Chinese “medicine” has always been about more than just taking medicine. It’s about a way of living for health, happiness and longevity. I’m all over Dan Buettner’s new book, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. One little gem: people who eat nuts four to five times per week live two to three years longer than people who don’t eat nuts. Although this finding surprised the investigators, it makes perfect sense from a TCM point of view. Nuts contain the potential for life, the esssence of growth. This is called “Jing” in Chinese medicine, and nuts have Jing. So don’t wait for the researchers to tease out every last constituent in every nut and then publish their findings in a reputable journal. We evolved to eat the fruits of the earth. I personally feel that it will never be possible to tease out every last component of a given fruit,seed or nut. Nature has “packaged” the healing elements of plants more perfectly than any man-made “supplement”. The long-lived populations discussed in Dan Buettner’s book don’t take synthesized supplements. They just eat fresh, unprocessed food. What a concept!