'The right amount of a flavour will benefit an organ; too much will put it out of kilter and damage the organ. A good Chinese diet will feature a mixture of yin and yang foods and the five flavours.'
Even a properly cooked, traditional Chinese meal will reflect this kind of balance, as no one flavour will overwhelm the others, or a bitter dish may balance out a sweeter one.
Clissold believes that Westerners tend to overindulge in particular flavours in their diet, leading to bodies that Taoist food theory would consider unbalanced and dysfunctional.
'Sweet (and bland) foods are the pre-dominant flavours in most Western diets, which is why many Western waistbands are stretched to the limit and digestive disorders are so common.'
She also compares the way that Chinese food is holistic with Western ideas of breaking down foods to their nutritional components, a notion that does not acknowledge that foods work in tandem with each other.
'Modern nutritionists break a meal down into proteins, carbohydrates and fats,' she says. 'There is increasing awareness of the need for vitamins, minerals and micro nutrients but the Western nutrition model combined with the ready availability of food in the West tends to promote very limited eating.'
One surprising discovery that Clissold made during her research was that the Chinese actually consume 30 per cent more calories than Westerners but stay 20 per cent slimmer, a claim originally made by T Colin Campbell in The China Study, a comprehensive survey that examined the link between diet and disease in China and other countries.
The China Study debunked the idea that the Chinese are thinner because of a more active lifestyle and therefore consume more to maintain this lifestyle. In fact, to make its point, the survey compared the least active group of Chinese, office workers who led sedentary lives, with a more active group of average Americans who exercised moderately.
But even as The China Study extolled the way that rural Chinese ate, one danger that Clissold sees is that as China modernises, the Chinese themselves are moving away from their own traditional diets with their accumulated knowledge and falling into Western practices of eating on the run, snacking, buying processed foods and consuming empty calories, leading to the diseases of the industrialised world: cancer, diabetes and obesity.
Still, she ends her book on an optimistic note about the role of foreign influences in Chinese cuisine, saying, 'I have faith that the influence will not be long-term. Chinese culture has done a pretty good job of withstanding invasion to date.'
