According to Chinese medicine, each taste has a specific direction - meaning that there are tastes that cause symptoms to go down and there are those that cause movement to the sides or up.

I know it sounds strange, but the truth is, it makes sense that our diet would affect our symptoms. Some symptoms feel like something coming up: heartburn, nausea, or vomiting, and some symptoms feel like something stuck in the body - stomach pain, abdominal discomfort, or bloating.

Sour taste - brings you down and in (imagine what happens to you when you drink lemon juice, you shrink inward). Therefore, sour tastes can help with symptoms that "rise" up: nausea, heartburn, vomiting.

Examples of sour foods would be yogurt, lemon, sour apple, pickles, olives. The point is not that you should only eat them, but that you can incorporate more sour foods into your diet or eat them when you have nausea or heartburn (for example, suck on a lemon or pickle).

Spicy taste - spreads to the sides and moves. Chinese medicine was created from observation and the first practitioners of Chinese medicine saw what happens when we eat spicy food: we get tears, sweat, even bowel movements. The Chinese understood that spicy taste creates movement in the body or gets things out, but they also knew how to say that it is not necessary to eat extreme things like hot peppers to cause this movement. You can eat foods that are mild in their spiciness that will cause much gentler movement in the body and relieve symptoms such as pain or discomfort in the stomach.

Mildly spicy foods would include radishes, green onions, leeks, coriander, ginger, basil, and fennel seeds. You can drink them in infusions (ginger infusion, fennel seeds) or add them to food.