Hi Corinne,
I feel like most of the benefits of a real food diet have little to do with the Qi of the individual ingredients, and are primarily attributable to just eating something that isn't processed. Another way to look at it is that processing adds so much Heat to a food, that eating anything unprocessed is going to end up being dramatically more cooling.
Having said that, poultry is generally considered warming because birds themselves have a lot of Yang, as evidenced by their incredibly fast heart rates and constant movement, packed into their little bodies. Lamb has a long tradition of being considered Yang, and is eaten traditionally at the winter solstice to put Yang deep inside the body during the darkest and most Yin day of the year. Fish are cooling because of their habitat, and of course the anti-inflammatory effects of many of them by virtue of their essential fatty acid content. Everything else, then, is relative, although rabbits and turkeys have fast heart rates, too, so why are they not warming, according to that reference?
Whenever I see conflicting opinions in Chinese medical theory, I know one of two things:
- I can just disregard it, because it's not based on something empirically observable, or
- You can't generalize regarding that particular topic
Thus, I tend to ignore people's opinions on the Qi of meats. If an animal is behaving inconsistently with one school of thought, just go ahead and apply the other one. Or assume that the Qi of the food is completely irrelevant to the problems you're seeing, and see if there is a Chinese medical diagnosis going on instead that can explain the symptoms you're seeing.
Hope that helps you out. If nothing else, it should reassure you we're all in the same boat on this conundrum.
Steve