Damp Foods: Foods That Cause and Clear Damp

Which ‘Damp Foods’ Help to Clear Dampness?

Some of the following foods are in the list of foods above that cause Damp!

It’s a matter of degree and digestibility. Barley, for example, often helps your digestion work better, even though it contains some gluten.

1. Ginger – sliced from raw ginger root. This herb benefits your Spleen and is warming, but not hot in action. (Ginger powder, however, is regarded as ‘hot’, so don’t use it to clear damp.)
2. Some garden herbs like coriander leaf, marjoram, oregano, rosemary and thyme are fragrant and lighten foods that might otherwise be too yin, too heavy or damp-producing.
3. Cinnamon is warming and helps you better digest foods that otherwise slow you down, like puddings, especially puddings made with dairy food.
4. Barley. Chinese medicine regards barley grain as a mild diuretic. Use it in soups and stews. (But, as explained, it does contain gluten so may not be suitable for those who are gluten-intolerant.)
5. Mushrooms – fungi. The thinking here is that mushrooms grow in damp places and absorb damp as they grow, so they know how to help your body clear damp. In Chinese cookery, they are always cooked before being eaten. So this does not include raw mushrooms.
6. Mildly spicy foods. These don’t produce the moisturing response of strong, hot spices. Instead they gently prod your metabolism to perform better and digest food better: they also encourage your Spleen to work better. (One of the Spleen’s functions is to clear Damp.) See next on seeds:
7. Mild spices made from seeds often stimulate the digestion and make it more efficient, so reducing Damp. These include caraway, cardamom, coriander, cumin, fennel, star anise and turmeric. Get in the habit of adding them to dishes.
8. Sprouts eg from beans but also from grains (not the glutinous ones, of course!) But sprouts have a cold energy so must be cooked and eaten hot to compensate.
9. Theoretically, non-glutinous grains help clear Damp because they help you absorb nutrients without irritating your digestion, so  helping your metabolism work more efficiently. Gluten-free grains include: amaranth, arrowroot, buckwheat, corn – maize, kasha, kudzu, millet, oats, quinoa, rice, sago, sorghum, soy, tapioca and teff. One variety of millet is Job’s Tears (coix lacryma-jobi) which is used in many Chinese herbal formulae to clear Damp.
10. Snow peas and snap peas. Other names for these include ‘sugar snap’ peas, ‘green’ peas, ‘Chinese’ pea, and ‘pois mangetout’ in French. If you’re still unsure, they all belong to a cultivar group based on pisum sativum var. macrocarpum. The main point is that the pods are edible.
11. Fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchee.
12. Warm food. It is an important tenet in Chinese medicine that warm food digests better than cold food.
13. Well-chewed food. Chewing initiates digestion by mixing digestive enzymes in the mouth with a larger surface area of food. Smaller chunks of food  break-down more easily in the stomach and proceed more smoothly through your digestive tract.
14. For some people, ‘food combining‘ is important, so that foods of different kinds work together. The belief is that meat/protein dishes don’t mix well with fruit (there are important exceptions, of course) or grains, but do mix with vegetables. Vegetables mix with almost everything, but fruit and grain mix together less readily. This ‘food combining’ diet, also known as the ‘Hay’ or ‘Kensington’ diet suits many people and if you suffer from Dampness, you may wish to try it for a while, whatever the science may say at https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/food-combining!
15. Some foods are traditionally associated with increasing urination. Of course, increasing urination doesn’t necessarily mean Damp will be cleared, but if you urinate very little it makes it harder for your body to clear Damp. However, there may be reasons for reduced urination which you need to know about before changing  your diet – so see your practitioner. Foods that make you pee more include beans that grow in bean pods: snap peas, garden peas, snow peas, string beans, broad beans etc.
16. Tea made from cornsilk is a traditional diuretic.
17. Many bitter foods have a diuretic effect. The classic is dandelion greens, but many varieties of cabbage including Brussel sprouts are somewhat bitter. Also artichoke, bitter melon, broccoli, celery, chicory, endive, radicchio and spinach. For more, see our page on the Bitter taste. When taking these foods, make sure to take them cooked and warm. Celery, for example, has a cold energy so if used as a diuretic you need to cook it to compensate for the coldness.

To clear Damp, your body mostly urinates it out but it’s important not to lose too much fluid at a time. Consequently many of the above foods are used in soups and stew which replace the moisture. The classic dish, a very frequent part of food in Chinese and SE Asia, is made from rice: try our recipe Clogstoun Congee.