Food is medicine! It is important throughout life. We emphasize the use of food to create and maintain health as well as to help us treat imbalances.
“Let food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.”
Hippocrates – The Father of Medicine
Zen Animal Wellness Recommendatons:
At Zen Animal Wellness, we believe that many health problems can be traced to feeding inappropriate diets. We do not believe in a single dietary program for animals with a “one size fits all” approach. Instead, Dr Heather will “prescribe” a nutritional therapy plan that is tailored to your animal’s specific needs.
Our dietary recommendations are formulated taking into account a variety of factors such as the species, age, breed, weight, work the animals is expected to perform and disease condition. Individual food therapy programs suitable for your lifestyle that range from complete home-made diets to commercially available pet foods can be formulated for your pet.
Chinese Food Therapy
Chinese food therapy is one of the five branches of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and is the study of food as therapeutic agents for the preservation of health and the treatment and prevention of disease. For over 2000 years, doctors in China evaluated and recorded the properties of foods and their effects on the body.
Food is considered to have the same energetic actions as herbs (cooling, warming etc) for treating disease and its application is based on similar principles but with a much broader range of applications. Food energetics refers to the effects food has on the digestion, physiological processes and metabolism of the body.
Chinese food therapy follows the same diagnostic and treatment principles as acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. Chinese food therapy can be thought of as food used as medicine. Diets are designed to bring the body back into balance and work synergistically with the other TCM modalities.
Food is grouped into 4 basic energetic classifications:
- Thermal nature (hot, warm, neutral, cool, cold)
- Flavor (sour, bitter, sweet, pungent, salty)
- Organ association (a food can affect specific internal organs)
- Meridian affiliation (a food has a definite effect on a particular acupuncture channel more than any others)
Call Zen Animal Wellness to schedule a nutrition consultation either in person at your home or over the phone. Call now to schedule: 575-779-7279
Do you think that acupuncture is only good for older pets or pets with chronic problems? Think again...imbalances develop long before symptoms appear. Watch the video below to learn more.