Medicine and food have the same origin and have a long history. During the Zhou Dynasty, there were already the world’s first full-time nutritionists – food doctors, and the Rites of the Zhou had a record of “nourishing the sick with five tastes, five grains and five medicines”. The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine not only laid the foundation of food therapy theory, but also included food therapy prescriptions. In the Han Dynasty, the Shennong Ben Cao Jing contains many medicinal foods; Zhang Zhongjing’s Treatise on Typhoid Fever and the Essentials of the Golden Mean contain recipes for food therapy such as “Pig Skin Soup” and “Angelica Ginger Lamb Soup”. In the Tang Dynasty, Sun Simiao’s “Prepared Emergency Thousand Gold Essential Formula” is devoted to the chapter of “Food Treatment”. In the Song Dynasty, the “Treatise on Food Therapy” in the “Taiping Shenghui Fang” recorded 28 kinds of food therapy prescriptions for diseases; and the “Book for the Elderly” described the dietary health and treatment for the elderly. In the Yuan dynasty, Kusi Hui’s “The Book of Food and Drink” was a complete monograph on nutrition. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, works on diet and health care proliferated. Li Shizhen’s “Compendium of Materia Medica” contains more than 200 kinds of medicines and foods. The “medicinal food” in food therapy is guided by the basic theories of Chinese medicine, and the identification of evidence to administer meals. Chinese medicine and certain food with medicinal value are combined to make food with certain color, fragrance, taste and shape. As stated in “Nei Jing”, “To cure a disease, we must seek its root”, “Medicine to dispel, food to follow”, and “Man is based on the five grains”. He also summarized the dietary principles of “the five grains are for nourishment, the five fruits are for support, the five animals are for benefit, the five dishes are for enrichment, and the five flavors are taken together to nourish the essence and benefit the qi”. The Chinese medicine has formed a characteristic of the prevention and treatment of medicinal food, including tea, sugar, porridge, medicinal wine and so on. As the saying goes, “the essence of health must be funded by food”, and “food draws on the power of medicine, and medicine helps the power of food”, both of which complement each other, showing the advantages of “medicine and food in the same source” in the treatment of illness and health.