Food as Medicine, Here Comes the Warm Weather: Cooking For Spring and Summer

By Cynthia Baker

One spring morning, I received a call from a client whose history of digestive problems had long been resolved. He was upset and angry. He had just received a copy of his most recent blood work and his cholesterol levels were all wrong. With more energy he was greatly enjoying life much more than before, but he felt betrayed and weak when he saw his lab results.

Dialoging with him I discovered that he had tossed aside exercise and seasonal balanced menus for a fad diet to loose weight quickly. He was no longer eating dark leafy greens, fresh vegetables and quality proteins. There was significant weight loss, but his liver was incredibly unhappy and his liver enzymes were rising. Without those bitter seasonal greens, his body was confused and out of balance.

Using foods to balance the body has been the cornerstone of every system of medicine since the beginning of time. Most practitioners of Ayurveda or Traditional Chinese Medicine will prescribe certain foods (and similar herbs, often of the same families) to increase or move energy through a certain area of the body, or to cool or warm the body.

Ayurveda recognizes that the body is a vehicle for your spirit. That vehicle requires objective care, just as you would care for your car. I tell clients that food is 90% of their protocol. It is the fuel that runs their body. Herbs and supplements are fuel additives.

Prior to electricity, refrigeration and the ability to quickly transport food from one part of the world to another for resale, many maladies we now label as various diseases did not exist. Stop and think about it for a minute. If you lived in New England 400 years ago, your menu for today would be much, much different. You would not have eaten yogurt and bananas with soymilk for breakfast.

Although it is mind boggling at first, choosing to play this little game each day as you plan your meals can actually help you choose more wisely and keep your body in tune with the seasonal changes of the earth and create more balance and therefore health.

Historical information shows that during the spring and the summer months, foods chosen by native New England tribes consisted of shad, salmon, wild greens, small mammals and a smaller amount of waterfowl. The stores of starchy beans and winter squash were gone. The small amounts of maize used was a recent historical occurrence and even so, by the spring, the stores had dwindled and no grains were used in the diet.

Look outside your window. Our native greens (dandelion, fiddleheads, grape leaves, chickweed, sorrel, pigweed, violet leaves) can provide you with the important minerals and cleansing properties that are so important to prepare your body for the heat and humidity of the approaching summer.

As the weather gets warmer, the heavy, sticky foods of the winter should be removed from the diet. The dense red meats like lamb and beef should be replaced with lighter proteins like fish and chicken. Vegetables should be a large part of your daily diet, and both cooked and raw should be eaten. Choosing just raw foods, even during the warmest days of summer can still deplete the digestion. Our fruit season progresses from berries in the early summer to apples and pears in the fall. When the local fruits are ripe that is the time to add them to the diet. Grains and beans should be eaten in moderation.

The tendency during the hot summer months is to load up on cold foods like ice cream, cold drinks, frozen desserts and things like cold melon salads. Eating foods that are cold means that your body has to turn up the heat in your stomach. It means your digestion has to work harder and the end result is not that you cool your body down, but that you actually create stress and more heat.

In New England and many other parts of North America summers come with a great deal of humidity. Foods that increase damp qualities in the body and create sticky situations should be limited to only a small part of your diet. Dairy products and overabundance of fruits and even natural sugars fall into this category.

Pestos, relishes and salsas made from fresh local greens and good quality olive oil and organic herbs can add flavor and nutrients to your fish and chicken. Fresh eggs and their deep golden yolks provide essential fatty acids. Deep yellow butter from grass fed cows can increase your body’s ability to digest the nutrients in your cooked spring greens. Small green salads with fresh flowers like nasturtiums, violets, Calendula and even day lilies can brighten a meal and stimulate digestion Fish stock can provide extra protein, magnesium and calcium and serve as a good base for a light summer soup or a sauce that will nourish and cool your body at the same time.

Practice some very basic, good old-fashioned common sense. Eat what is seasonal, local, organic and fresh. Learn to enjoy the taste and diversity of foods that each season has to offer and get healthy.

About the Author:

Cynthia Baker is a Certified Ayurvedic Educator through the American Institute of Vedic Studies, a graduate of Michael Tierra’s East West School of Herbology, as well as a graduate of the EverGreen School of Integrative Herbology.

Cynthia is a Registered Herbalist with the American Herbalist’s Guild. She is the creator of Upstream Nutrition™, a system that combines and integrates knowledge from Ayurvedic medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, current research on supplements and diet, and conventional medicine.

Cynthia has also authored a cookbook titled The GET REAL! Cookbook, Seasonal Recipes for Health and Healing. She is a columnist for Organic Family Magazine.

(c) Cynthia Baker, Sattva Vital Health, May 2004

Baker, Cynthia. 2004. Food as Medicine: Cooking for Spring and Summer. Organic Family Magazine 2: 10-11.