Herbs in Chinese Medicine: Sheng Jiang

Video Transcript

"The next herb we're going to talk about is Ginger. In Chinese, we refer to it as Sheng Jiang. That's the fresh ginger. We actually have slightly different properties with the different ways that we can prepare the ginger. So, we've got things like the Sheng Jiang. And then we have Gan Jiang, which is actually a dried ginger. Then we have Pao Jiang, which is actually that it's toasted and so we actually roast it a little bit to add some additional properties to it. So, I'll talk about each one of the properties. So, Sheng Jiang is my personal favorite and we can use this specifically for nausea. So, it's a wonderful thing that we can make a tea out of it, or we can even chew on it if we really want a strong effect from that ginger. But the fresh ginger is best for nausea. We can use the Gan Jiang, which is the dried ginger, to aid in digestion as well as to warm the abdomen. So, a lot of times, if you're always feeling cold in your belly from eating cold foods or raw foods, use the dried ginger and it will actually help to warm that abdomen up, and warm your stomach up and aid in your digestion. If you want to enhance that warming effect where you're just, it feels like there's an ice cube almost stabbing you in the stomach, then we actually go to the extreme, and very, very warm one, and we use the Pao Jiang. We can even enhance it more if we just take off the skin. So, if we just peel the skin off the ginger, we say the skin is the hottest part. We can even use that to make us break a sweat if we're starting to catch a cold. So, ginger is a wonderful, wonderful herb that's safe to use and wonderful to cook with and has so many uses from aiding in our digestion, to using the fresh ginger to help with nausea."