is what is good for us!
Vegetables refresh us, cool us down and have lots of water. These are the most important things we like to eat in summer. Dairy products are always eaten with pleasure, even in summer. TCM does not demonize any foods! It always depends on the quantity and who eats it when and in what physical condition.
Why am I saying this about dairy products in particular? Because TCM recommends that these products should be reduced as much as possible. Milk and dairy products quickly produce mucus, which causes tiredness, sluggishness, blemished skin, cellulite and obesity. However, in summer a yoghurt with berries or melon (home-made) with perhaps a little soda is of course very refreshing.
In terms of intestinal health, I also recommend eating less dairy products and even leaving them out at the beginning when you are changing your bowel habits. I'm always a bit cautious about that. Do you know what coconut yogurt or almond milk is like? Is that also more cooling?
Anna: It's more neutral in terms of thermals than cow's milk. The problem with cow's milk is that it's mucilaginous. It's not a drink, we often forget that. We often drink cafe lattes in the morning, at work, in the afternoon, with a friend - that would be four cafe lattes a day. Just how much milk is in the cafe latte and then we might use the milk for something else if we want to make a pudding in the evening. I have people in my practice who drink half a liter to 1 liter of milk a day!!! That's far too much!
I often find that many people don't even realize how much they can consume in a day.
Anna: And that's where TCM and modern knowledge play a huge role. On the one hand, the Western diet says that dairy products are very healthy and TCM says that it's nonsense. If you are too cold and tend to be tired, have stomach ache etc., dairy products are not for you!
What do you think about using ice cubes for drinks or eating lots of ice?
Anna: Put a few ice cubes in your drink every now and then, go for an ice cream every now and then, absolutely! When it's hot, really enjoy the ice cream and eat it without feeling guilty! But not once a day, or every 2 days. We eat too much of these things and I don't think it's smart to cool every drink with ice cubes.
It's really about not letting your digestive system cool down completely, even in summer. As soon as the digestive tract gets cold, the food stays in the middle of the intestine for longer, starts to ferment at some point and then you have abdominal pain and a tendency to diarrhea. I also recommend eating something cooked in summer.
One more thing: if I drink every drink ice cold in summer, the body first has to bring the cold liquid up to operating temperature. That means warming up. And when the body starts to warm up, I get hot. My warming process heats me up. That's why Arabs and Asians etc. like to drink lukewarm tea. I recommend peppermint tea, lemon balm tea, camomile tea, slightly acidic teas (hibiscus, rosehip).
Fermented things like kombucha or fermented carrots should be good in summer, right?
Anna: Absolutely! Not only for the gut bacteria and for digestion, but also because of the slightly sour taste, which keeps the precious bodily juices in the body.
So to summarize:
Anna: Yes, I would. I see breakfast as the most important meal to start the day and give your body the energy and strength it needs in the morning. I always recommend preparing it in the evening if you like porridge, for example. Then you only need to heat it up to a ready-to-eat temperature in the morning and don't have to cook it in the morning and wait for it to cool down.
And if you don't want it to be so hot, you don't necessarily have to use rolled oats, because cereals also have different temperatures. Oats are the warmest cereal. If you eat in rotation or are in a very hot phase, you can also use spelt flakes or millet flakes.
But grains such as barley, spelt, couscous or quinoa are also wonderful as a small cooked component in a cooling salad, for example. Salad with tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchinis cools, refreshes, builds up precious body juices and the cooked grain strengthens the center and prevents my digestive fire from cooling down.
In my course, I always recommend using cooked vegetables at the beginning because raw food upsets the intestines a little. You could very well cook tomatoes and zucchinis and then eat them cold.
Anna: Exactly, or grill them. Peppers, zucchinis, tomatoes, but also the typical grilled vegetables. Or if you're grilling in the evening, grill a little more and save it for the next day and eat it with pulses. I always have chickpeas and kidney beans in a jar from an organic brand at home. Then I have them already cooked and ready to add to the salad.
Are there any spices that you can add that don't have a warming or cooling effect?
