Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about healthy diet. Especially, since the media promote it widely trying, however not effectively to fight the civilisation’s diseases, such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Well, and for this, since we have an excellent access to the products from around the world and the preparation of daily meals has become a rather enjoyable culinary trip. I also like to have a full control of the products we buy every day - meat from a halal butcher, Spanish tomatoes, or maybe fruits from Pakistan... selection is huge! Among the friends, I’ve noticed this trend to buy terribly expensive organic food. But does healthy food must be so expensive, and why something that 10 years ago was so normal and cheap and hosted on the table of every housewife, today is a luxury? Do we, the inhabitants of the western world know really what to eat to feel great and healthy for many years? While ordinary Europeans, suffering from flu seek an advice of another doctor of conventional medicine, on the other side of the globe Chinese, the world's healthiest people eat a delicious warming meal, which also has an antiviral properties... I had a chance to experience the blessings of Chinese medicine myself, when treated a chronic problem which conventional, seemingly well-developed medicine could not treat. And so I came across a book 'Chinese System of Food Cures: Prevention and Remedies Who would have thought that chewing fresh cherries may fight laryngitis... The book presents a fascinating, proven ways to use the healing properties of foods by understanding their flavours, energy, action and movement. It also explains why the food affect people in different ways. The key is 's score', a scale based on the traditional principle of Yin and Yang that applies to food and body types. The book contains a huge number of ideas for selecting and preparing hundreds of vegetables, fruit, meat, grains and legumes in order to alleviate and treat a wide range of health problems such as obesity, smoking, insomnia, asthma, peptic ulcer, diabetes, hypertension, inflammation kidneys, hepatitis, diarrhoea, anaemia, and many others. Who among us would have thought that the food has such a power – well, Chinese have known this for centuries. Energy of foods relates to their capacity to generate sensations - cold or hot - in the human body. So according to this principle - the consumption of products with a warm energy will allow us to experience the sensation of heat in the body and the food with cold energy, feeling cold. In everyday life, everyone knows that eating ice cream makes you feel cold and drinking hot beverages causes a feeling of warmth in the body. In addition to heat and cold energy, food also has a cooling energy, warm and neutral. They do not refer, however, the current state of food. An example is tea, which has a cooling energy, so even if we drink hot tea is as if we drank cold drink, because soon after tea enters the body, the heat will be lost, and it begins to generate cold energy, which makes our body cool. Conversely, intake of red pepper, which has energy generating heat and even if you eat peppers straight from the refrigerator, her seeming cold is lost in the body after ingestion, causing a sensation of warmth. That all knowledge seems to be very enigmatic, however, we use it unwittingly in everyday life, choosing the right foods. For example, on rainy, cold day when completely wet going home, the first thing we can think of is to eat something warming - for example, a bowl of hot soup with roasted vegetables.
It’s very warm here today, the first signs of spring's probably for good hit the island, the sun warms us through the window and in a large pot mung beans is simmering ... According to the rules of yin and yang, it has a cooling energy and thus restores the balance when we are hot or have a fever. Although we do not have a fever and we’re fully enjoying the heat of sunlight today, the simplicity of this soup has confounded us to the extent that we decided to cook it. You cannot miss, of course, all other good properties contained in this little bean, such as proteins, vitamin B6 and C, folic acid and other ....
This soup can be enjoyed either hot or cold, and it is refreshing and healthy!
It is difficult to write the exact recipe for this soup, since the amount of ingredients depends on individual taste. For two hungry people like us, we used these amounts of ingredients:
2, 5 cup fresh mung beans (soaked for two hours in advance)
3 tablespoons sugar
5 cups water
Place the mung beans and water in a pot. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 1 hour. Add sugar to taste.
And that's all - is it not the easiest and healthiest soup of the world?
Enjoy!
