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TCM Treasures Honey
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SIMPLIFIED Chinese: 蜂蜜 Pinyin: fēng mì
For many Chinese people, it’s become a habit to add honey to milk, spread it on bread, or just simply stir some into a cup of warm water for breakfast.
It’s not just for the sweet taste but more for its rich nutrition and special function in Traditional Chinese Medicine, such as dispelling toxins and pathogenic heat, relieving pain and nourishing yin (cold) energy.
Apart from its widely recognized nutritional value, honey is also Chinese people’s favorite as a “neutral” food with medicinal properties. In the “Compendium of Materia Medica,” the TCM classic by pharmacist Li Shizhen in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), honey can help dispel pathogenic heat, clear away toxins, relieve pain and combat dehydration.
Eating honey often can help nourish yin energy and strengthen the spleen and improve sight. Honey every morning can help prevent constipation and can also battle chronic coughing.
Taking water with honey can help as a hangover cure as well as protect the liver. Spreading honey on a burn can help relieve pain as well as prevent infection and accelerate healing. And recent research shows that having a spoon of honey before bed can aid sleep and a cup of water and honey at morning and at night can help relieve high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries and other related diseases.
Honey made from different flower pollen can have different health properties. Honey made from flowers of coptis, loquat and Chinese milk vetch can help dispel pathogenic heat most effectively. Those of the common vetch, wild rose and motherwort can help achieve beautiful skin and rosy cheeks. Those of wolfberry, orange and loquat can help moisten the lungs.
Prescriptions & Usage:
Honey pear
• Peel the pear and chop it into slices. Apply loquat honey and have it often.
Benefits: helps nourish lungs, dissolves phlegm and relieves coughing and infection.
Honey bread
• Spread honey on the bread (biscuits). Have it before drinking.
Benefits: help relieves hangover and protects the liver.
Sesame honey milk
• Mix 15g black sesame powder, 30g honey and milk and stir even. Have it in the morning on an empty stomach.
Benefits: Relieves constipation.
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