Chinese Health Advice

As anyone who lives in China knows, their ideas about health/cures for sickness are just a bit different than those in the West. They prize their health here, and are very focused on keeping everything in the body balanced....all the while eating really oily foods and smoking away...but anyway....I do not discount all of the ideas I encounter here, because, hey, China has a long history...there may be some truth to some of their long-held practices....however, as a Westerner, I am easily annoyed by the things that interfere with some of my own habits.

For example:

-Don't drink cold water...or cold anything. Girls especially. If you drink cold water...you will die. OR at least have any number of horrible health problems. Or, as my Chinese soon-to-be mother-in-law told me this morning, "If you want to have kids, don't drink cold water." I bit my tongue and didn't respond like I wanted, which was to say that Americans drink cold things all the time, and, somehow, we have still managed to reproduce.

-Animals are bad for your health. Don't keep them close to you, you will get diseases. Now, this belief is actually becoming less common as pets become more and more popular here in China...but, once again, this is what my m-i-l thinks. We then gently informed her we were planning to get a big dog in addition to the dog I already have (actually we are planning to get two, but...we'll break it to her slowly).

This leads into another interesting, and, to me, horrifying collection of practices surrounding pregnancy, childbirth, and babies. This whole process has a BUNCH of rules, none of which I intend to follow when I reach that stage in life. These include:
-being confined to your bed for one month after giving birth. For real...NO MOVEMENT.
-no showering for that same amount of time (hell no)
-eating a bunch of things I don't want to eat
-not eating a bunch of things I do want to eat
-And, once again, not being around animals/letting them around your baby (this includes all of pregnancy)

Now, some people I know do not follow these quite so religiously, however, many people still hold these to be true, and my m-i-l, while a sweet woman, is very, very traditional in some aspects...particularly concerning health.

Once again, I don't mean to come across as condescending towards Chinese medicine/health practices, but, once again, as a foreigner, these are a few of the things that are weird/not tolerable to me.

Anyone else encountered any interesting health beliefs here in the middle kingdom?