The use of health foods is becoming popular and rediscovery of Chinese foods is responsible for launching a new generation of diet. A convenient classification of these products to cook has been developed based on the theory of traditional Chinese medicine (Zheng, 1998). A classification of 286 foods popular in Japan was conducted using the four categories of food source, flavors, Chinese medical signs, and channel tropism. Although those foods appear be primarily from the category of the channel tropism linked almost totally to the organs of either spleen or stomach, they are broad in all categories. These results suggest that the 286 foods may be enough to prepare the traditional Chinese medicated diet in Japan using foods in common use in this country.
