What is yakuzen? The meaning of food and medicine sharing a source, and the basic ideas

Yakuzen sounds good for you, but what is it, really? You may know the word and still find it oddly hard to explain. Yakuzen is food that settles the body by using what ingredients do, on the basis of Chinese medicine. You can start with supermarket vegetables, without stocking up on special crude drugs. This article sets out what yakuzen means and the thinking underneath it, how it differs from kampo and from nutrition science, and how to bring it in for your constitution and the season, drawing in part on our interview with a Kokusai Yakuzenshi (international yakuzen practitioner).

What is yakuzen? A way of settling the body through food, grounded in Chinese medicine

Yakuzen is a way of eating that chooses and cooks ingredients to suit your constitution, how you feel and the season, on the basis of Chinese medicine theory. Underneath it lies the idea that food and medicine share a source. Medicine and food come from the same root, and everyday meals are the foundation of health: long-standing wisdom from Chinese medicine.

How yakuzen is read, and where it comes from

Yakuzen is read ya-ku-zen. It is dietary care handed down in China over thousands of years, and underneath it lies the old idea that food and medicine share a source. Its range is wide, from serious cooking using specialist crude drugs to the everyday dishes of a family kitchen.

What sort of cooking is yakuzen? Closer than you think

Say yakuzen and you may picture special, medicinal-smelling dishes. In fact, a good deal of the cooking around you already connects to yakuzen thinking.

• Samgyetang: the classic yakuzen soup, made with ginseng and jujube
• Yakuzen hotpot and yakuzen curry: dishes that combine warming ingredients and spices
• Yakuzen teas: jujube tea, goji tea, and the ginger tea you drink on a cold day
• Everyday dishes: adding ginger to miso soup, eating cucumber in summer. That is yakuzen in its own right

Yakuzen, in other words, is not special cooking but choosing your usual food to suit your body, a way of thinking that carries on from daily life.

What is the difference between yakuzen and ordinary cooking?

Even with the same ingredients, what yakuzen and ordinary cooking choose on differs. Ordinary cooking chooses on taste, nutrition and season; yakuzen chooses on what an ingredient does to the body, to match how you feel that day, your constitution and the turn of the season. That is what marks it out.

	Ordinary cooking	yakuzen
What it chooses on	Taste, nutrition, season	What it does to the body, constitution, season
What it aims at	Taste and nourishment	Keeping the body in balance
What it uses	Everyday ingredients	Everyday ingredients (the same ones are fine)

Yakuzen suits people like these

• People who fall ill easily at the turn of the seasons
• People bothered by vague off-days, such as feeling the cold or swelling
• People who want to look again, gently, at their health through everyday meals
• People looking for a healthy habit they can keep up

Yakuzen is not treatment but daily care that looks after the body through food. If something continues to trouble you, speak to a medical institution, and bring a yakuzen eye to the dishes you already cook.

Food and medicine share a source: seeing ingredients by what they do

What most marks out yakuzen is that it sees ingredients not by how much of a nutrient they hold but what they do to the body by what they do. Yakuzen sorts ginger and spring onion as warming, tomato and cucumber as heat-settling, and uses them to match how you feel that day. There is no need to go hunting for difficult crude drugs; your usual vegetables and aromatics are yakuzen's materials.

Yakuzen settles pre-illness

Chinese medicine has an idea for the state where you are not ill but things have started to go off: pre-illness. Yakuzen is dietary care that settles things at that stage, through food. Rather than dealing with something once it appears, yakuzen gets ahead of the turn of the season. The practitioner we interviewed put it this way: bring in cooling ingredients before summer arrives, and throat-moistening ones before the dry season of autumn, early. She adds that in Japan, where universal health insurance has made going to hospital once something is wrong the norm, yakuzen and getting ahead through food are still at the stage of spreading.

Yakuzen and nutrition science are looking at different things

Yakuzen and nutrition science are easily confused, but their axes differ. Nutrition science sees ingredients by how much of a nutrient they hold, such as vitamins or protein, while yakuzen looks at the direction of what they do. Neither is better; holding both views gives depth to how you choose what to eat. With the same tomato, nutrition science says it is high in lycopene and yakuzen says it settles heat in the body. The angle changes.

The Chinese medicine underneath yakuzen: yin and yang, the five phases, qi, blood and fluids

What you cannot do without in understanding yakuzen is the Chinese medicine underneath it. It sounds technical, but the basics come down to three things, yin and yang, the five phases, and qi, blood and fluids, plus how ingredients are sorted, by the four natures and five flavours. Get a rough hold on these and why a given ingredient is chosen starts to make sense.

Yin and yang: seeing which way the body leans

Yin and yang is the idea of seeing everything in nature through two opposing qualities. In the body, leaning too far either way, towards cold, which is yin, or towards flushing, which is yang, is held to bring trouble. Yakuzen aims to settle that balance through ingredients.

The five phases: dividing nature into five and tying them to the body

The five phases divide nature into wood, fire, earth, metal and water, and tie each to an organ among the five zang and to one of the five flavours. They correspond to the seasons too, which gives you a guide for choosing ingredients that look after whichever organ weakens most easily in that season.

