Child Grinds Teeth at Night, Tongue Is Red with a Thin Coating — Doctor Luo Dalun: This Is Usually Yin Deficiency; Shao Yao Gan Cao Tang Turns Sour and Sweet into Moisture

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Hello, parents. Today we continue with children’s tongues. This parent asks: why does my child grind his teeth at night? Let’s analyze this together.

Opening: that grinding sound at night — don’t panic, parents

When a child grinds his teeth at night and you hear that grinding, scraping sound, your heart sinks a little: what is going on in there?

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Teeth grinding can have several causes. First: are there roundworms in the belly? Usually a stool test for worm eggs will tell you. A child with roundworms grinds his teeth because the toxins the worms secrete irritate the body — that’s one kind. What else? Some children grind their teeth because they are short on calcium. But there is another situation — and it is the most common one — and that is yin deficiency.

What is yin deficiency? The body’s fluids run low and the meridians lose their nourishment

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Yin deficiency means the fluids inside the body are insufficient, and then the meridians lose their nourishment. Chinese medicine holds that this is what leads to teeth grinding. At such times there can also be cramping — adults get spasms and leg cramps, and so on. It’s all the same principle.

How can parents tell? First step: look at the tongue

So how does a parent judge whether a child is yin deficient? Doctor Luo teaches the simplest method — look at the tongue.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: How do we judge yin deficiency? We look at the tongue. A normal tongue should be light red, with a thin layer of white coating. If the tongue turns red — the tongue body is red in color, the coating is very thin, or even absent — then this may well be yin deficiency. Look at the child today: the tongue body is red, and the coating is very thin.

What else does a yin-deficient child show? Check the list

Besides the tongue, a yin-deficient child usually carries a whole string of visible signs. Doctor Luo goes through them one by one:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: A yin-deficient child tends to have dry stools — some children have extremely dry stools, and every bowel movement is painful. The hands and feet are warm — the palms and soles feel hot. The temperament is easily irritated, always restless — because there is heat inside. Yin deficiency generates internal heat: yin deficiency means the body’s fluids are low; when the body machine runs, without fluids, without lubricating oil, it naturally heats up. So we say yin deficiency generates internal heat — this is the theory of Chinese medicine.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: At night a yin-deficient child easily has night sweats — as soon as he sleeps, his head is covered in sweat. His arms and legs must stick out of the blanket, because he feels hot. He likes cold food, ice cream for instance, because he is hot inside and only cold things feel comfortable. He sometimes seems to run a temperature — not a real fever, but a constant feeling of warmth in the body. The lower eyelids tend to look big, red or purple. The lips tend to be bright red, much redder than other children’s. The personality is a little impatient and hyperactive — the smallest thing sets him off.

Why are so many children yin deficient now? Source number one: heredity

Yin-deficient children make up a very, very large share today. Where does all this yin deficiency come from?

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: First of all, it can be inherited from the parents. Sometimes I see a yin-deficient child whom no amount of adjusting seems to help, and I wonder: where did this child get such stubborn yin deficiency? Then I look at the mother — I ask her to let me look at her tongue — and oh my, she is the most textbook yin-deficient constitution you could find. When a father or mother has never corrected their own body, the constitution is passed to the child. This inherited yin deficiency is relatively harder to adjust — it needs regular gentle treatment, and a lifelong awareness of yin deficiency: try not to eat spicy food, try not to stay up late, protect yourself, avoid hot-natured medicines, no beef and lamb every day — instead, regularly eat things that nourish yin.

Source number two: eating too much meat — the story CCTV exposed

Besides heredity, there is one especially common cause: many children love to eat meat.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: The food-safety problem with today’s meat is not fully solved. Some farmers, chasing profit, to sell a few more pounds of meat, add drugs while raising the animals — and part of that can be hormone drugs. CCTV secretly filmed this: a company in Shandong handed chickens out to farmers to raise, and one farmer used 18 kinds of antibiotics plus a hormone — dexamethasone — mixed into the chickens’ drinking water. The chickens drank it and grew fat; after slaughter, the wings were delivered to the warehouse of a famous foreign fast-food brand. To be fair, the brand was rather wronged too — they had no idea the Chinese farmer was bold enough to mix in dexamethasone, which is a medical-grade hormone. Hormone drugs make animals run hot, and heat consumes the fluids in the body — so the animals often end up yin deficient. When a child eats meat carrying leftover hormones, the child tends to go the same way.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: In many families today, meat is basically the child’s staple. If a meal doesn’t have ribs or chicken wings, the parents feel they’ve failed the child — ask yourself, is that you? Grandparents cook something different every day. But I want to ask: of all the ribs and wings we eat every day, how much meat is truly, completely safe? Can we guarantee none of it has added drugs? I really do see many children who love meat slide into this state — it’s another major source of yin deficiency. A child who refuses vegetables and eats only meat will develop all kinds of problems. So meat intake is a fairly important reason the body gradually generates heat and slowly drifts into a yin-deficient constitution.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Pay special attention to this: beef and lamb are heating; pork and duck nourish yin. Some parents feed the child beef and lamb every day, and if the meat also carries a little drug residue — well, that is heat piled on heat. Give a child meat in moderation — no need for much — and try to choose safe meat. Among adults, people who eat spicy food all the time and stay up late every night also become yin deficient — children usually don’t do those things, so for a child, adjusting the diet and nourishing yin a little will turn things around.

