If having enough energy to earn your daily bread and to get all your chores done is a struggle for you. If you go to bed tired, but wake up even more tired. If you can't get up and go without coffee, or can't slow down and relax without alcohol. If your fatigue is ruining your mood and your friendships. Then it's time to build energy and stamina the Wise Woman Way.
The Wise Woman Tradition nourishes optimum energy, and optimum health, by using safe simple nourishing herbal infusions, eating whole grains, and avoiding stimulants.
Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) is my favorite energizing infusion. It gives me the energy to work 14-15 hours a day on my dairy goat farm, train my apprentices, write books, run a publishing company and a workshop center, and fly all over the world to teach. I don't know how I could do so much otherwise.
I buy dried stinging nettle and prepare it like this:
Put one ounce by weight in a quart canning jar.
Fill the jar with boiling water, cap well, and allow to steep for four hours or overnight.
Strain and enjoy.
Refrigerate the remainder.
Drink within 36 hours.
Because stinging nettle strengthens the kidneys and adrenals, it builds powerful energy from the inside out, and gives one amazing stamina. If you drink 4-5 quarts of nettle infusion weekly, you can expect to see results within 3-6 weeks.
There are no contraindications to the use of stinging nettle infusion. Side effects may include: thicker hair, softer skin, stronger veins, and greater delight in life.
Nourishing herbal infusions can be made with other herbs too. I like red clover blossoms, lots of anticancer protection there, as well as lots of phytoestrogens. And oatstraw, such a mellow brew, and it's so great for easing and nourishing the nerves. I also use chickweed, comfrey leaf, linden blossoms, and mullein as infusion herbs, depending on my need.
All nourishing herbal infusions are made as instructed above.
Whole grains are the backbone of a whole food diet. Because they break down much more slowly than refined (white) flour products, whole grains provide a "time release" capsule that allows you to work and work and work (or play and play and play, as you will). For more energy, eat more whole grains.
Notice which white flour products you currently use, and replace them with whole grain versions as you run out. Soon you'll be eating: whole wheat pasta, whole wheat bagels, whole wheat English muffins, whole wheat crackers (read boxes carefully), whole wheat pretzels, whole wheat cookies, whole wheat bread, brown rice, kasha, millet and more. The tastes and textures will bring new delights to your dining pleasure as well as lots of energy for you to do with as you will.
Avoid stimulants. For powerful stamina and lots of energy, we are well advised to avoid stimulants. Not just drug stimulants like cocaine or "speed," but herb and food stimulants too.
It is tempting to try to get more energy by using stimulants. But stimulants actually decrease overall energy. They provide fast fuel, but no steady flow of energy. Stimulants push us beyond our innate capacity. In effect, they make us work harder than we truly have the energy for, and thus deplete us at deep levels.
The energy-depleting effects of coffee, soft drinks, and white sugar products are cumulative. The more you try to get energy from these sources, the more tired you make yourself. The long-term consequences often include a profound fatigue.
Black pepper and spices such as cinnamon and cloves are acknowledged stimulants too, and, if overused (as in drinking chai daily) can also weaken the internal fires that give us energy.
Herbal stimulants such as ephedra (ma hang or Mormon tea), cayenne, ginseng, and guarana are also unlikely to help build real energy and stamina unless used sparingly and wisely. Herbal stimulants may even be quite dangerous, especially when powdered and taken in gelatin caps. Water-based preparations of stimulating herbs (teas and soups) are usually the safest, and tinctures are next safest, unless standardized. Small amounts of these herbs taken occasionally are harmless enough. It is long-term use of stimulants that erodes healthy energy.
White sugar is one of the most common stimulants in the fast-food culture. We consume it in dozens of forms: corn syrup, cane sugar, "raw" sugar, fructose. I find that when the diet is rich in minerals, especially those in nourishing herbal infusions, whole grains, and yogurt, the desire for sweets is lessened and more easily satisfied with far less.
For energy and stamina everyday, plus the extra you need to deal with everyday emergencies, follow the Wise Woman Way: drink nourishing herbal infusions, such as stinging nettle, red clover, oatstraw, and chickweed.
For energy and stamina at home and on the road, plus the extra you need to deal with the constant stress, follow the Wise Woman Way: eat only whole grains: brown rice, wild rice, spelt, cornmeal, amaranth, quinoa, and edible wild seeds including lamb's quarter, nettle, and yellow dock.
For energy and stamina, the Wise Woman Way, rely on your own power, trust in your own body's wisdom if it needs to say "no," and don't force the issue with stimulants (except on those very rare occasions when nothing else will do).
Energy and stamina the Wise Woman Way is simple, safe, successful, and fun. Congratulations for taking your health into your own hands.
Susun Weed
PO Box 64
Woodstock, NY 12498
Fax: 1-845-246-8081
Visit Susun Weed at: http://www.susunweed.com and http://www.ashtreepublishing.com
For permission to reprint this article, contact us at: susunweed@herbshealing.com
Vibrant, passionate, and involved, Susun Weed has garnered an international reputation for her groundbreaking lectures, teachings, and writings on health and nutrition. She challenges conventional medical approaches with humor, insight, and her vast encyclopedic knowledge of herbal medicine. Unabashedly pro-woman, her animated and enthusiastic lectures are engaging and often profoundly provocative.