Five phases	Season	The organ to look after	The flavour to keep in mind
Wood	Spring	Liver	Sour
Fire	Summer	Heart	Bitter
Earth	Late summer (the rainy season)	Spleen	Sweet
Metal	Autumn	Lung	Pungent
Water	Winter	Kidney	Salty

Qi, blood and fluids: the three things that circulate

Chinese medicine holds that the body stays well through the circulation of three things: qi, its energy; blood, its nourishment; and fluids, its water. When any of them runs short or stalls, it is held to bring tiredness, cold and swelling, and they serve as the measure when reading a constitution. The thinking behind qi, blood and fluids is set out in detail in What are qi, blood and fluids in yakuzen?.

The four natures and five flavours: sorting ingredients by what they do

Yakuzen sorts ingredients by the four natures, cold, cool, warm and hot, with anything in between called neutral, and the five flavours, sour, bitter, sweet, pungent and salty. This is yakuzen's measure for choosing ingredients by what they do. Each flavour is held to work in a different direction, sour gathering in, bitter cooling heat, sweet replenishing, pungent dispersing and salty softening, and they are combined to keep the balance.

Category	Category	How yakuzen sees it
Four natures	Warm and hot	Held to warm the body (ginger, spring onion, kabocha squash and the like)
Four natures	Cool and cold	Held to settle heat in the body (tomato, cucumber, eggplant and the like)
Neutral	In between	Leaning neither way, easy to use day to day (rice, tubers and the like)
Five flavours	Sour, bitter, sweet, pungent, salty	Each flavour is held to work in a different direction

What yakuzen is most often confused with is Kampo. Roughly put, yakuzen is everyday food and kampo medicine is medicine used for symptoms and constitutions. A detailed comparison, including what each uses and who handles it, is in What is the difference between yakuzen and kampo?.

Bringing yakuzen in by constitution

What makes yakuzen interesting is that the same ingredient suits some people and not others. Eating nothing but cooling ingredients because you heard they were good for you can leave someone who feels the cold feeling it more. Starting from your own constitution makes your eating fit you better. Here are the constitution types Chinese medicine commonly uses and a guide to the ingredients to choose.

If the constitution names do not mean much to you, starting from the sign that is bothering you is fine. Warm if you feel the cold, replenish qi if you feel heavy, moisten if you feel dry, think about draining water if you swell. That alone is a first step into yakuzen. Once you are used to it, use the types below as a guide.

Constitution type	How Chinese medicine sees it	A guide to the ingredients to choose
Qi deficiency	Qi tends to run short; you tire easily	Japanese yam, kabocha squash, chicken
Qi stagnation	Qi does not circulate; you feel tight and bloated	Citrus, myoga, shiso
Blood deficiency	Blood tends to run short; you dry out easily	Liver, spinach, black soybeans, jujube
Blood stasis	Blood does not circulate; dullness is on your mind	Onion, oily fish, vinegar
Yin deficiency	Moisture runs short; you flush easily	White wood ear, pear, tofu
Phlegm-damp	Excess fluid builds up; you swell easily	Sweetcorn, Job's tears, cucumber

A constitution is not necessarily one thing; several can mix. Start from whichever type is on your mind, and for more see the Qi deficiency-Qi stagnation-Blood deficiency-Blood stasis-Yin deficiency-Phlegm-damp explanations as well.

Three steps to starting yakuzen

If the word yakuzen makes you tense up, there is no need to overthink it. These three steps bring it into daily life without strain.

The trick to keeping it up is not chasing perfection. Every meal need not be yakuzen; a few times a week is plenty. The less you make of it, the longer it lasts. If you want to start with an easy yakuzen tea, see Starting a yakuzen life with everyday vegetables as well.

What ingredients do, in yakuzen terms: it changes how you choose the dish in front of you

Yakuzen ingredients are nothing special. The vegetables and aromatics you already eat are held to warm the body or moisten it. Knowing what the common ones do lets you choose to match how you feel that day.

On a day like this	Ingredients to bring in	Add it to the dish you already make
You feel the cold	Ginger, spring onion, garlic	In miso soup or a broth
Hot and flushed	Tomato, cucumber, eggplant	In a salad or on cold tofu
Tiredness has built up	Japanese yam, kabocha squash, chicken	In a simmered dish or grated over rice
Dryness is on your mind	White wood ear, pear, lotus root	In a dessert or a simmered dish
I swell up easily	Sweetcorn, Job's tears	In rice or a soup

What each ingredient does in detail is in the vegetable encyclopedia, one by one. Start with whichever vegetable interests you.

FAQ

In summary: yakuzen is a way of eating that looks after your body

Yakuzen is a way of eating that looks after the body through what ingredients do, built on the thinking of Chinese medicine. Underneath it lie the ideas that food and medicine share a source and that you prepare for pre-illness, and ingredients are chosen by measures such as yin and yang, the five phases, qi, blood and fluids, and the four natures and five flavours. Unlike kampo medicine, there is no waiting for a professional's prescription: you can start by knowing your constitution and choosing everyday ingredients that suit the season. Begin with one dish a day that looks after your body.