Anna: We like to eat porridge with cinnamon, cloves and/or star anise. This is heating and I would avoid it especially if we have heat symptoms. Nutmeg, garlic and onions - which are often found in barbecue sauce - are just as heating.
Vanilla, grated and dried orange peel (also helps the digestive tract) and cardamom are wonderful additions to porridge in summer. In the west, we tend to be wet. We snack a lot, we eat a lot of bread, a lot of pasta, a lot of dairy products - it all creates wetness. Cardamom is something where you should really add a little breeze everywhere because cardamom transforms that wetness into precious bodily juices. When we cook cocoa, make pudding, prepare any dessert, we should always add a little cardamom.
So the powder, not the capsules?
Anna: The capsules are great to cook with water! Crush two capsules and then boil them in a liter of water to make cardamom water. That's different from drinking tap water all the time. The powder is great for adding to cooked desserts.
And to come back to your question about herbs - what we often have in the garden or at the markets is peppermint. Peppermint is a very cooling and refreshing herb. You can use it very individually, also for fish dishes or for salads. Thyme, rosemary and marjoram are all spices that strengthen our digestion and don't heat up too much.
You mentioned grilled meat, which is very popular in summer. Does it have a heating effect?
Anna: Yes, very much! Especially lamb. Lamb and shrimps are the hottest animal products we can do to our bodies. I say this explicitly because people who have heat symptoms (many with skin problems such as neurodermatitis) can see the heat on their skin. They have to be really careful with it. This grilling process alone is very heating and then possibly adding a garlic sauce and a glass of red wine is the "heat super gau" for the body.
This also affects migraine patients! Migraine patients react very strongly to hot products. You might eat a prawn skewer with lamb ribs and drink a glass of red wine with it and then get a migraine attack!
We don't have to give up meat! Meat is also a wonderful thing from a TCM perspective! It builds up blood, it builds up precious bodily fluids, it is a great source of protein, gives us strength and energy, strengthens us.
What I can highly recommend when barbecuing is chicken. It's lighter and doesn't heat up so much. Pork is always a bit problematic from my point of view. Without wanting to step on anyone's toes, the product quality of meat in Germany is even worse than in many other countries.
If you know a good organic farmer, beef and pork are good. What I can highly recommend if you like to have a drink at the barbecue (especially when it's hot at night, women with menopausal symptoms etc.) is to have a glass of beer in the evening! This can also be non-alcoholic. Beer is the most cooling and most precious alcoholic drink available to us! Even if we like to drink a white wine spritzer in the evening, alcohol is heating.
I have two more questions. Curry is often eaten in hot countries - is it also cooling even though it is spicy? Or what about spicy food in general?
Anna: In many Asian countries, where it's hot and humid, people eat a lot of fatty, hot food. If I go there now and say that they shouldn't eat so much greasy food, it's like the Chinese standing up in our house and taking away our bread.
Bread, noodles and sweets are not good for us, and in these hot and humid countries, these greasy, spicy foods are often not good for people either. Just as we see these cold and wet symptoms here, we see a lot of hot and wet symptoms there.
We often attract exactly what we have inside us. People who tend to be cold and wet like to snack. And it's exactly the same in different countries. If you have wetness and heat in your body, you should avoid those meaty, greasy, hot foods there and eat a vegetarian/vegan and very light diet and even eliminate wetness before you travel to that country. I have a course called 'Detox without a diet', which is a great way to eliminate water from the body.
What are the symptoms of having too much water in the body? Is water retention one of them?
Anna: Also, exactly. Or tiredness. When we have a cold and our nose is running, our ears and sinuses are blocked - that's wetness. We cough it out, we blow our nose a lot. It's all this mucus and wetness that is obviously visible in our body. We feel like we're wrapped in absorbent cotton when we're sick and that's how our body feels. We don't see the wetness obviously, but the body is tired because of the wetness. It's contained, we're tired after eating, we could sleep all the time.
Depending on where the deposits are, we know in TCM which energy system and organ system is particularly weakened. We work with tongue diagnosis. It shows If it's wide and has teeth marks on the side, it's because it's wet. It not only makes us wide, but also our tongue. When we sleep, our tongue hits our teeth and we then have these teeth marks on the left and right sides of our tongue.
