Chinese food therapy originated in ancient times. Diet**, as far back as the Zhou and Qin periods, was already quite mature. In Chinese traditional Chinese medicine, great importance is also attached to the use of medicinal diet for health care. At this time, the medicinal diet was the ancient dietary therapy. In modern times, we have summarized a definition of dietary therapy, that is, dietary therapy is a health food with disease prevention and treatment through cooking and processing of drugs and food under the guidance of traditional Chinese medicine theory. Diet therapy can also refer to a health preservation method, also known as "food therapy", that is, according to the different tastes of food, acting on different organs, and has the effect of conditioning and **. It is an important branch of health preservation, including important contents such as medicinal diet.
The economic and cultural development of the Qin and Han dynasties was very rapid, which accelerated the process of medicinal diet research. The earliest existing medicine book in China, "Shennong's Materia Medica", published at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, contains 365 kinds of medicines.
During the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the theory of medicinal diet made great progress, and some special works appeared. In Ge Hong's "Elbow Reserve Emergency Prescription" of the Jin Dynasty, many folk simple prescriptions with the nature of dietary therapy and medicinal diet were recorded. For example, seaweed cures gall disease, sheep liver cures finch blindness, etc. Tao Hongjing, a health practitioner of the Liang Dynasty, classified medicines and foods. Cui Hao's "Shijing" in the Northern Wei Dynasty and Liu Xiu's "Shifang" in the Liang Dynasty played a role in the development of China's medicinal diet theory.
In the Tang Dynasty, Chinese medicinal diets were not only systematically developed in theory, but also more widely applied. Sun Simiao, a famous doctor in the Tang Dynasty, has a special article on "food treatment" in his book "Preparation for Emergencies", which is divided into five parts: fruits, vegetables, grains, rice, birds and beasts, and insects and fish, containing 154 kinds of medicinal foods and 117 prescriptions for medicinal diets.
Therefore, food is not eaten indiscriminately, but also eaten for different symptoms, especially some chronic diseases, ** diseases, etc. For example, because of the diseases caused by dampness in the body, some of them are very complicated and troublesome, and most of the incurable diseases that are usually said are such diseases. If the drug is used, it can not be eradicated, and the adverse reactions are not small, so dietary therapy has become the best choice.