What are black foods in Chinese medicine? Brehan Crawford, L.Ac., with black soybeans, black sesame and black rice in his video on the five food colors

What Are Black Foods in Chinese Medicine?

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    In Chinese medicine, the color of your food tells you which organ it is feeding. Four of the five colors are probably in your fridge right now. The fifth, black, you may never have eaten on purpose. Here is what the five colors mean, what the research says about each, and why black foods belong at your breakfast table.

    The short answer

    Black foods are the foods Chinese medicine assigns to the Kidney system. Black soybeans, black sesame and black rice lead the list. Red feeds the Heart, green the Liver, yellow the Spleen and Stomach, white the Lungs and black the Kidneys, which hold your deepest reserves. Most of us eat the first four every week without trying. Black is the one that goes missing, and it brings anthocyanins, copper, isoflavones, phytate and resistant starch with it.

    The short version, on video.

    What are black foods in Chinese medicine?

    They are the foods that are black, or so deeply purple that they read as black, and they belong to the Kidney system. The three I name in the video are black soybeans, black sesame and black rice.

    The idea comes from the five phases: wood, fire, earth, metal and water. Each phase has an organ system, a season, an emotion and a color. The pairings were set out roughly two thousand years ago in the Huangdi Neijing, the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic. Water is the phase of winter and of storage. Its organ is the Kidney. Its color is black.

    The Kidney system in Chinese medicine is larger than the two organs that filter your blood. It holds the reserves of energy you were born with, and you gradually use them throughout your life. When that reserve gets too low, Chinese medicine connects it with fatigue, infertility, bone density loss and a vulnerability to fear. So you nourish it, and food is where that starts. Feeding the terrain, meal after meal, is how I teach diet, and it is the work we do together inside Gut Brain Synchrony.

    What are the five food colors in Chinese medicine?

    Red, green, yellow, white and black. Each one feeds an organ system, and each one carries a chemistry that modern research can now describe.

    01 Red, for the Heart. Tomatoes and red peppers. Their pigments are lycopene and capsanthin. A meta-analysis that pooled 25 studies found that people with the highest lycopene intake or blood levels had a 26 percent lower risk of stroke and a 14 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease.[1]
    02 Green, for the Liver. Spinach, broccoli, anything leafy. These carry chlorophyll, glucosinolates and folate. In a randomized trial of 52 Japanese men with fatty liver, two months of a broccoli sprout extract rich in the glucosinolate glucoraphanin lowered the liver enzymes ALT and gamma-GTP. The placebo did not.[2]
    03 Yellow, for the Spleen and Stomach. These are the earth organs that run your digestive system. Sweet potato, pumpkin and carrots get their color from carotenoids, and your body turns beta-carotene into vitamin A. A 2025 review in the American Journal of Physiology proposes that the active form of vitamin A reinforces the gut lining by raising the tight junction proteins that seal it, with dietary fiber working alongside.[3]
    04 White, for the Lungs. Cauliflower, garlic, onion, Asian pear and tremella mushroom. Here you find sulfur compounds, the tremella polysaccharide glucuronoxylomannan, and the arbutin in pear. Korean pear is an old folk remedy for the respiratory tract. In a small randomized trial in adults with mild asthma, those who took a pear extract supplying about 5 milligrams of arbutin a day for four weeks had more of the fiber-degrading gut bacteria that support immune defense than the placebo group. In mice with asthma, the extract suppressed the allergic signals IgE, IL-4, IL-5 and IL-13.[4]
    05 Black, for the Kidneys. Black soybeans, black sesame and black rice. This is the color most plates are missing.

    Western nutrition reached a similar instruction by a different road: eat the rainbow. A 2022 umbrella review gathered 86 studies covering 449 health outcomes and more than 37 million participants. Color-associated plant pigments improved 42 percent of those outcomes, and the authors concluded that variety of color may add benefits beyond the total amount of fruit and vegetables you eat.[5]

    You eat red, green, yellow and white in a normal week without trying. When was the last time you ate anything truly black?

    What are black foods good for?

    In Chinese medicine, they nourish the Kidney system: your reserves, your bones and your hair. Here is where human research meets the tradition.

