Summer temperatures are high, and the body loses a lot of water, which must be replenished in a timely manner. The water in vegetables is natural, clean, nutritious, and biologically active water filtered through multiple biological membranes. Eating 500 grams of melons and vegetables daily is equivalent to drinking 450 milliliters of high-quality water, and melon vegetables also have the effect of lowering blood pressure.
Early summer should be a time to eat more cooling vegetables. The summer heat and dampness can affect human health. Eating cooling vegetables helps to promote saliva production, quench thirst, relieve vexation and summer heat, clear heat, and purge fire. Cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, celery, lettuce, asparagus, watercress, and jicama are all considered cooling vegetables.
Early summer should be a time to eat more bitter vegetables. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that most bitter vegetables have the effect of clearing heat. Foods with a bitter taste, such as bitter vegetables and bitter melon, can help reduce summer heat, eliminate fatigue, and more. Regularly consuming bitter melon soup or bitter melon dishes in the summer can harmonize the spleen and stomach, relieve fatigue, refresh the mind, and has a certain preventive effect against heatstroke and gastrointestinal diseases. Bitter vegetables are also a type of medicinal and edible vegetable, with functions such as cooling and detoxifying, disinfecting and draining pus, removing stasis and stopping pain, and preventing and treating gastroenteritis. When eating bitter vegetables, wash the roots and leaves, and they can be eaten cold, stir-fried, or in soups. The taste is bitter yet fragrant, making it a great dish for relieving summer heat and stimulating the appetite. It also has a certain preventive and therapeutic effect on enteritis and dysentery.
In addition, summer is a season with a high incidence of diseases, especially intestinal diseases. Eating more antibacterial vegetables like garlic and chives can help prevent illness.