Hot Foods & Heating Foods. They warm and energise but can drain you

Grading hot foods

Here are some of the foods that heat. They are graded according to their typeface:

• warming, 
• more warming, 
• heating, 
• very heating

The following are the foods most likely to be your downfall, though each of us reacts differently to individual foods: what might be heating for me might be merely warming for you.

The more often you eat something warming the more heating its effect. In other words, the heat accumulates.

Also, the following are only approximate grades of hot foods and one could argue over the precise level of heating of each one of them. For example, most spices tend to lose their heating effect with age, but a few grow stronger for a while.

If a spice is ground to powder it loses its effect over time, and when freshly ground, its effect appears faster when you take it.

How you eat something makes a difference:

• Meat taken cold will be less heating than if taken hot. 
• Gin and tonic with lots of ice and lemon, which are cooling, will be much less heating than gin taken neat. 
• Fish unless very oily is warming, but if smoked and grilled becomes heating.

Finally, this list of hot foods is incomplete. I just wrote it down from memory and add foods as I think of them. Just because a food isn’t here doesn’t mean it’s not heating. So a food that’s been omitted may be heating.

Hot Foods Chinese Medicine

It’s an unfortunate fact that many ‘hot’ foods are highly indulgent!

• alcohol, wine, spirits and fortified wines
• animal fats
• aspirin
• bacon
• barbecued food
• beef
• beef jerky
• black pudding, fried
• boiling, in other words, boiled food
• butter (brandy butter, even more so – unfortunately – my downfall)
• cakes made the British way
• cheese varies, depending on fat and concentration: for example cheese nuggets often contain more fats, plus other substances that increase the overall heating effect
• chicken
• chips, potato, deep fried
• chocolate, the more fat in it the more heating
• cinnamon as used in the kitchen

• coffee (for more on coffee click here)
• concentrated foods such as Vegemite and Marmite
• cream from dairy cows
• chips (assuming covered in fat and fried or roasted)
• cinnamon bark
• cloves
• cooked food
• coriander
• crisps, packets of snacks
• curries, Thai foods, chilli, the stronger the more heating
• deep frying
• eating late at night when tired because the food takes longer to be digested so accumulates and creates more heat, like newly cut grass put on a compost heap
• eating too fast, or when rushed, or snatching food while working; all tend to weaken your digestion and may make the food more heating, if already a warming food
• estrogen (oestrogen) pills seem to be very warming for many women
• fats like butter, olive oil, animal fat, coconut oil, dripping: also full-fat ice-cream (although the temperature it is eaten at makes it initially slightly cooling)
• fish
• foods cooked in fat or deep-fried
• garlic, the stronger the more heating

Ginger is an important herb in Chinese medicine

• ginger root: ginger is used in many herbal formulae in Chinese medicine because it strengthens the Stomach and Spleen, which digest food and absorb it into your body – but if you ate nothing but ginger it would become heating
• ginger dried powder
• greasy food
• grilling
• haggis cooked
• horseradish
• ibuprofen
• lamb
• meat (beef is considered to be less heating than lamb, but all meat is heating to a greater or lesser extent.)
• microwaving food
• milk
• mussel
• mustard
• mutton
• nuts such as brazil, hazel, almond and peanuts
• onion
• pepper
• peppers red or green
• pork
• processed foods, can be very heating
• puddings (but most fruit salads are cooling)
• roast or fried meat
• roasted peanuts
• root vegetables like carrot, potato
• rosemary
• seeds such as apricot and caraway 
• shellfish
• smoked food
• spices like curry spices or chilli
• steaming (some experts think steaming can even be cooling)
• sweeteners like sugar are initially warming, but for many have a subsequent cooling action. Artificial sweeteners, being concentrated, have many other effects and are more like medicines.  So, be sure to read the page on primary and secondary actions. For more on this, click here.
• tobacco smoke, especially if inhaled (I do not have enough experience of the effects of electronic cigarettes but expect they will be heating)

Then there are foods that specifically benefit a particular body energy, such as foods for Kidney Yang.