How to adjust? Everything that nourishes yin is simple

So how do you treat yin deficiency? Doctor Luo says: everything that nourishes yin is simple.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: I’ve written out nourishing-yin formulas before, they’re all in my books — for example use Sheng Di (Rehmannia), Sha Shen (Adenophora), Mai Dong (Ophiopogon), and a little Shi Hu (Dendrobium) — all of these nourish yin. You can simmer them into a pork-bone soup: 6 grams, 6 grams, 6 grams of each, and drink it slowly to nourish yin. Cantonese people have the habit of simmering Sheng Di and Shu Di (raw and prepared Rehmannia) with pork spine bones — adding herbs to the stock — it’s the same idea.

The classic formula for teeth grinding: Shao Yao Gan Cao Tang — sour and sweet turn into moisture

For a child who grinds his teeth at night, Doctor Luo teaches one special method.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Chinese medicine has a formula called Shao Yao Gan Cao Tang (Peony and Licorice Decoction). How to use it? For adults: Bai Shao (white peony root) 30 g, honey-fried Gan Cao (licorice) 6 g — that’s the adult dose. For children: Bai Shao 10 g, honey-fried Gan Cao 3 g, boiled in water. The principle of this formula is suan gan hua yin — sour and sweet together generate fluids: the peony root tastes sour, the licorice tastes sweet, and when sour meets sweet they transform into yin — that is, they produce the fluids the body needs.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Shao Yao Gan Cao Tang works very well for teeth grinding and cramps — for grinding teeth at night or leg cramps at night, this formula usually clears the problem up within two or three days. So I suggest you give it a try, or have a nearby doctor take a look and prescribe this formula.

A bonus food therapy drink: Wu Mei Tang (smoked plum soup)

Besides the formula, there is a small food-therapy drink that doubles as a beverage and nourishes yin.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: To nourish yin you can also drink Wu Mei Tang: take two or three Wu Mei (smoked plums), add a small spoon of white sugar, and simmer for about 40 minutes until it becomes sour plum soup — sour plum soup also nourishes yin. These are all food-therapy methods, and you are welcome to try them.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: All right, parents. That’s all for today. We analyzed this child’s tongue together, and whenever I have the chance, I’ll go through the tongue signs you send in, one by one. Thank you, and see you next time.

What to take away: A child grinding teeth at night usually comes down to three causes — roundworms (check a stool sample for eggs), calcium deficiency, and the most common one: yin deficiency, meaning the body’s fluids are low and the meridians lose their nourishment, which also explains night leg cramps in adults. The quickest way to judge: look at the tongue — normal is light red with a thin white coating; red tongue body with a very thin or absent coating points to yin deficiency. Supporting signs: dry stools, hot palms and soles, irritability and restlessness, night sweats, arms and legs out of the blanket, liking cold food, a constant feeling of warmth, large red-purple lower eyelids, and bright red lips. The two big sources in children today are heredity (a mother’s uncorrected yin-deficient constitution passes to the child) and too much meat (some farmers use antibiotics and hormone drugs like dexamethasone, which make animals run hot and consume their fluids — the residues reach the child). Beef and lamb are heating; pork and duck nourish yin. Adjustment is simple: Sheng Di, Sha Shen, Mai Dong and Shi Hu, 6 g each, simmered into pork-bone soup; for grinding teeth, Shao Yao Gan Cao Tang — Bai Shao 30 g with honey-fried Gan Cao 6 g for adults, 10 g and 3 g for children, sour and sweet together generating fluids; and Wu Mei Tang (two or three smoked plums with a little sugar, simmered 40 minutes) as a nourishing-yin drink. Yin deficiency is a constitutional state, not a disease to panic over — adjust the diet, nourish yin gently, and most children return to balance.

Based on a children’s tongue-diagnosis lecture by Doctor Luo Dalun.