Damp Heat Foods to avoid, and which can help!

Damp Heat foods to AVOID

Small note! No food is all bad or all good. Even the following damp heat foods may have their place in some people’s diet from time to time. Damp-forming foods, for instance, are moistening, so if you had Dryness as a symptom, Damp-forming foods may help it for a while. But it’s easy to get it wrong.

Alcohol

• Just to avoid doubt, alcohol includes spirits and wine, beer and gin, sherry, port, advocaat, cocktails, liqueurs, vodka, whisky, rice wine, limoncello, brandy, armagnac, champagne, sake … The more concentrated they are, the more likely damp heat foods will worsen symptoms of Damp-Heat.

Fat and Grease

• Fatty, fried, deep-fried, roasted and greasy foods. To create these kinds of damp heat foods, a lot of heat energy goes into them. A famous Scottish delicacy is the deep-fried (in batter) Mars Bar, made from self-raising flour which itself tends to be heating: it must be cooked in very hot fat or it goes soggy. The flour absorbs the fat, and so do you. Inside it is the Mars Bar. (If you don’t think the Mars bar has fat in it then you obviously haven’t tried one recently.) 
• Note – we all need fat for health, but it must be the right kind of fat and although saturated fat is heating you still need it – but not much when you have Damp-Heat. (NB Don’t ever eat hydrogenated fats, still very common in many foods. And oils that are frequently heated – such as used to deep-fry food – quickly lose any attractive qualities they had.) I recommend Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill, by Udo Erasmus if you want to know more. This category includes any food that is cooked in fat. That includes bacon and black pudding if you’re still thinking of Scottish food. 
• It also includes butter and similar fats, see below. 
• And ice cream. Sorry.

Sweets, Candies and the like

• Sweets and candies.These are in this list of damp heat foods mainly because of the sugar, (but many cakes, for example, are very rich, making them heating as well). This weakens your Spleen energy and tends to make you put on fat. Eating sugar also warms you up, temporarily. Sugar is such a concentrated food that it should really be a medicine, used only in appropriate situations. As a medicine it has primary and secondary actions, but as far as being in this category is concerned, your body produces heat as it burns the sugar, and your Spleen is weakened by it and becomes less able to combat Damp. So you get more Damp-Heat. 

• Biscuits, puddings, sugars, refined flour foods and cakes. This category of damp heat foods includes puddings, ice-cream, sugar in coffee and cakes, biscuits, and foods that rapidly turn to sugar during digestion, including foods made with refined flour, such as white bread, bread rolls and crackers. 
• NB Sweet foods have their place in nutrition but it’s a small place! For example, on a hot day, a drink such as lemonade with melon is wonderfully refreshing, unless you suffer from yang deficiency, or have Damp-Heat when the sweetness might make it worse. Try it and see!

Dairy Foods are nearly always Damp Heat Foods!

• Dairy food, made from cow’s milk, including cream, butter, cheese, mild shakes, and including all sweetened yogurts. Sorry! These are also in our list of damp heat foods to avoid! 
• Dairy foods are damp in nature because they tend to produce phlegm. So if  you are suffering from a very sore, dry, burning throat, cold ice-cream might be the perfect food: too much of it, however, will give you phlegm, which might become infected by passing bacteria giving you even more symptoms of Damp-Heat!
• More on Yogurt. Unsweetened yogurt is thought to be less heating and indeed, in Indian meals is often added in the form of ‘raita’ to compensate for the hot spices. The Indian drink known as ‘lassi’ is also made from yoghurt and has similar qualities, unless taken sweet, eg with mango. But the salty type of lassi is less heating.

So are most Hot, Spicy foods!

• Highly-spiced food, including curries. These usually are too hot, increasing the Heat bit of your Damp-Heat. If, as is common, they are part of a rich, fatty meal, all the worse because the fats compound the problem. However, for a while when and immediately after eating spicy food you may think that any phlegm you have is better, because the spices encourage your Lung energy to disperse blockages like phlegm. Later, however, you’ll probably feel worse.

• Ginger, however, although a spice, is usually helpful as it encourages your Spleen energy to work better. But don’t use dried ginger, which is too heating: use slices of fresh ginger root. See good foods, below.

 

• Other Heating foods: for a fuller list, click here. Some foods known to be heating and therefore in our list of damp heat foods include:
• bamboo shoot
• black sesame
• carrot
• chestnut
• chocolate (contains fats and milk, already on this list, above)
• coconut milk
• coffee (though being such a concentrated ‘food’, its primary effect is often to make you feel a little better, but the secondary action is to drain your energy)
• eels
• eggs
• garlic
• ginger (dried, powdered)
• goose
• leek
• kidney
• lamb and mutton in particular but
• other red meats are also heating or are considered too sweet (eg beef) if you have Damp-Heat
• mustard – the hotter it is, the more heating
• octopus
• onion
• oranges are considered heating for some people
• peanuts are fairly heating, including peanut butter!
• pepper, hot peppers, chili pepper 
• pig’s liver and pork
• seafoods like lobster, crabs, clam, mussels and prawns
• shark meat
• squash

What foods help your body clear Damp-Heat?

More important than the following is avoiding damp heat foods ie those that produce Damp-Heat, see above. 

Over time, the Chinese worked out that quite a few foods can help to clear Damp-Heat. Unfortunately, many of them are not used much in European or American kitchens, so you may not be familiar with them or know how to prepare them.

NB individuals react to foods differently. You might find that your body accepts one of these but someone else’s body doesn’t.

Here are some of them:

• amaranth
• banana, (though I don’t agree with this as it’s too sweet, so easily inclines to produce Damp) 
• bean sprouts
• bok choy
• cabbage
• carp 
• celery
• citrus fruits except oranges
• coix seed
• cucumber 
• duck meat, (this is a rich sweet meat, so can be too heating)
• bitter gourd
• fungi and mushrooms, many kinds
• hyacinth bean 
• kelp
• loofah
• loquat fruit
• lotus root
• lotus seed
• melon, unless very sweet or taken with a lot of sugar
• millet
• mung bean 
• poria
• purslane
• red rice bean 
• seaweed
• spinach
• tofu
• tomato (though for some this is heating)
• water chestnut
• water melon
• wax gourd 
• wild rice stem

Other pages to read

Although this page is about damp heat foods, you’ll get a broader understanding of damp-heat if you read the following pages.

• Damp
• Damp-Heat
• Heat
• Nutrition
• Primary and Secondary actions
• Gall-bladder
• Gallbladder Damp-Heat
• Liver
• Spleen
• Stomach Damp-Heat

Are you, dear reader, a practitioner?

If so, you’ll realise that a few of the above damp heat foods also exacerbate phlegm-damp and phlegm-heat syndromes: some of them are actually worse for those conditions than for damp heat.