From the winter solstice, Yin Qi began to fade, while Yang Qi gradually picked up. If the elderly can seize this season and make appropriate supplements, it will be extremely beneficial to enhance their immunity and recuperate weak diseases. Most elderly people are yin deficiency of liver and kidney, and winter is the best season to warm and tonify kidney yang. Therefore, tonifying kidney and helping yang in winter can nourish liver and tendons, benefit heart and yang, and moisten lung qi.

In winter, people are prone to dry nose, dry lips, thirst, dry throat and dry skin. Therefore, they should eat more foods that nourish yin and promote fluid production, such as pears, rock sugar, tremella, adenophora, duck and so on. Patients with wind-heat cold, pharyngitis and tracheitis should eat more sesame seeds, bean products, honey, spinach, potatoes, radishes, longan, bananas, grapes, lotus seeds, yams, lotus roots, Monopterus albus, chestnuts, walnuts, peanuts, red dates and other foods that can nourish yin and moisten dryness, moisten the lungs and relieve cough, and clear the heart and soothe the nerves. Eat less spicy food, such as onion, ginger and garlic. Eat more sour fruits, such as citrus, hawthorn, grapefruit, carambola and lemon. Especially in winter, we should eat more black food, such as black rice, black beans, black sesame seeds, black fungus, black dates, turtles, squid fish, kelp, seaweed and so on. Eating black food can benefit and strengthen the kidney, enhance human immune function and delay aging. Black food is not only rich in nutrition, but also mostly mild in taste, nourishing but not greasy, eating but not dry, which is especially beneficial to the elderly with decreased kidney qi and infirmity.