A little tip for summer wellness: eat more sour foods and fewer cold ones!

The proverb says: "If you don't eat eggs on the start of summer, you'll stumble up and down hills." After the start of summer, the weather begins to get hot, and the body's energy consumption increases accordingly. People often feel tired, making health and wellness particularly important at this time. You should eat more sour foods like black plum, hawthorn, and tomatoes to resist the invasion of summer heat.

Why eat more sour foods in the summer?

1. To reduce sweating and expel dampness

In the summer, you sweat a lot, so it's appropriate to eat sour foods such as tomatoes, lemons, strawberries, black plums, grapes, hawthorn, pineapple, mangoes, and kiwis. Their sourness can help reduce sweating, stop diarrhea, and expel dampness. It can prevent excessive sweating from depleting qi and fluids, and it can also promote the production of fluids to quench thirst and aid digestion.

Tomato and Black Plum

2. To enhance sterilization and prevent diseases

Under continuous high temperatures, it's important to replenish water in time. Drinking water can maintain the body's adequate blood volume, lower blood viscosity, expel toxins, and reduce the burden on the heart and kidneys. However, drinking too much water can dilute gastric juice and reduce its sterilizing ability. Eating some sour foods can increase the acidity of gastric juice, strengthen the spleen and whet the appetite, and help with sterilization and digestion.

3. To help the absorption of nutrients

In the summer, the body needs comprehensive and balanced nutrition. In a high-temperature environment, the body's consumption of nutrients is considerable. In addition to three meals a day, you should also pay attention to supplementing with extra vitamin C, B1, B2, A, and D from vegetables, fruits, and your diet. People who lose a lot of calcium should also supplement with high-quality calcium preparations. Eating more sour fruits and foods can increase and help the absorption of nutrients like calcium.

Other summer wellness tips:

1. Pay attention to heart care

For the entire summer, wellness should pay special attention to heart care. You can drink more milk and eat more soy products, duck, shrimp, crucian carp, lean meat, and edible fungi. You should also eat more vegetables, fruits, and whole grains to increase the supply of fiber, vitamin C, and B vitamins.

2. Avoid cold food in your diet

Your summer diet should be more pungent and warm, and less bitter and cold. Limit cold drinks. In the summer, because you sweat too much, you often feel thirsty, so using some cold drinks in moderation can help dissipate heat from the body and play a role in clearing heat and relieving summer heat. Mung bean soup and lotus bean soup are excellent for quenching thirst and relieving summer heat, but you must avoid overindulging in cold drinks, ice and snow, cold jelly, cold congee, and raw cold fruits and vegetables because of a craving for coolness. In the summer, you should prevent improper diet by consuming foods like Job's tears porridge, Agastache rugosa tea, mung bean porridge, and cold-dressed purslane to clear damp-heat and clear heat and toxins.