Do you have diabetes?
Yes? Do you really HAVE diabetes? Or is it just a label you are carrying?
Not to dispute the reality of the symptoms you feel or the havoc the diabetic condition can wreak in your body - but they are, after all, just names doctors made up. A diagnosis helps to find a pill against the diagnosis.
That has its good sides, and its bad. Especially with a diagnosis of diabetes: Do you really believe that a single little pill can reverse years of not exercising and eating the wrong foods? I don’t.
But I do believe in simple sheer good health. Instead of fear-mongering with labels, let's focus on what we can do to stay/become healthy. Your body actually wants to get healthy and has a vast ability to repair itself - if you just give it some room and help. If you eat your green veggies, move briskly through life (instead of lingering on the couch or a chair in front of TV and computer), if you drink fresh water, do not smoke, relate warmly to other people, get enough sleep - you might never have to see a doctor all your life.
Admittedly, bad things happen to good people, and environmental hazards are as yet under-reported and not well understood in their impact on our bodies. But aside from that (and genetics), you are responsible for a good portion of your health. Estimates are not scientific – but an educated guess is that you hold about seventy-five percent of your health outcome in your hands.
Our bodies are really old, old things – not meant for driving in a car, eating TV dinner and marshmallows, staring at a screen for most of the day, exist holed up in our individual cubicles (at home and at work), exposed to noise, electronics, polluted air and other ills of modern times.
We don’t want to move back into the cave; we like the amenities of modern life – for instance the ease of connecting with loved ones via telephone of computers. The more it behooves us to counteract the bad modern influences and have as many of the natural elements in our lives as our good old bodies need: Water, movement, fresh food, herbs, and balance.
Back to diabetes (or any other diagnosis): If modern lifestyle is at the root of diabetes (and it is!), then go to the roots, make some meaningful changes, and don’t expect betterment from a little pill, please - not like the patient whom I once counseled against smoking: “The heck, when I get lung problems, they’ll give me a nice, new heart-lung transplant.” Read More
Blog: On Health. On Writing. On Life. On Everything.
May Bowl
May 5, 2010
We have something great to celebrate in our family this week, and we will celebrate it with May bowl.
Recipe for May Bowle:
Crush a handful of sweet woodruff leaves (before flowering) into a pitcher. Pour a bottle of white wine over it - a glass pitcher will show off the beauty of this green-golden drink. Let sit it in the fridge for an hour or longer. – Enjoy!
Sweet woodruff (Galium odorata) is a woodland herb with a wonderful perfume to its leaves; the perfume stems from coumarin. Therefore people on coumadin should avoid it or drink it sparingly, coumadin being the man-made form of coumarin. By the way, sweet grass owns the same wonderful fragrance.
Sweet woodruff should only be harvested in May. It was one of the first things I planted in my garden – it likes dappled shade and a leafy soil.
In Europe, when I was little, they used sweet woodruff flavor in all kinds of candy; my favorite was fizzling soda powder (made famous in Günter Grass' novel The Tin Drum, where the protagonist Oskar Mathzerath sprinkles it onto the belly button of his love, adds some spit, and waits for the erotic results). Meanwhile, sweet woodruff is forbidden in Europe as a food additive because of suggestions it might cause cancer. Those results came from Petri dish studies, not from population studies.
Thus sweet woodruff illustrates human greed, again: Used once a year in a May bowl, it likely is harmless - more likely beneficial. Used as a flavoring everywhere all the time, it's bound to hurt. Remember, it took the White Man to turn the occasional peace calumet into a three-pack-per-day habit. As with tobacco, so with alcohol: Since my father was a drinker, I certainly don't want to entice you to imbibe May bowl more than on a rare occasion, in moderation!
Sweet woodruff also is an example how one scientific tidbit, taken out of context, is used to suppress herbal knowledge. Which is not to say I am against science - which I am not (being married to a scientist and trained in scientific medicine myself); just that scientific results should be taken with a grain of salt and some common sense.
So we will celebrate with May bowl – and might find a second occasion later this month. And then we have to wait for a full year before we can drink May bowl again. Read More
A Tea From Your Garden
April 30, 2010
Green is the color of life, and green herbs keep us healthy.
From April to November, I find things growing in my garden that go into my daily garden tea. Only one question asked of that green thing: Is it edible? If it is not, forget it! If you don’t know, don’t even touch it – what you don’t know can kill you when you put it into your tea!
Today, this is what I gathered: Dandelion leaves and flowers, stinging nettle leaves, feverfew leaves, young burdock shoots. Pine needles (make sure you can identify them because hemlock and yew would be deadly!), rose leaves, raspberry leaves. And from my herb garden: rosemary, thyme, basil, parsley, chives (including their fat purple buds), sage, cilantro. I also started a vegetable garden in big pots on the terrace and I snipped off a few leaves off lettuce and broccoli.
These green things contain small molecules - phyto-nutrients - which we are not getting easily from our modern food. But our ancient bodies need them to function.
Nature gives me these green gifts every morning, and I breathe in the beauty of my garden (which is, admittedly, an unkempt jungle – but never touched by pesticides, herbicides, and the like!). When I come into the kitchen I feel as if I have meditated (I have meditated!). I throw my big handful of greens into a cup, pour boiling water over it and start my day in beauty, contemplation – and health.
And it tastes good, too. Read More