If we stop eating bread, pasta, sweets, bananas and dairy products for a while, these teeth marks disappear. This is the simplest test. Large-pored skin, blackheads and blemished skin are also symptoms of oozing.
You mentioned migraines earlier. Is that also a sign of too much heat?
Anna: Yes. Migraines are often caused by liver energy and this heat rises in the body. It's the same in the summer heat. When we get hot, people also freak out more quickly. Heat rises, it's always warmer at the top than at the bottom. Just like when you turn up the heating in winter. The same thing happens in our bodies. The heat rises and collects in the head, then we explode - some because they are at a red light, others because of a headache. Headaches are mostly heat symptoms! There are also types of headache that come from wetness, but most migraines come from the heat.
Would you like to share the recipe you told me in the preliminary talk?
Anna: I really like to recommend celery for headaches! You can boil it over and over again to do something to combat the heat - to channel it down, so to speak. It calms the mind. We do go to the toilet more often because celery has a draining effect. You take half a stalk, cut it into slices and boil the celery in half a liter of water for 5 minutes. Then you drink the water throughout the day and you can also eat the celery. The other day I had a bad headache, so I boiled a whole stalk and drank the water. It helps! I'm not allowed to make any promises of cures, but I can see from the people who drink it that it helps.
I can start an appeal right now. If you hear it now and have tried it, let us know in the follow-up notes or on Facebook if it worked!
I've also posted this on my Instagram account if you want to read about it.
Dear Anna, that was so much useful information! Where can people find you if they want to find out more about you?
Anna: I can be found online at www.annatsu.at where you can find everything about me and my story, my online courses and e-books.
On Facebook under Anna Reschreiter, on Instagram you can also find me under Anna Reschreiter.
I launchedmy podcast in February 2019, it's called "High five for your healthy diet" and you can already find lots of episodes about TCM nutrition there.
Very nice. Who knows, maybe we'll have to do a follow-up when it's cold again. If you have the time and inclination, we can do it! Is there anything else you'd like to mention at the end?
Anna: I am a mother of a young son and what is always very important for me to pass on to mothers is to make sure that they look after their son as much as possible. Warm up the child's tummy well. Even if it's hot, not going out for ice cream with the kids every day or slipping them yoghurt with banana every day.
Especially not in winter, when it's cold and the kids are constantly sick anyway. And giving all that frozen, deep-frozen, pre-cooked food to babies - that makes my heart bleed! That's thermally cold!
Soy milk has no place with babies and toddlers either! It is the thermally coldest cereal milk. Those are my final words as a mom when it comes to thermals. Despite what you have learned from me, don't stress! Stress generates heat. Just take it easy and don't focus too much on your diet! Really enjoy it too, pleasure brings us to our center and we need that in summer too.
Thank you so much for this great information!
These are the links to the episode:
Anna's website: https://www.annatsu.at
Anna's podcast "High five for your healthy diet": https://www.annatsu.at/kategorie/podcast/
Anna's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Annatsu/
Anna's Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/annatsu_tcmernaehrung/
Anna's online course "Detox without diet": https://www.annatsu.at/detox-ohne-diaet/
Now I recommend you subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you like what you hear, I really appreciate a review on iTunes or Apple Podcast. Because these reviews also help other people find the podcast so we can spread the knowledge about gut and health more.
Today I'm talking to the lovely TCM nutrition expert Anna Reschreiter about cooling foods for the hot season.
Anna Reschreiter is a nutrition expert based on the 5 elements of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM for short). She shows us the incredibly ingenious effect that the simplest FOOD products have on our physical and mental health - and how you can make clever use of the thousands of years of TCM knowledge. Simple and suitable for everyday use.
In this interview, Anna and Julia talk about why TCM not only works in Asia, but why this knowledge can also be applied here for us and to our circumstances.
In this interview, we also focused a little on which foods can cool you down in summer, how you can preserve your precious bodily fluids even in summer and how you can prevent digestive problems caused by eating food that is too cold.
