In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) point of view, there are no absolute healthy or unhealthy foods, only healthy or unhealthy diets. And a healthy diet is all about eating a wide variety of food and getting the balance right.
In general, there are two components in food variety. One is “Category” like grain, meat, bean, milk, egg, vegetable, fruit, oil & fat, etc. The other is “Item,” which refers to different foods in each category such as rice, noodle, millet, corn, buckwheat, sorghum, and oat in grain group; and pork, beef, lamb, chicken, fish, and duck in meat category.
In fact, since amino acids is the source of life and proteins are made up of 20 kinds of amino acids in which nine of them must be taken from food, TCM Practitioners encourage us to eat a mixture of foods across the whole range and within each of food type including rice, cereal, and bread; vegetable and fruit; dairy products; fish, poultry, and meat; etc. in proper amounts in order to have well-balanced diet of essential amino acids.
Simply take Chinese dumplings as an example. Most popular dumplings are make up of meat (around 30%) and vegetable (around 70%) , which indicates that animal protein (complete protein) and plant protein (incomplete protein) can be complemented with each other in this dish. Further more, when combining smaller amount of high-fat-content animal protein with larger amount of low-fat-content plant protein in these dumplings, one will have a balanced combination of all the amino acids and dietary fiber.
Try it yourself: Beef Celery Dumplings.
Image by winkelmander
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