Beyond the biochemical aspects, there are food energetics-
The long-standing traditional medicines (Oriental, Ayurvedic, Unami) understood the properties of food. These medicines use food as medicine. They each have an enduring, successful Food Science.

For example, each food has an inherent metabolic property, an action, an indication, and a contraindication, just as all substances in any pharmacy have. Foods are either hot, warming, neutral, cooling, or cold. The can be drying or dampening, tonifying, dispersing, etc.
To educate yourself in understanding the way individual foods work with the body, I’d suggest these two books. Healing with Whole Foods, by Paul Pitchford,
has a great reference section about the foods and many herbs and spices, and about using foods as medicine. And another good book for reference is Healing with the Herbs of Life, by Leslie Tierra.

Ginger is hot, drying, and has a pungent flavor.
It warms, expels cold, benefits digestion, relieves cramps, colds, coughs, cold limbs, diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, nucus, rheumatism, cold abdominal pain. It is a carminative (relieves gas and indigestion).

Carrots: neutral, sweet, builds digestion and digestive fire.

Salt: cold, a diuretic  (and always remember, refined salt is a poison).

Watermelon is energetically/metabolically cold and is a remedy for “summer heat”. So is soy, which is why it helps menopausal women with hot flashes, but it’s cooling properties lower metabolism, promoting weight gain.

Here’s an important principle: every food has a metabolic temperature. Each food is inherently cold, cooling, neutral, warming, or warm. Look through the book, healing with Whole Foods at the section describing the properties of different fruits, veggies, grains, beans, etc.

For instance, carrots are neutral; ginger is hot; soy is cold. Soy makes the body colder, by it’s inherent nature. Even if it is served hot, as it is processed, it cools down the body. Medicinally, it is used to help recovery from heat stroke. If you eat soy often, you are cooling your metabolism, which can lead to weight gain, swelling, edema, etc.

How Do We Know What Foods Do ?

The traditional medicines have the ability to assess, with pulse diagnosis, the action of food energetics, including the arisal of the clear, descent of the turbid. A practitioner can develop skill in feeling the pulses. There are 6 distinct pulse points on the wrists, giving a wonderful, accurate window into the energy systems of the body.  There is a pulse point for each of the five major organ energy systems: the Liver, Heart and Brain, Lungs, and Spleen, and there are two separate points for the Kidneys, right and left. Within each of these pulse points, a skilled practitioner can fell at least 82 different pulse wavelengths, and each of those wavelengths allow an assessment of what is going on with that particular system, as well as how that system is interacting with each of the other systems.

Translation: if someone hasn’t eaten for some time, and they eat just one particular food, a good practitioner can know exactly what system(s) that food is affecting, what it’s doing energetically (slowing, quickening, constricting, opening, etc.), and how it is affecting the entire body as a whole. This is Real work-with-the-body medicine.

Hopefully you can see how extremely beneficial it would be to learn from books like the ones above to understand how to use foods to enhance your abilities to use foods well, and to be enjoying their enormous natural benefits in your life!