I have forgotten most of my childhood experiences, as is the way with childhood memories. But I remember our neighbor Shoshana from the Katamon neighborhood very well. She was a true childhood experience.
Shoshana was a housewife of Moroccan origin, mother to eight children. Initially, when my parents went to work and didn't know what to do with their child, she was my caregiver when needed. Later, when I grew up and was six years old, I was considered the ninth child. Every visit to her home was a real treat, mainly because of the various Moroccan pastries whose taste is still preserved in my palate. But the real treat was sweet tea with mint. There was no other tea like the taste of that tea, and there never will be.
The truth is that I didn't understand in those days what was the point of drinking hot tea with mint in the middle of summer? After all, it would be much more appropriate to drink cold water or juice. This puzzle remained unsolved—until I learned about the ancient medicine of the Chinese...
The ancient Chinese believed that the world exists thanks to tension between opposites. Nature can be understood as a struggle or, in a more accurate metaphor, as a tempestuous tango dance between two basic forces. The first is a masculine force, active, tending toward heat, while the second is a feminine force, passive, tending toward cold. If you will, these are the "heaven and earth" and "light and darkness" from the first paragraph in the Book of Genesis. When these forces balance each other, they create life. However, when they separate from each other—there is no life.
In Chinese medicine, the human body is compared to a small world. Like in nature, we humans also live and exist from the interplay between these forces. When the balance between them is disrupted, our body weakens, and we become sick.
The way to maintain this balance, determined the ancient Chinese physicians, is mainly by balancing the energetic temperature of our body.
You are probably wondering now what, for heaven's sake, is "energetic temperature"?
When our body systems are very active, when there is rapid metabolism, our body is characterized by a "hot energetic temperature." In these states, we feel warm. If we return to the comparison to the world, then in this case we are similar to a volcano, or to summer at its peak. When body systems are less active, we feel more sluggish and slower, and may feel cold in various places in the body. Our body then resembles nature in the depths of winter.
How do we balance between "heat" and "cold"? There are several ways.
One important and basic way is proper nutrition.
In the Chinese view, every food has a certain energetic temperature. "Energetically cold" food tends to cool our body while "energetically hot" food tends to warm it. For example, beef, ginger, and chestnuts are considered "energetically hot" foods. Cucumber, ice cream, and fruits are considered "energetically cold" foods.
Why do I use quotation marks when I speak about energetic "cold" and "heat"? Because again, this is not about the cold and heat familiar to us. This temperature cannot be measured with a thermometer, but rather involves a deeper energetic influence. We don't immediately cool down from eating cucumber. But if we eat many cucumbers over a long time, without balancing our body with warm food, our body systems will tend to be "colder" and less active.
The energetic temperature of food is a constant characteristic in the food itself, regardless of any relationship to ambient temperature. Food is considered "hot" or "cold" energetically, whether it just came out of the refrigerator or has been cooking in a pot for two hours already. Ginger warms the body, both in its natural state and when cooked. Tomato soup, on the other hand, cools the body, even when served boiling hot to the table, since tomatoes cool the body energetically, even if they themselves are bursting with heat.
Of course, if we heat "energetically cold" food by cooking, it will cool the body less, just as if we eat "energetically hot" food frozen from the freezer, it will warm the body less than if we ate it cooked.
From this, to maintain balance, we need to combine in a balanced way between energetically cold foods and energetically hot foods. In addition, it's important to adapt nutrition to our body's energetic temperature and to the weather. If we tend to be "energetically hot"—meaning restless, suffering from summer heat, having difficulty living without air conditioning, getting angry quickly and calming down slowly—this means we tend toward the hot side of the scale, and therefore we should eat cooling and calming food. On the other hand, if we tend to be "energetically cold," suffering from cold, hating winter and loving summer, the nutrition suitable for us is warming and stimulating nutrition.
Nutrition also depends on the weather and season. On a stormy, rainy, and cold day, it's important to balance the weather by eating warming foods like hot soup, meat stew, and drinking hot tea. It's recommended to reduce consumption of cooling foods like fruits, uncooked vegetables, and ice cream. In summer, when we spend a lot of time outside and heat dominates the air, it's good to balance the effect of weather on our body by eating cooling foods like fresh salad, seasonal fruits, and of course, drinking plenty of fluids.
You might say: what's so surprising about this? After all, it's not surprising that we like to eat hot soup in winter and fruit salad in summer. The point is that sometimes we don't really know what food warms the body and what food cools it. Our ancestors who lived close to nature were more sensitive to the effect of food on our body, but today, when food is industrialized and processed, we don't know what warms and what cools.
The ancient Chinese compared the digestive system to a small cooking stove. That is, the digestive system constantly needs conditions of heat. If we cool it too much, it simply won't function, food won't digest properly, and the body won't succeed in extracting the vital substances. In the absence of these substances, the body weakens.
Therefore, even if we tend to be energetically hot, it's important not to overload ourselves with cold foods. When preparing fresh vegetable salad, one should be careful to take the vegetables out of the refrigerator about an hour before preparing the salad, so that we eat it at room temperature. Similarly, it's recommended not to drink cold juices or cold water straight from the refrigerator, but to let the liquids warm up a bit outside before drinking them.
According to the principles of energetic balance, one should also guard against overheating the digestive system. Excess heat dries out the body's fluids. Warning signs of excess heat are, for example, heartburn, or a feeling of slight burning in the stomach. In a state of excess heat, food residues in the intestines dry out quickly, excessively, and there is a tendency toward constipation. For example, daily eating of grilled lamb seasoned with ginger could overheat the digestive system and dry it out.
Let's return to Aunt Shoshana. Chinese medicine maintains that mint indeed cools the body, and in a most efficient way. Now, you too understand the natural wisdom of Aunt Shoshana when she offered me hot tea with mint in the height of summer.