Tom Sanders, professor of nutrition and dietetics at Kings College London, said: "If you put a jug of water on the table, people drink more water," he said.
She met McCance in the 1930s while studying dietetics at King's College of Household and Social Science.
Experiments with minerals, plants, and animal substances, inspired to some extent by Daoist dietetics and by the search for the elixir of life, resulted in the 52 chapters of pharmacopoeia called Bencaogangmu, or "Great Pharmacopoeia" (16th century).
Dietetics (grain and alcohol avoidance); ingestion of solar, lunar, and astral exhalations and their cycling within the body; gymnastics; and conservation of vital fluids through proper sexual techniques were all necessary and fundamental.
A student of Hippocrates' doctrine of medicine, which was based on balancing the four humours (body fluids)—blood, phlegm, yellow bile (choler), and black bile (melancholy)—Herophilus emphasized the curative powers of drugs, dietetics, and gymnastics.
Usually regarded as the chief representative of the dogmatic school, he wrote on animal anatomy, dietetics, physiology, embryology, and medical botany, among other subjects.
The Yellow Emperor also was the patron of technology; and the classic works of many arcane arts, including alchemy, medicine, sexual techniques, cooking, and dietetics, were all placed under his aegis.
He wrote an important book on dietetics, but he achieved his greatest fame for a treatise on typhoid and other fevers, a work highly regarded in the East for as long a time as Galen of Pergamum's works were popular in the West.