Finally, Anna also reveals her super simple and super effective TCM tip for headaches, which you should definitely try if you suffer from them, because the feedback is super promising. So be sure to stay tuned until the end.
TCM - a complex millennia-old knowledge
Today I have the lovely Anna Reschreiter as my guest. Hello Anna!
Anna, you are a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) specialist. That sounds kind of old, I'm thinking of Chinese monasteries. Is it contemporary to deal with it?
Anna: I think it's more contemporary than ever before. It's very original. Not only is it old, but the knowledge that is available to us is actually thousands of years old.
I think it's really smart and clever to take the knowledge that is thousands of years old, which still works, and combine it with our new knowledge.
Combining all this knowledge and, for me, that includes the old knowledge. For me, TCM is also the knowledge of a grandmother - who knew why she sprinkled rosemary over rosemary potatoes or why she sprinkled caraway seeds over roast caraway. That's also TCM for me.
Is it important that it's Chinese? Or is it ultimately a kind of experiential medicine?
Anna: It is absolutely an experiential medicine! We have the same, but unfortunately it was lost back then due to the burning of witches and disbelief.
There is a lot of herbal knowledge and knowledge about our food, the tides, the moon and so on. However, it was demonized (in the truest sense of the word) in our country, but not in China. It was passed on there. The masters memorize these old books and so the knowledge is passed on from one person to the next.
So can you compare European and Chinese knowledge? Is it similar?
Anna: Yes, the knowledge is very similar. Certainly, what is available to us through TCM is much more extensive. It is also influenced by Daoism and Buddhism and there are so many different directions and sources of knowledge that flow into it.
It's not just nutrition that we deal with. There is also acupuncture, knowledge of the meridians, knowledge of astrology. It's very, very extensive! It's simply available to us and my job is to bring this millennia-old knowledge across in a modern, simple and everyday way.
"What grows around us makes us healthy!"
We are not Chinese, we do not live in China. It would be foolish if we only used Chinese herbs as a guide when we cook. We have so many wonderful herbs available to us that grow all around us.
Hildegard von Bingen once said: "What grows around us makes us healthy!". It's clever to translate this knowledge!
And of course it's brilliant if you can translate it for us so that we can apply it in our everyday lives! I think some people are afraid that they won't be able to put it into practice. Then it's worth its weight in gold when someone like you picks out the right things and presents them in a way that's suitable for everyday use.
Anna: That's actually the point. It shouldn't be complicated! You can present any knowledge in a complicated and scientific way, but that's no good. You do it in such a way that you get things across very clearly so that people can put it into practice straight away.
Exactly, that's my goal too. Of course, there are also people who find it too simple, but the majority are happy that I explain it very simply.
How food affects the body in the cold and hot seasons
Anna: If you read a book, or a blog, or find out about something - everything is clear and logical anyway. That's wonderful, but putting it into practice is the next thing. Having the knowledge is nice, but not putting it into practice is wasted knowledge.
One thing that stands out for me in TCM is the knowledge of "how food works in the body" - thermally speaking, what warms and what cools. And because it's so hot right now, that would be a great topic. I think many people unconsciously eat things that have exactly the opposite effect to what they want.
And that applies to both seasons (hot and cold). We often eat exactly what is not in season. The classic is strawberries in winter. It makes no sense at all, because strawberries have a cooling effect. They also don't taste good because they are imported.
We want to warm ourselves up in winter, not cool ourselves down! Just like tropical fruits - oranges and mandarins, which are eaten a lot in winter! They are wonderful in summer, they are refreshing and cooling.
Nutritional advice for hot days
What can you do in summer if you suffer from the heat?
Anna: We have wonderful foods from nature. I always like to emphasize the LIFE in the foods that accompany us beautifully through the summer. These are all the fruits, including tropical fruits. The tropical fruits grow where it's hot and they cool people down.
Enjoying melons in summer is great! We have berries, apples, apricots - we have so much fruit! Fruit and berries are basically cooling from a thermal point of view. The sourness in berries is good in that we lose precious bodily fluids through sweating and sour draws us together. Sour helps us to keep the precious bodily fluids in the body.
