Ice cream, slurpees, and shakes—oh, my!
There’s no polite way to discuss this next subject, so if you are squeamish about bodily functions, this is not the post for you—unless of course you suffer from this particular problem.
In my office experience thus far, the number one reason for diarrhea (and this excludes the
stomach flues that are passed around in the summer and winter) is eating cold, damp foods. A fine example of this is a patient who came in complaining of cramping every evening before bed with a bout of diarrhea every morning. When I asked him what cold foods he eats, such as ice cream and icy cold drinks, he shook his head and said, “No, I don’t eat ice cream and I like my drinks room temperature.” I asked him to give me a typical day’s food intake. When the patient came to evening dessert his eyes lit-up. In the evenings before bed, he liked to eat a bowl of frozen yogurt. I asked him if he would do a little experiment—for one week he would not eat any frozen yogurt (and no ice cream for substitute). The next week, I ask the patient how the experiment went. He confirmed there had been no diarrhea and no stomach cramps.
If I didn’t see this again and again, I wouldn’t bother writing about it. Cold, damp foods aren’t 
for us. Nowhere in our dietary evolution did we hunt and gather ice cream and frozen yogurt. Our love affair with iced drinks–smoothies, iced coffee drinks, shakes, sodas and slurpees–wrecks havoc on our digestive tract. It’s no wonder I see so many people with diarrhea. Thankfully the solution is easy! Stop eating cold food and drinks.
There are other benefits to cutting out the cold and damp foods. Cold and damp in Chinese medicine diminishes the digestive fire, which means that people can’t efficiently digest and absorb their food so they over-eat to compensate, weight gain happens more easily too as the metabolism slows down (cold slows things down, heat speeds them up–ice verses boiling
water), and causes people to feel heavy and foggy in the head.
Try this experiment. Write down how you feel after you eat and drink for the next two days. Then for a week, cut out all cold-damp foods mentioned above. Write about how you feel. Compare and contrast with the first two days.
Tags: appetite, cold, dietary advice, experiments, health care
2 comments 
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September 12th, 2009 at 13:54
What about frozen fruit? I just found some frozen fruit cups that I’ve really been enjoying rather than ice cream. I like frozen things a lot and heard that its good because your body has to use more calories to warm them up.
September 12th, 2009 at 16:26
Good question, Lyndi! From a Chinese Medicine perspective cold foods ultimately inhibit the digestive function. It’s true that eating frozen fruit will require more energy (burn more calories) to digest, but over time it will cause injury to the digestive organs and rather than weight loss, the digestive organs will become sluggish (damp) and ineffective at absorption. When the digestive function of the Spleen/Stomach/Large Intestine/Small Intestine is damaged from cold and damp then people eat more food in order to get the nutrition they need because their digestive organs are no longer efficient at removing what they need from small amounts of food. You can think of our digestion as this warm, little fire that breaks things down and moves it along. When a person adds cold and damp to their fire, the fire has to work harder and harder to break food down because the heat is smothered—after many years of this the fire begins to sputter and die. It simply can’t keep up. People get heavier and heavier, damper and damper.