The Efficacy Of Food In Ancient Herbal Medicine

As one of the most important physical conditions of human survival ,the traditional diet has been recorded for several thousand years. Among them,there are many existing literatures that can be found,from Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing to Ben Cao Gang Mu ,Ancient literatures of herbal medicine have a detailed description for food stuff. But glancing through these books carefully,you will find that the descriptions of food function of ancient literatures are very different.The objects of this topic are that summarizing and researching food function of ancient literatures of herbal medicine,making the function of each food integral and hierarchical , and trying to find some characteristics between food function and the natural quality of food stuff.we have selected 46 ancient literatures,And collected 261 flavor food informations from them in this topic. All the food functions have been summarized and concluded by literature research methods; And the food functions of ancient literature have been studied systematically with the reasonable use of data analysis and statistics.This paper has two major components as follows:The first part is the statistic results of food effect. In accordance with its natural quality, the 261 food stuff that have been sorted out will be divided into 12 categories: grains, pulses, vegetables, fruits, thalloses, nuts and so on...Each food function will be summarized, and the effect of every kind of food stuff will be divided into four classes, they are reinforce,health protection,expelling evils and the other. They will be analyzed respectively.The second part is detailed analysis and discussion. We have found some principles through the statistical results of first part,and expounded its theory.The results:We have preliminary found the relationship between food function and their nature attributes; In summary,there are more foods which can expelling evils than that can enriching , so we can see invigorating is not the main purpose of meeting,the real significance is for balance between yin and yang ; In term of the beneficial function of food stuff,there are more for Spleen and qi,it is another important reflection of the qi theory of our traditional medicine.