Warming and Cooling Foods for Dogs: The TCM Food Energetics List

A few entries show two temperatures instead of one. Apricot is listed as neutral to warm. Pineapple is listed as neutral to cool. When a food has two values, it is tagged under both, so pineapple shows up when you filter for neutral and again when you filter for cool.

Two values mean the food sits somewhere between them. A neutral to warm food is fine for most dogs. It moves toward warm when you feed it often, feed it hot, and serve it next to other warming foods.

Meat shifts the same way, and cooking is what moves it. Chicken is warm to begin with. Simmer it slowly into a soup and it gets warmer. Roast it or put it on the grill and it gets warmer again. It is the same chicken every time. The cooking is what raised it.

So read the temperature on a card as a starting point. How you cook a food, and how often you feed it, will move it from there.

The classical ladder runs from cool to hot in this order: raw is cooling, steamed is cooling to neutral, boiled is neutral, stewed and stir fried are warming, baked is more warming, deep fried is heating, roasted and grilled are more heating, and barbecued is the hottest method of all.

Time counts as much as method. A stew cooked slowly is more warming than the same stew cooked fast. That is the whole logic behind congee, and it is why I will sometimes leave the ingredient list alone and change nothing but the pot. A dog who cannot hold weight on a bowl of a given food will often hold it once that food has been simmered for two hours into something soft and wet.

Salty belongs to Water and enters the Kidney. It moves inward and downward, moistens, softens, and detoxifies, and counters hardening in the muscles and glands. A little supplements the quality of the Blood. Too much congeals the Blood, stresses the Heart, and overtaxes the Kidney. Restrict it in dampness.

Sour belongs to Wood and enters the Liver. It gathers and astringes, so it is used for leaking and sagging conditions, and it counteracts the effects of fatty foods. Sour foods activate the Blood and clear stagnation. In excess they over contract and hold too much moisture.

Bitter belongs to Fire and enters the Heart. It drains and dries as it travels downward, improves appetite, and draws out dampness and heat. Reduce it in cold, dryness, or deficiency. In excess it depletes qi and moisture.

Sweet belongs to Earth and enters the Spleen. It is the most common flavor and forms the center of the diet, harmonizing the other four. Full sweet covers most meat, legumes, nuts, dairy, and starchy vegetables and is tonifying. Empty sweet covers most fruit and sweeteners and is more cleansing and cooling. In excess, sweet forms phlegm and heat.

Pungent belongs to Metal and enters the Lung. It disperses stagnation and moves qi and blood outward and upward, stimulates digestion, and breaks through mucus. Because damp and stagnant conditions usually sit on top of an underlying deficiency, pungents often need a tonifying diet underneath them. In excess they exhaust qi and blood.

A balanced diet uses all five, with sweet at the center.

Every dog should eat across all temperatures and all flavors. Knowing the individual lets you tilt that diet slightly in one direction. A cold dog tilts slightly to the warming side of neutral. A hot dog tilts slightly to the cooling side. A Yin deficient dog favours foods that tonify Yin and drops the over stimulating ones.

The more extreme the imbalance, the stronger the corrective tilt can be. Tilt too far for too long and you cause the opposite problem. A Yin deficient dog fed nothing but Yin tonics and cooling foods will weaken the Yang and end up worse off than when you started.

Dietary remedies are meant to be gentle. A lean held steadily over months does far more than a binge. Strong tilts belong to short acute situations only.

No absolute rule governs whether a food is warming or cooling, but these guidelines will place most things you cannot find here.

Plants that take longer to grow, root vegetables and ginger among them, tend to run warmer than fast growing foods like lettuce and courgette. Foods with high water content tend to run more cooling, which is why melon and cucumber sit where they do. Dried foods run warmer than their fresh counterparts. Chemically fertilized foods forced to grow quickly run cooler than their naturally grown counterparts, and some chemical additives produce outright heat reactions.

Cooling foods direct energy inward and downward, cooling the upper and outer body first. Warming foods move energy upward and outward from the core, warming from the inside out. Warmer foods speed a body up. Cooler foods slow it down.

When you read about Chinese medicine, including on this page, you will run into the word center. It is close to what we call the stomach in everyday English, and it is wider than that.

What we treat as one organ shows up in Chinese medicine under several names, doing several different jobs. In the Spleen and Stomach lineage, all of it begins with digestion. Those organs sit in the middle of the body, so the tradition named the whole area, and everything it does, the center. It covers taking food in, breaking it down, and turning it into something the body can use.

You will also see it written as the middle, or the middle jiao. Those are the same thing. Different translators picked different words for it.

So when a food is described as strengthening the center, read that as strengthening digestion.

I am not going to get into sourcing on this page, but I do want to invite you to start educating yourself on farming practices.

There is real difficulty in every direction here. You may want to feed organic and then learn the farm growing it sits directly beside a commercial operation. You may live in a country where regenerative farms barely exist while another country has them in every county. Your budget may simply not reach the price range you would prefer. Do the best you can inside the situation you are actually in.

If I had to put my own spending in order, my priorities are meat first, then organ meat, then fish, with vegetables last.

That all said, cooking is the great neutral ground. Where you are worried about quality, cooking it properly will minimize a good deal of the risk.

In Chinese medicine, regulate means a food or herb acts on the qi dynamic. It helps qi move smoothly and freely, which is how you clear qi stagnation and settle rebellious qi.

Four organs carry most of that dynamic: the Lung, which governs qi; the Liver, which governs dredging and draining; the Spleen, which governs transformation and transportation; and the Stomach, which governs receiving and taking in.

Any of those functions can be disrupted, and there are a number of reasons why. When the Spleen and Stomach go stagnant, you see abdominal fullness, distension, belching, and acid reflux. Herbs are used at that point to unblock the stagnant qi and get things moving again.

Foods that regulate qi are generally foods of movement, and the effect they have is temporary. You have to keep feeding them to keep getting it.

Tonifying works differently. To tonify is to leave the body better than it was before the process started. Ginseng strengthens digestion, and that strengthening stays behind after the herb is gone.

So when you filter by Regulates, you are asking what a food moves. When you filter by Tonifies, you are asking what it builds.