Prof. Seungho Baek's Medical Insight

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.

Lupus strikes women roughly ten times as often as men. That lopsided ratio is a clue, and Korean Traditional Medicine reads it through the lens of qi and blood — a physiological difference between the sexes that, in this framing, tilts women toward the pattern the disease seems to grow from.

An economic bubble and the body’s inflammation look like problems to be stamped out. Seen differently, both are the same thing: a surge of concentrated resources rushing to where a problem needs solving. Suppress either without understanding why it arose, and the real trouble only returns, larger.

We are taught to eat well when we are sick. But during an acute infection, eating the same as usual — or a little less — tends to serve recovery better than eating more, because digestion is work and overeating turns the body into friendly ground for microbes. How much less depends on your constitution.