5 types of food and drink for heatwave and hot weather!

Cooling food and drinks for the heat wave and for hot summer day. Icy drinks or ice cream? No, not really. According to Chinese medicine, there are food and herbs that can naturally cool our body down or to clear heat in our body. I will share 5 types of food, including herbs, that will help you to fan off the heat. And make sure stay till the end which I will also give some tips on who shouldn't overeat these types of cooling foods and drinks. Hi everyone, my name is Shirley. I'm a Chinese medicine practitioner and a Western medicine pharmacist in Australia. In this channel, I'll focus on teaching you more about practical Chinese medicine knowledge so that you can use it in your everyday life. I will also share simple herbal recipes so that you can cook it easily at home. In the recent days, my news feeds are flooded with news about heat waves across the globe. UK is going to be hitting the 40 degree or already hit it when you watch this video. It also triggered the first ever red alert for the weather. And there are scorching heat in Europe, Asia and Africa. I should have done this video much earlier to help you to prepare for this. Yet I think this sort of rising temperature unfortunately will happen more frequent than we used to be. So if you are here now, save this video for the future use. Or if you come from the future, I hope at that time we have learned to cope with it much better. And yet more importantly is I hope we have put enough climate effort to help to at least slow down the global warming situations. That being enough said, let me start with What is cooling food in Chinese medicine? In Chinese medicine, we see everything in yin and yang aspect, including food and herbs. So warming being the yang and cooling being the yin. It is not exactly the actual temperature, such as the hot food is warming and cold food is cooling. While there's some truth to it, more importantly, we actually look at how this food make us feel and what our body do after consuming it. For example, ginger. Ginger is warming. I mean, you don't have to put ginger in the hot tea to feel the warm. Just try chewing it. Then you can already feel the warm quite immediately. The other example is the watermelon. Watermelon is cooling. You don't have to put it in the fridge. Just eat it at room temperature. You could feel quite cooling almost immediately as well. These are the obvious example. There are many of them are not as obvious. However, with thousands of years of observation, Chinese medicine do categorize food and herbs and drinks being cooling or warming. Before I go on, I can't stress this enough. Please make sure you follow your local health authorities advice for the heat waves, such as keep up with your hydration, trying to stay indoor if it's possible. If you have to go out, make sure you put on the sunblock and also put on the hat if it's possible. All right. As you can see, most of the food that I'm going to recommend here, they are mostly got to do with hydration. So let's begin. First, if you are someone who don't like plain water, in hot days, try coconut water. Coconut water is considered cooling in Chinese medicine. It is so fresh everywhere in tropical countries. If you can't find fresh coconut water, you can buy the box coconut water. Usually they are quite easy to find in most groceries these days, even in the West. Just make sure that you choose the one that don't have a lot of sugar or ideally no sugar. The other thing is coconut water contain lots of electrolytes, which are great for hot days if you are someone who sweat a lot. However, please do not over-consuming it, especially if you have chronic kidney disease or if you take medication such as ACE inhibitor. If you take medication, you know what I'm talking about. This is because coconut water contain a higher potassium content. So if you are the above group of patients, it might interfere with your kidney function and will be interfere with your medications. I know my pharmacist had it coming in like for now, but this is just extra precaution that you hear from me as a pharmacist. Second, if you don't like plain water but like tea, choose green tea or matcha instead of black tea. In Chinese medicine, green tea is cooling, but black tea is slightly warming. So for any hot day, green tea would be a better choice. A chilled green tea should quite quickly give you a sense of coolness during hot days. The third group is actually Chinese herbal cooling tea, liang cha or liang cha. Among Chinese community, we are quite aware of what these are. In tropical country like in Malaysia where I grew up, we drink cooling herbal tea to stand off the 365 days of hot weather. So that's kind of our lifesaver there. You would have seen these little stores by roadside if you have been to Southeast Asia. Many of them probably are selling Chinese herbal cooling tea. Some cooling herbs should not be quite hard to find. If you live near Chinatown or Asian groceries, even if you're living in the West, they are quite common. Herbs like chrysanthemum flowers, juhwa, mulberry leaves sangniat or mint or peppermint leaves, bohe. Those three are cooling herbs. They're able to clear heat in our body. And that's why they have the cooling function. They are very easy to make. Just put them in boiling water and then just brew them like a normal tea. Another Chinese herb is actually Prunella, which is this one, Xia Gu Ca. For this, you do need to cook it for at least 30 minutes, unlike the one that I just mentioned, you can brew them like a tea. So this one is more cooling than the above three. I would only recommend this if you feel a lot hotter inside than normal, or feel very irritable and have bloodshot eyes or even swollen glands due to the heat. If you are someone who feel dizziness quite easily, sometimes might not be a good idea to take this too. Another one I would like to recommend is this, the Luo Han Guo. Mung fruit is very easy to drink and it is sweet. More importantly, its sweetness will not increase your blood sugar level. And that's why it's recently being hailed as the alternative sweetener for type 2 diabetes. So they now make them into like a powder form that you can just add it to your diet or drinks as a sweetener. We actually drink this a lot during hot days in Asia. According to Chinese medicine, it actually