Why are the precious bodily fluids so important in summer?
Anna: I always compare it to the coolant in a car. The precious bodily fluids are like when I add coolant to my car. It cools my car and that's what our body is all about.
All the summer vegetables are ripe at the moment (tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis, eggplants etc.). We should enjoy these, especially in summer! What is growing now in summer is what is good for us!
Vegetables refresh us, cool us down and have lots of water. These are the most important things we like to eat in summer. Dairy products are always eaten with pleasure, even in summer. TCM does not demonize any foods! It always depends on the quantity and who eats it when and in what physical condition.
Why am I saying this about dairy products in particular? Because TCM recommends that these products should be reduced as much as possible. Milk and dairy products quickly produce mucus, which causes tiredness, sluggishness, blemished skin, cellulite and obesity. However, in summer a yoghurt with berries or melon (home-made) with perhaps a little soda is of course very refreshing.
How to prevent digestive problems from cold food
In terms of intestinal health, I also recommend eating less dairy products and even leaving them out at the beginning when you are changing your bowel habits. I'm always a bit cautious about that. Do you know what coconut yogurt or almond milk is like? Is that also more cooling?
Anna: It's more neutral in terms of thermals than cow's milk. The problem with cow's milk is that it's mucilaginous. It's not a drink, we often forget that. We often drink cafe lattes in the morning, at work, in the afternoon, with a friend - that would be four cafe lattes a day. Just how much milk is in the cafe latte and then we might use the milk for something else if we want to make a pudding in the evening. I have people in my practice who drink half a liter to 1 liter of milk a day!!! That's far too much!
I often find that many people don't even realize how much they can consume in a day.
Anna: And that's where TCM and modern knowledge play a huge role. On the one hand, the Western diet says that dairy products are very healthy and TCM says that it's nonsense. If you are too cold and tend to be tired, have stomach ache etc., dairy products are not for you!
What do you think about using ice cubes for drinks or eating lots of ice?
Anna: Put a few ice cubes in your drink every now and then, go for an ice cream every now and then, absolutely! When it's hot, really enjoy the ice cream and eat it without feeling guilty! But not once a day, or every 2 days. We eat too much of these things and I don't think it's smart to cool every drink with ice cubes.
It's really about not letting your digestive system cool down completely, even in summer. As soon as the digestive tract gets cold, the food stays in the middle of the intestine for longer, starts to ferment at some point and then you have abdominal pain and a tendency to diarrhea. I also recommend eating something cooked in summer.
One more thing: if I drink every drink ice cold in summer, the body first has to bring the cold liquid up to operating temperature. That means warming up. And when the body starts to warm up, I get hot. My warming process heats me up. That's why Arabs and Asians etc. like to drink lukewarm tea. I recommend peppermint tea, lemon balm tea, camomile tea, slightly acidic teas (hibiscus, rosehip).
Fermented things like kombucha or fermented carrots should be good in summer, right?
Anna: Absolutely! Not only for the gut bacteria and for digestion, but also because of the slightly sour taste, which keeps the precious bodily juices in the body.
So to summarize:
- pay attention to seasonality because nature shows us what we should eat.
- don't chill everything too much
- cooked things from time to time eat - even in the morning? Would you recommend having a hot breakfast in the morning?
Anna: Yes, I would. I see breakfast as the most important meal to start the day and give your body the energy and strength it needs in the morning. I always recommend preparing it in the evening if you like porridge, for example. Then you only need to heat it up to a ready-to-eat temperature in the morning and don't have to cook it in the morning and wait for it to cool down.
And if you don't want it to be so hot, you don't necessarily have to use rolled oats, because cereals also have different temperatures. Oats are the warmest cereal. If you eat in rotation or are in a very hot phase, you can also use spelt flakes or millet flakes.
But grains such as barley, spelt, couscous or quinoa are also wonderful as a small cooked component in a cooling salad, for example. Salad with tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchinis cools, refreshes, builds up precious body juices and the cooked grain strengthens the center and prevents my digestive fire from cooling down.
