5 Herbs That May Support Digestion, According To Traditional Chinese Medicine

Digestion is crucial to overall health. If your digestion isn’t working, then the rest of your body can slowly start to fall apart: Your sleep quality can suffer, you may lack energy, your bowel movements can change, your skin may be affected, and much more.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the most important organs that we look at are the liver, spleen, and stomach. The liver can affect your digestion because stress affects the liver, and the liver will affect either the spleen or the stomach. If the liver affects the spleen, you may see symptoms such as irritability, abdominal distention, and pain; you may be hungry but get full only after a few bites of food or thirsty but have no desire to drink; there may be alternating constipation and diarrhea and a lot of gas—to name just a few symptoms. If the liver affects the stomach, you might see more upper-digestive issues such as acid reflux, hiccups, belching, nausea, and vomiting, and you may retain food in your stomach for a longer period of time and have distention in you upper abdomen, and more.

Also, if you've experienced hunger so strong that no matter how much you eat, it's still not enough, we may diagnose this as “Stomach Fire." This means that there's so much heat in your stomach that it just burns up all the food and you have to eat more and more. You may also have symptoms such as bad breath, bleeding gums, mental restlessness, acid reflux, and an intense thirst for cold drinks.

Simply put, this is rice. In TCM, rice is very soothing to the digestive system. It's also sweet in flavor (not sugar-sweet but carrots- or broccoli-sweet), and sweet is strengthening.

Also known as “chicken inner golden," Ji Nei Jin is a form of chicken gizzards. They are used to promote digestion but are especially good for moving stagnant food.

Shan Zha is a hawthorn berry, and it's one of my favorite herbs. You can buy it and drink it as a tea after every meal. It's sweet and sour in taste and is considered one of the strongest food stagnation herbs around. I find it particularly good if you are having problems digesting meats and fats.

This is actually the peel of an orange or a tangerine. This herb can help regulate your whole digestive system and according to TCM, is though to help with spleen and stomach issues, including nausea, vomiting, belching, abdominal fullness, and distention or pain.