Prof. Seungho Baek's Medical Insight

As a student I assumed “fortify the spleen” and “tonify the spleen” meant the same thing. They don’t. One adds energy to the organ; the other simply clears the dampness sitting on it — and that distinction turns out to explain a great deal about why we swell.

Every health checkup flags me for suspected hyperlipidemia, though only my LDL is high. That sent me looking at how the gold standard behind that flag was built — and at how much looser the founding of a “firm and settled” theory can be than we assume.

The lipid hypothesis says cholesterol in the blood clumps into plaque and blocks the artery. But when researchers lowered cholesterol and then looked at the plaque itself, the plaque did not shrink. So what actually builds it? High blood sugar and oxidation — with cholesterol closer to the firefighter than the fire.

Zero-sugar drinks feel like a free lunch: the sweetness without the calories. My own gut disagreed, and so does a surprising amount of research. Korean Medicine offers a clean explanation — sweetness without substance slows metabolism and quietly sets you up to eat more later.

My own weight has been creeping back up lately, so I went back to first principles on the yo-yo. The conclusions surprised me: losing weight the hard way is itself the problem, the rebound is worth accepting rather than fighting, and most of it comes from stress.

A packet of herbal decoction holds 10 to 30 calories — less than almost anything else you drink. So when weight rises during a course of herbal medicine, the herbs are rarely the cause. The real reasons are more interesting, and mostly good news.

Most of us treat chewing as a trivial first step of digestion. Korean Medicine’s classic texts saw it as a source of the body’s very energy — and modern research ties it to brain blood flow and cognition. Refined carbohydrates and liquid fructose quietly strip that benefit away by needing almost no chewing at all.

Sometimes a taste appears in the mouth when you have eaten nothing at all — bitter, sour, or sweet. Korean Medicine reads these as signals of imbalance among the five organs. A sweet taste on an empty stomach, in particular, points to heat in the spleen — and can be an early sign of a blood-sugar problem.

Reaching for food under stress is not simply a failure of willpower. Korean Medicine reads “false hunger” as a signal of imbalance — and traces it to a mismatch between the liver and the digestive organs that shows up in four distinct patterns, each with its own cravings.

GLP-1 weight-loss drugs put the pancreas into a kind of forced booster mode — squeezing out insulin as if you had just overeaten, even when almost no food has come in. Korean Medicine reads the resulting strain through one idea: overwork. Here is how to support the organ while you take them.