Why herbs and spices are important in TCM
In my course, I always recommend using cooked vegetables at the beginning because raw food upsets the intestines a little. You could very well cook tomatoes and zucchinis and then eat them cold.
Anna: Exactly, or grill them. Peppers, zucchinis, tomatoes, but also the typical grilled vegetables. Or if you're grilling in the evening, grill a little more and save it for the next day and eat it with pulses. I always have chickpeas and kidney beans in a jar from an organic brand at home. Then I have them already cooked and ready to add to the salad.
Are there any spices that you can add that don't have a warming or cooling effect?
Anna: We like to eat porridge with cinnamon, cloves and/or star anise. This is heating and I would avoid it especially if we have heat symptoms. Nutmeg, garlic and onions - which are often found in barbecue sauce - are just as heating.
Vanilla, grated and dried orange peel (also helps the digestive tract) and cardamom are wonderful additions to porridge in summer. In the west, we tend to be wet. We snack a lot, we eat a lot of bread, a lot of pasta, a lot of dairy products - it all creates wetness. Cardamom is something where you should really add a little breeze everywhere because cardamom transforms that wetness into precious bodily juices. When we cook cocoa, make pudding, prepare any dessert, we should always add a little cardamom.
So the powder, not the capsules?
Anna: The capsules are great to cook with water! Crush two capsules and then boil them in a liter of water to make cardamom water. That's different from drinking tap water all the time. The powder is great for adding to cooked desserts.
And to come back to your question about herbs - what we often have in the garden or at the markets is peppermint. Peppermint is a very cooling and refreshing herb. You can use it very individually, also for fish dishes or for salads. Thyme, rosemary and marjoram are all spices that strengthen our digestion and don't heat up too much.
Summertime is barbecue time - you don't have to go without meat!
You mentioned grilled meat, which is very popular in summer. Does it have a heating effect?
Anna: Yes, very much! Especially lamb. Lamb and shrimps are the hottest animal products we can do to our bodies. I say this explicitly because people who have heat symptoms (many with skin problems such as neurodermatitis) can see the heat on their skin. They have to be really careful with it. This grilling process alone is very heating and then possibly adding a garlic sauce and a glass of red wine is the "heat super gau" for the body.
This also affects migraine patients! Migraine patients react very strongly to hot products. You might eat a prawn skewer with lamb ribs and drink a glass of red wine with it and then get a migraine attack!
We don't have to give up meat! Meat is also a wonderful thing from a TCM perspective! It builds up blood, it builds up precious bodily fluids, it is a great source of protein, gives us strength and energy, strengthens us.
What I can highly recommend when barbecuing is chicken. It's lighter and doesn't heat up so much. Pork is always a bit problematic from my point of view. Without wanting to step on anyone's toes, the product quality of meat in Germany is even worse than in many other countries.
If you know a good organic farmer, beef and pork are good. What I can highly recommend if you like to have a drink at the barbecue (especially when it's hot at night, women with menopausal symptoms etc.) is to have a glass of beer in the evening! This can also be non-alcoholic. Beer is the most cooling and most precious alcoholic drink available to us! Even if we like to drink a white wine spritzer in the evening, alcohol is heating.
What about spicy food? And what does a craving for sweets have to do with wetness?
I have two more questions. Curry is often eaten in hot countries - is it also cooling even though it is spicy? Or what about spicy food in general?
Anna: In many Asian countries, where it's hot and humid, people eat a lot of fatty, hot food. If I go there now and say that they shouldn't eat so much greasy food, it's like the Chinese standing up in our house and taking away our bread.
Bread, noodles and sweets are not good for us, and in these hot and humid countries, these greasy, spicy foods are often not good for people either. Just as we see these cold and wet symptoms here, we see a lot of hot and wet symptoms there.
We often attract exactly what we have inside us. People who tend to be cold and wet like to snack. And it's exactly the same in different countries. If you have wetness and heat in your body, you should avoid those meaty, greasy, hot foods there and eat a vegetarian/vegan and very light diet and even eliminate wetness before you travel to that country. I have a course called 'Detox without a diet', which is a great way to eliminate water from the body.
