This water application sounds a bit gross on first encounter. But a salt water nose rinse works well in acute colds, acute and chronic sinusitis, hay fever and sneezing attacks, regardless of their cause, because the rinse flushes out dust, pollen, mites, dander, viruses, bacteria and all kinds of irritating debris from the nasal passages. Therefore, it shortens acute infections and relieves chronic problems.
Take a quarter teaspoon of table or sea salt in a glass of lukewarm water. Stir, lick: Its saltiness should be somewhere between that of the ocean and your tears. Now put a bit of the saltwater into your palm and sniff it up one nostril. It might feel like you are drowning – but you are not. Spit out the phlegm that comes down in the back of your nose. Do the other side. Finish the other side.
This can be done many times a day, especially with an acute cold. For many chronic conditions, it might be enough to do it twice a day. Contraindications: If you tend to have high blood pressure, rinse out your mouth afterward and swallow none of the salty phlegm that will still come down after a few minutes due to the cleansing action of the nose rinse. If the fluid stings or burns in your nose, you might have too little or too much salt; experiment!
A few other tips for chronic sinusitis:
• Avoid all milk and dairy products as they are mucus-producing.
• Avoid ice-cold beverages because they can trigger sneezing attacks and exacerbate asthma. Drink hot beverages – lemon and honey seems to soothe chronic sinusitis. Herbal teas are healing: linden, elderberry flowers, honeysuckle, fennel, thyme, and so on.
• Interestingly, getting chilled might affect some people with chronic conditions. Avoiding cold, draft and having a hot beverage (thermos!) before getting out of bed, might do the trick of warming up.
• Exhaustion depletes immune function; getting enough rest and sleep is especially important in children and adolescents.
• Avoid spicy foods.
• Look for triggering food allergens. Read More
Blog: On Health. On Writing. On Life. On Everything.
Summer Fare
July 19, 2010
In the summer, we don’t like to eat heavy foods. We have a natural tendency, an innate knowledge, to eat lighter in hot weather. Braised lamb red, cabbage and sweet potatoes is a combination I would not serve now; in the fall, with temperatures down, it will be delicious.
Here is a recipe for a light shrimp salad, easy to make:
• About five to ten cooked shrimps per person. Remove tails and slice the shrimp lengthwise. (Instead of shrimp, cooked lobster, chicken, mussels, crab meat, mushrooms would work).
• Add an onion, finely chopped.
• A can of mandarins or pineapples, or fresh apple or pear (or whatever fruit, you fancy).
• Walnuts or almonds or whatever nuts.
• A bit salt and pepper.
• Fresh or dried dill (or any herb).
• And mayonnaise – as little as possible. I prefer a mayonnaise made with olive oil. You can stretch the mayonnaise with juice from the mandarin can, or with a few drops of olive oil; or both.
• Serve the shrimp salad with corn on the cob, broiled (with sunflower or sesame seeds and olive oil) asparagus, and lentils or a multi-grain bread.
• End the meal with fresh fruit – a watermelon or cherries or strawberries from the field.
This is a good example how I cook: I use what I have at hand and what is fresh and in season and therefore cheap. It never tastes the same twice. And never ever ask me: How much? I am a “feeling” cook, not a measuring one.
This is a Sunday dish. Eating mayonnaise every day is not such a good idea for the waist line – even if it is finger-licking good. By the way, if you have a mixer, you can make your own mayonnaise: Separate eggs into yolks and egg white (use the whites for making meringues later). Beat the yolks until they stiffen a bit. Drop by drop add olive oil – never stop beating, slowly first, then faster. The secret is in never to add too much oil at a time so that the mayonnaise does not curdle. Takes five minutes to make.
Summer fare is about freshness and moderation. Thinking about it: It's the same in the winter. Except that in the summer, the heat helps you with the moderation part - it curbs our appetites. Read More
Raw Foods
July 18, 2010
The raw foods movement is an ideology – just as the vegetarian and vegan foods movements are. Fact is that we are omnivores. The length of our intestines, the shapes of our teeth, the hydrochloric acid produced in our stomachs, digestive enzymes produced in our pancreatic glands and our appetites – they all are witness to that fact.
We are omnivores because during evolutionary times, we did not have much choice in what we ate: we had to eat what was at hand, from roots to rabbits, from grubs to greens.
We need a diet that is mixed from raw foods and cooked foods. Recent research shows that mankind has had fire much longer than we thought; we used to think that fire came only about 100,000 years ago. Now the estimate goes to a million years, perhaps two million years. That time is long enough that our bodies have adjusted to cooked food.
The main advantage of cooked food is that we can get more nutrients out. Yes, a few vitamins get destroyed in the cooking process, but overall we gained.
Do we need a fixed ratio between cooked and raw foods? No. Naturally, we tend to prefer longer cooked foods in fall and winter, and raw foods in the summer. We eat more raw food in warmer climates. We are adaptable.
We also have different needs. A person who is warm, can take more uncooked food. A person who is always cold, can't digest raw foods well.
A raw or vegetarian or vegan diet is perfect to detoxify your body when you have lived too many years on too much meat and fast foods. People like to stay on a diet that made such a dramatic difference in their lives, and are often not aware that they might run into deficiencies after a while. I have seen too many patients on a vegetarian diet that consisted of pizza, donuts and ice cream.
After a month or so on a raw/vegetarian/vegan nutritional regimen, the body needs to go a bit more toward omnivore again – a little bit meat and fish, once to twice a week, if one wants to avoid too much meat for reasons of protecting animals and/or the Earth. To get protein and vitamin B12 from fish and/or eggs, it is sufficient to eat animal fare about once a week; more than twice a week might have negative outcomes. There is enough protein (not as perfect though) in nuts, grains and legumes to feed people most of the time.
The discussion raw vs commercial milk (or: a potentially infectious vs pasteurized, homogenized, fortified – adulterated foodstuff) should not be discussed with other raw food issues. But so much here: Dairy in any disguise is not healthy and not necessary - except in rare cases of non-thriving children. The two food groups you don’t need are dairy and white starch. Read More
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