The principles of dietotherapy for chronic hepatophilic viral disease are
¨ “fresh”
¨ “alimental”,
¨ “balanced diet”,
¨ “absolutely no disinfectants” and
¨ “avoid food that harm the liver”.
During the treatment of hepatitis, a patient should intake high quality and digestible proteins (such as fresh eggs, milk, pork, beef, fish, etc). Pork is especially good and it is thought to be “yin nourishing and kidney reinforcing, saliva producing and asthenia eliminating” and contains abundant calcium, phosphorus and ferrum. The content of cholesterol in pork is lower than that in chicken, duck, fish and beef. Therefore, pork is the first choice for dietotherapy of chronic hepatitis.
Patient should also eat fresh vegetable and intake sufficient amyloid and vitamins. It is because the heart fire, liver fire, lung fire and large intestine of the patient are usually stirred up. He should not eat poultries with heat such as chicken, pigeon, goose, and damp heat marine product, which contains much heterologous protein, such as shrimp, crab, clam, corb shell, oyster, and so on.
In addition, patients should fast mango, lichi, Liulian as this kind of fruits is damp-heat in nature. At the same time, he should avoid pungent, barbecued and fried food. To make the protein in meat become digestible, Chinese cuisine “braise” is highly recommended as this method helps to retain the protein in meat and then hydrolyzes meat protein into aminopeptodrate and amino acid. So braised pork liver or thin meat with radix astragall (黃蓍) and dangshen (黨參), and water braised beef soup with ginger piece are among the first choice for protein supplement (especially before or after menses).
It is very beneficial for curing deficiency of yin leading to hyperactivity of fire to cook “yin nourishing and kidney reinforcing soup” such as aweto, Shuiyu, teal, pricklyash berry, spiral, clam, etc (冬蟲草、水魚、水鴨、花膠、響螺、蛤蚧) with Chinese pot. It is correct for fat persons to pay attention to the intake of fat quantity. But if you are secondary obesity caused by hepatic edema, your diet should still contain proper amount of fat and sugar. Even you eat food with no fat, fatty acid can still be synthesized from sugar or precursor substances of amino acids. Superfluous ingestion of fat also increases the incretion of insulin, and then causes sugar to transform into fattiness. Chronic hepatitis patients should select vegetable oil with unsaturated fatty acid when they intake fat.