    Blood pressure and blood vessels

    In a placebo-controlled trial, 30 adults with prehypertension took 2.52 grams of black sesame meal a day. After four weeks their systolic blood pressure had fallen from 129.3 to 121.0 mmHg and a marker of oxidative stress had dropped.[6]

    Black soybeans did something similar. Twenty-two healthy adults ate a daily cookie made with 20 grams of roasted black soybean powder for four weeks. Their vascular function improved, their systolic pressure came down, and nitric oxide, the signal that relaxes blood vessels, went up.[7]

    Bones

    Chinese medicine says the Kidneys govern the bones. Two things in black foods speak to that. The first is copper. Bone is mineral laid onto a collagen frame, and the frame is only strong once its fibers are cross-linked. The enzyme that does the cross-linking, lysyl oxidase, contains copper, and copper deficiency is thought to weaken bone by lowering its activity.[8]

    The second is isoflavones, which black soybeans share with every other soybean. A meta-analysis of 18 randomized trials in menopausal women found that an average of 106 milligrams of isoflavones a day, taken for 6 to 24 months, raised bone mineral density by 1.63 percent at the lumbar spine and 1.87 percent at the femoral neck compared with controls.[9]

    Memory and inflammation

    Black rice gets its color from anthocyanins, the same pigment family found in blackberries and blueberries. Researchers at the University of Reading gave 24 older adults 210 grams of black rice a day, carrying 208 milligrams of anthocyanins, and compared it with brown rice. After eight days on black rice, verbal memory was better and the inflammatory marker IL-6 was lower.[10]

    Is black rice good for kidneys?

    What is in the bowl lines up with what your kidneys need, in three ways.

    01 Anthocyanins. A prospective study followed 109,711 adults for about ten years. Those eating the most flavonoid-rich foods, around six servings a day, had a 16 percent lower risk of chronic kidney disease, and anthocyanins were one of the flavonoid classes tied to that lower risk.[11]
    02 Phytate. Seeds, beans and whole grains store their phosphorus as phytate, and the human gut absorbs phosphorus in that form poorly.[12] Less absorbed means less for your kidneys to clear. When nine people with chronic kidney disease ate a vegetarian diet for one week, their blood phosphorus and the phosphorus-regulating hormone FGF23 were both lower than after a week on a meat diet with matched nutrients.[13]
    03 Resistant starch. This is starch that escapes digestion and feeds the bacteria in your colon. A meta-analysis of 10 randomized trials in 355 people with chronic kidney disease found that resistant starch lowered blood urea nitrogen and indoxyl sulfate, a uremic toxin.[14]

    The gut and the kidneys work as one system. Feed the terrain in the colon and you lighten the load downstream.

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    Does black sesame help with gray hair?

    Chinese medicine has said so for centuries, and the modern explanation runs through copper.

    In Chinese medicine the hair on your head is the outward sign of the Kidney system. When the reserve runs down, hair thins and grays early. Black sesame, hei zhi ma, is the classic kitchen answer to that picture.

    Hair color is melanin, and the enzyme that builds melanin in the follicle depends on copper. When researchers in Iran compared 66 people under 20 who were graying early with 66 matched controls, the early-gray group had lower blood copper, 90.7 against 105.3 micrograms per deciliter.[15]

    That is an association, and it tells you copper matters to the pigment in your hair. Sesame seeds are one of the richer food sources of copper, which makes a daily spoonful of black sesame a sensible place to begin.

    How to eat black foods every day

    Start with breakfast, the easiest meal to change.

    01 Stir black sesame into breakfast. Toast the seeds lightly, grind them, and stir a spoonful into oatmeal or rice porridge.
    02 Cook black rice with your usual rice. Start with a handful in the pot and work up to half and half.
    03 Keep black soybeans in the pantry. Simmer them into soups and stews, or buy them roasted. The trial on blood vessels used 20 grams of roasted black soybean powder a day.[7]
    04 Eat them warm and cooked. Your digestion has to transform food before any of it can nourish you. I explain why temperature matters in my post on iced matcha.
    05 Keep the other four colors on the plate. Black completes the set. It does not replace the rest.

    One black food a day is enough to begin. Build from there.

    Black food questions, answered

    What are some black foods?

    Start with black soybeans, black sesame and black rice. Black beans, black lentils, black wood ear mushrooms, blackberries and mulberries belong on the list too.

    Is black rice better than brown rice?

    Both are whole grains. The difference is the pigment. In the Reading trial, the black rice carried 208 milligrams of anthocyanins a day and the brown rice carried none, and only the black rice improved memory and lowered IL-6.[10]

    Is black sesame better than white sesame?