What are the symptoms of having too much water in the body? Is water retention one of them?
Anna: Also, exactly. Or tiredness. When we have a cold and our nose is running, our ears and sinuses are blocked - that's wetness. We cough it out, we blow our nose a lot. It's all this mucus and wetness that is obviously visible in our body. We feel like we're wrapped in absorbent cotton when we're sick and that's how our body feels. We don't see the wetness obviously, but the body is tired because of the wetness. It's contained, we're tired after eating, we could sleep all the time.
Depending on where the deposits are, we know in TCM which energy system and organ system is particularly weakened. We work with tongue diagnosis. It shows If it's wide and has teeth marks on the side, it's because it's wet. It not only makes us wide, but also our tongue. When we sleep, our tongue hits our teeth and we then have these teeth marks on the left and right sides of our tongue.
If we stop eating bread, pasta, sweets, bananas and dairy products for a while, these teeth marks disappear. This is the simplest test. Large-pored skin, blackheads and blemished skin are also symptoms of oozing.
Celery - insider tip for headaches
You mentioned migraines earlier. Is that also a sign of too much heat?
Anna: Yes. Migraines are often caused by liver energy and this heat rises in the body. It's the same in the summer heat. When we get hot, people also freak out more quickly. Heat rises, it's always warmer at the top than at the bottom. Just like when you turn up the heating in winter. The same thing happens in our bodies. The heat rises and collects in the head, then we explode - some because they are at a red light, others because of a headache. Headaches are mostly heat symptoms! There are also types of headache that come from wetness, but most migraines come from the heat.
Would you like to share the recipe you told me in the preliminary talk?
Anna: I really like to recommend celery for headaches! You can boil it over and over again to do something to combat the heat - to channel it down, so to speak. It calms the mind. We do go to the toilet more often because celery has a draining effect. You take half a stalk, cut it into slices and boil the celery in half a liter of water for 5 minutes. Then you drink the water throughout the day and you can also eat the celery. The other day I had a bad headache, so I boiled a whole stalk and drank the water. It helps! I'm not allowed to make any promises of cures, but I can see from the people who drink it that it helps.
I can start an appeal right now. If you hear it now and have tried it, let us know in the follow-up notes or on Facebook if it worked!
I've also posted this on my Instagram account if you want to read about it.
Dear Anna, that was so much useful information! Where can people find you if they want to find out more about you?
Anna: I can be found online at www.annatsu.at where you can find everything about me and my story, my online courses and e-books.
On Facebook under Anna Reschreiter, on Instagram you can also find me under Anna Reschreiter.
I launchedmy podcast in February 2019, it's called "High five for your healthy diet" and you can already find lots of episodes about TCM nutrition there.
Very nice. Who knows, maybe we'll have to do a follow-up when it's cold again. If you have the time and inclination, we can do it! Is there anything else you'd like to mention at the end?
Anna's final words on the subject of thermals for mothers
Anna: I am a mother of a young son and what is always very important for me to pass on to mothers is to make sure that they look after their son as much as possible. Warm up the child's tummy well. Even if it's hot, not going out for ice cream with the kids every day or slipping them yoghurt with banana every day.
Especially not in winter, when it's cold and the kids are constantly sick anyway. And giving all that frozen, deep-frozen, pre-cooked food to babies - that makes my heart bleed! That's thermally cold!
Soy milk has no place with babies and toddlers either! It is the thermally coldest cereal milk. Those are my final words as a mom when it comes to thermals. Despite what you have learned from me, don't stress! Stress generates heat. Just take it easy and don't focus too much on your diet! Really enjoy it too, pleasure brings us to our center and we need that in summer too.
Thank you so much for this great information!
These are the links to the episode:
Anna's website: https://www.annatsu.at
Anna's podcast "High five for your healthy diet": https://www.annatsu.at/kategorie/podcast/
Anna's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Annatsu/
Anna's Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/annatsu_tcmernaehrung/
Anna's online course "Detox without diet": https://www.annatsu.at/detox-ohne-diaet/
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