has additional functions such as to help to relieve dry cough and constipation caused by the heat and the dryness. So if you have this extra symptom, this would be a good drink to go to. And they tend to can relieve the thirst quite easily too. So when you always have dry mouth, this is a good one to go to as well. It is quite easy to make. Just crack open the fruit and boil it with water for about 30 minutes. You don't have to add sugar because I think it's quite sweet already, but it's up to you. Fourth is the cooling fruits and vegetables. Fruits are cooling such as watermelon, papaya, pear and strawberries. Of course not all fruits, but those that I mentioned, they are considered cooling fruits. And vegetables that are cooling usually are green leafy vegetables as well as vegetables that have bitter flavor. Bitter flavor in Chinese medicine usually means that they can clear heat, hence it is cooling. Things like bitter gourd or bitter melon, they are cooling too. Fifth, it is in the category of beans and grains. They are the mung beans and the Chinese barley. Mung beans are cooling. You just similarly, very easy, just boil them with water for at least 30 minutes or until they are softened. You can soak them in water for a couple of hours before you cook. Just make it easier. At the end, you can just add a little bit of brown sugar for flavoring. And if you can find lily bulb, so this is the lily bulb. This is another type of Chinese herbs. You can cook this together with the mung beans. This combination will give you a very yummy cooling drink or like a sweet soup for the hot days. Lily bulbs have additional effects which are nourishing our yin and can calm our spirit. Whether it's hot, we experience dryness and that's why we need to replenish our yin which in a way represent like fluid or body fluid. So lily bulb have this function is to nourish our yin. Also, when the weather is hot, we tend to feel quite restless, irritable and have trouble falling asleep. Lily bulb we say we can calm our mind and our spirit which will be quite helpful for the symptoms that I just mentioned above. As for the Chinese barley, apart from clearing heat, it also have another additional function which is to clear dampness. Dampness is a Chinese medicine theory yet in weather wise, it means humidity. So if the heat is company with humidity which will make you feel quite heavy and sluggish, then you can add some barley to your diet. I think recently become quite common in the west too. Or the other easy way to do it is just simply cook barley with water. It will help to elevate the feeling of heaviness and sluggishness caused by the humidity. In Malaysia, barley drinks are served in most restaurants or cafe as the weather there is always hot and humid all year around. So there you have it. The five types of food and drinks including herbs that you could eat and drink when the weather is hot or when it's super hot. Okay, now we're nearing the end. As promised earlier, there are a few more tips that I want to give it to you. Especially it's for a few groups of people who need to be more careful when taking this cooling food or cooling drink. Tip number one, please do not over drink icy drinks or cold raw food during hot weather. Actually in any other day, alright? Because it is totally understand that we will feel much better with icy drinks or even ice cream when the weather is hot. A few cups is fine. It's not something that you want to drink throughout the day for an extended period when it is hot. This is because we have this so-called yang or yang qi in our body which we want to protect. It is like the engine of life and that explains why our body temperature always remains at 36 or so. When you put too much hot stuff in our body unnecessarily, it might affect the yang qi. Especially you are someone who have weaker digestion, especially for those who are elderly, young children, pregnant women, or women who recently given birth. It is best to avoid over consuming icy drink, cold raw food during heat wave or just generally. Tip number two, similarly all the drinks and food and herbs that I recommended, they are great during hot days but similarly don't over consuming them. As always moderation is the key and watch how your body responds to that. If you start to have diarrhea or stomach ache, it may mean that your digestive system can't quite tolerate it well. Then reduce the amount or even stop taking them. Everyone is unique so we might respond to cooling food differently. Also please don't consume too much of that during cold weather or winter time. As Chinese medicine is always all about balance, during cold weather we prefer warming food or drinks. I mean it's kind of common sense too right? And tip number three, please avoid the above cooling food if you have your menstruations. Especially if you are someone who often suffer from painful periods with pain that is relieved by warm. In Chinese medicine we call this is cold pain, so it means that the pain when it's cold when you put the warm you feel better. So it's the same thing like the yin and yang balance. During period time this is when your body needs the warm to help to push out the menstrual blood. So if you already suffer from the cold pain that I just mentioned, please avoid all these cooling food, cooling drinks, and especially icy drinks during your menstrual period. Okay that's all from me and for all the tips and tricks and as well as the food and drinks that you can help you. I actually have did a similar video about summer wellness. It gives you a general tips on how to look after ourselves during summer time. You can check that link out either here or I will leave that in the description box as well. I actually share similar food and drinks in that summer wellness video as well. So anyway that's all from me today. Thank you for watching and I hope you find this video helpful and I really wish that you could cope well with the hot weather. Please take very good care and if you like this video and find it it's valuable for you, please give it a thumbs up. It means a lot to me and if you think your friend would like to learn something like this too, please share with them too. And last but not least don't forget to subscribe so you'll be the first one will be notified when my next video come out. So that's all. Please take care. Bye. See you in my next video.