    They are the same plant with different chemistry. A study that mapped 557 metabolites in black and white sesame found the two differed most in the phenylpropanoid, tyrosine and riboflavin pathways, and the authors reported that the compounds separating them were closely related to the functions recorded for black sesame in Chinese medicine.[16]

    Take a look at your plate today. Find the color that is missing, and add it.

    — Brehan Crawford, L.Ac.

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    References

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    2. Kikuchi M, Ushida Y, Shiozawa H, et al. Sulforaphane-rich broccoli sprout extract improves hepatic abnormalities in male subjects. World J Gastroenterol. 2015;21(43):12457-12467. doi:10.3748/wjg.v21.i43.12457
    3. Skawratananond S, McCrea GE, Lie P, et al. The synergistic interplay between vitamin A, dietary fiber, and the microbiota-gut-brain axis: a potential mechanism for preventing Alzheimer's disease. Am J Physiol Gastrointest Liver Physiol. 2025;329(3):G484-G499. doi:10.1152/ajpgi.00097.2025
    4. Yang M, Lee U, Cho HR, et al. Effects of Pear Extracts on Microbiome and Immunocytokines to Alleviate Air Pollution-Related Respiratory Hypersensitivity. J Med Food. 2023;26(3):211-214. doi:10.1089/jmf.2022.K.0117
    5. Blumfield M, Mayr H, De Vlieger N, et al. Should We 'Eat a Rainbow'? An Umbrella Review of the Health Effects of Colorful Bioactive Pigments in Fruits and Vegetables. Molecules. 2022;27(13):4061. doi:10.3390/molecules27134061
    6. Wichitsranoi J, Weerapreeyakul N, Boonsiri P, et al. Antihypertensive and antioxidant effects of dietary black sesame meal in pre-hypertensive humans. Nutr J. 2011;10:82. doi:10.1186/1475-2891-10-82
    7. Yamashita Y, Nakamura A, Nanba F, et al. Black Soybean Improves Vascular Function and Blood Pressure: A Randomized, Placebo Controlled, Crossover Trial in Humans. Nutrients. 2020;12(9):2755. doi:10.3390/nu12092755
    8. Medeiros DM. Copper, iron, and selenium dietary deficiencies negatively impact skeletal integrity: A review. Exp Biol Med (Maywood). 2016;241(12):1316-1322. doi:10.1177/1535370216648805
    9. Barańska A, Kanadys W, Bogdan M, et al. The Role of Soy Isoflavones in the Prevention of Bone Loss in Postmenopausal Women: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. J Clin Med. 2022;11(16):4676. doi:10.3390/jcm11164676
    10. Mekhora C, Lamport DJ, Spencer JPE. Impact of anthocyanin-rich black rice consumption on cognitive function, inflammation and microvascular function in older adults: a crossover intervention trial. Food Funct. 2026;17(3):1311-1325. doi:10.1039/d5fo04351d
    11. Bell W, Thompson AS, Bondonno NP, et al. A flavonoid-rich diet is associated with a lower risk of chronic kidney disease: A prospective cohort study. Clin Nutr. 2025;51:126-135. doi:10.1016/j.clnu.2025.05.026
    12. Buades Fuster JM, Sanchís Cortés P, Perelló Bestard J, Grases Freixedas F. Plant phosphates, phytate and pathological calcifications in chronic kidney disease. Nefrologia. 2017;37(1):20-28. doi:10.1016/j.nefro.2016.07.001
    13. Moe SM, Zidehsarai MP, Chambers MA, et al. Vegetarian compared with meat dietary protein source and phosphorus homeostasis in chronic kidney disease. Clin J Am Soc Nephrol. 2011;6(2):257-264. doi:10.2215/CJN.05040610
    14. Zhang Y, Hu XY, Yang SY, Hu YC, Duan K. Effects of resistant starch supplementation on renal function and inflammatory markers in patients with chronic kidney disease: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Ren Fail. 2024;46(2):2416609. doi:10.1080/0886022X.2024.2416609
    15. Fatemi Naieni F, Ebrahimi B, Vakilian HR, Shahmoradi Z. Serum iron, zinc, and copper concentration in premature graying of hair. Biol Trace Elem Res. 2012;146(1):30-34. doi:10.1007/s12011-011-9223-6
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