Traditional Chinese Medicine Parenting: Question 5 What should be done if a child doesn't like to eat regular meals and only wants to eat sweets?
Traditional Chinese Medicine Parenting: Question 5 What should be done if a child doesn't like to eat regular meals and only wants to eat sweets?
Traditional Chinese Medicine Parenting: Question 5 What should be done if a child doesn't like to eat regular meals and only wants to eat sweets?
Answer: From the perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and the five organs, children's bodies are characterized by "three deficiencies and two excesses." This means that children are prone to kidney deficiency, spleen deficiency, lung Qi deficiency, heart Qi excess, and liver Qi excess. If a child doesn't like to eat regular meals but loves to eat sweets, this is a sign of spleen and stomach weakness.
According to the Huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon), sweet flavors enter the spleen. Therefore, when a child has a weak spleen and stomach, they naturally crave sweet foods. This is actually a self-healing mechanism of the body, where consuming sweets helps to strengthen the spleen.
However, the biggest problem today is that the sugar available now is not the same as the sugar from the past. If it were natural sugars (such as cane sugar, brown sugar, or malt sugar), consuming them in moderation would be beneficial. But most of the sugar in children's food today is artificial sweeteners like saccharin. Natural sugars taste sweet in the mouth but are alkaline in the stomach, which is why they don't cause tooth decay. In contrast, artificial sugars taste sweet in the mouth but turn acidic in the stomach, which is the real cause of tooth decay.
Treatment Methods:
Give your child a daily spinal massage (spinal pinching) with extra focus on the spleen and stomach area.
Use 150 grams of Paederia scandens (chicken dung vine) and 50 grams of fried chicken gizzard lining (Ji Nei Jin), grind them into a powder, and give the child one spoonful three times a day.
If the child is too young and unwilling to take powdered medicine, use Xiao Jian Zhong Tang as follows: For a 20-pound child, take 8 grams of cinnamon twig (Gui Zhi), 16 grams of white peony root (Bai Shao), 8 grams of fresh ginger (Sheng Jiang), 5 grams of roasted licorice (Zhi Gan Cao), 5 grams of jujube (Da Zao), and 2 spoons of maltose. Boil the first five ingredients in three bowls of water until it reduces to one bowl. Then add the maltose and let it dissolve. Feed this to the child in three doses.