Susun is one of America's best-known authorities on herbal medicine and natural approaches to women's health. Her four best-selling books are recommended by expert herbalists and well-known physicians and are used and cherished by millions of women around the world. Learn more at www.susunweed.com
Optimum Nutrition - Cooked or Raw?
Which is better: cooked food or raw? Taking nothing for granted or gospel, I set out to find out for myself the answer to this important question.
First, I asked, what is meant by "raw food" and what is meant by "cooked food?" One cannot simply say that raw is uncooked, for there are raw food "cookbooks." Nor is cooking simply the application of heat through boiling, baking, or frying, as I soon discovered. Ripening itself is one form of natural cooking; others are described later.
Second, I wondered, what did my ancestors eat? And was it raw or cooked?
Third, I questioned, how do enzymes in foods affect digestion and health?
And fourth, I attempted to sum it up - is there an advantage to cooking?
The answers weren't as simple as one might suspect, however. The answers to these questions combine in interesting ways, and open up other questions in their answering.
To begin with the second question: Our most primitive ancestors, those who lived several million years ago, most likely ate raw food. The majority of what they ate was animal protein: muscle meats, organ meats, eggs, and insects.
Present day examples of peoples who primarily eat raw animal protein include the Inuit of the far North and the Masai of Africa, known for their health and freedom from disease.
Research done by Dr. Pottenger in the mid-twentieth century revealed that raw meat and milk contained enzymes necessary for digestion. He showed that heat deactivated their enzymes (www.westonaprice.org). His conclusion was that raw meat, fish, milk and eggs provide more nutrients and are more easily digested.
This is not true of plant foods, however. Vegetables and fruits do contain enzymes - if picked fully ripe - but their enzymes have no function in their own digestion, although papaya, pineapple and kiwi fruit contain enzymes that digest meat (an interesting aside - these fruits are tropical fruits that help digest and destroy, in the digestive systems of people and animals, the parasites that are found in those regions, and only incidentally digest other kinds of meat). Many plant enzymes interfere with digestion, so our bodies destroy them.
Cooked food was the preference of most of our ancestors. Archaeologists have found evidence of fire in sites occupied by hominids as far back as a million years ago, but cannot say exactly when we began to use fire to cook food.
Certainly by about ten thousand years ago, when cultivation of grains and beans - hard foods which absolutely require cooking - became widespread, our ancestors were regularly and routinely cooking their food.
Most current aboriginal people also cook their food; in New Zealand, for instance, I found the Maori jealously guarding natural hot pools used to cook their food.
Is there an advantage to cooking? It depends on how we cook - or, more basically, how we define cooking - and whether we are eating animals or plants. Animal cells are surrounded by a membrane. This thin membrane is easily dissolved by digestive juices, releasing the nutrients stored in the cell. Fast, high-heat cooking will toughen these membranes, thus slowing digestion and impairing nutrient uptake.
For an illustration of this, think of how tough an overcooked piece of meat can become; chewing, an important part of digestion, is much more difficult. Slow, low-heat cooking dissolves the membrane, making digestion and nutrient uptake much easier. If the idea of raw meat turns your stomach, eat soups and stews instead.
Plant cells are surrounded by a wall. This wall is designed to resist breakage and to protect the stored nutrition in plant cells. Digestive juices act on the cell walls of plants little if at all; take a look in the toilet the day after next time you eat corn on the cob to see how true this is. Cooking, which can be expanded to include her sisters freezing, drying, sprouting, fermenting, and preserving in oil, breaks the cell wall and is necessary to liberate nutrients from plant cells.
Cooked vegetables and fruits, grains, and beans provide more nutrients and are more easily digested than raw ones.
A Haiku-like verse that could sum this up is:
Chewing what is raw,
how can one smile?
Muscles of the jaw too tense.
A macrobiotic diet, the only vegetarian diet shown to put cancer in remission, consists of cooked food exclusively. Around the world, well-cooked meat broths - think chicken soup - are the food of choice for convalescents.
Cooked plants are far more nourishing than raw plants, whether we look at vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains or pulses (beans). Cooking not only breaks the cell wall, liberating minerals to our bodies, it actually enhances and activates many vitamins.
This is true especially of the carotenes, used to make vitamin A, and other antioxidants in plants. Research found that the longer the corn is cooked and the hotter the temperature, the greater the amount of antioxidants in the corn.
This also applies to vitamin C. A baked potato contains far more vitamin C than a raw potato. And sauerkraut (cabbage cooked by fermentation) contains up to ten times as much vitamin C as raw cabbage.
Some vitamins do leach into cooking water. Cooking with little or no water (for instance, steaming or braising) reduces vitamin loss in vegetables such as broccoli from 97% to 11%.
Note, however, that the vitamins aren't lost or destroyed, but merely transferred to the cooking water. Using that water for soup stock, or drinking it, insures that you ingest all the nutrients, and in a highly absorbable form.
Transferring nutrients into water, such as by making nourishing herbal infusions and healing soups, and then ingesting them is far more effective, in my experience, than wheat grass juice, green drinks, or any kind of nutritional supplement. It is, in fact, one of the best ways to optimally nourish oneself that I have found in three decades of paying attention to health.
Even if some vitamins are lost in cooking, people absorb more of what is there from cooked foods. Several recent studies measured vitamin levels in the blood after eating raw and cooked vegetables. "Subjects who ate cooked veggies absorbed four to five times more nutrients than those who ate raw ones," reported researchers at the Institute of Food Research in 2003.
There is no simple answer to the question "raw or cooked?" But for simplicity's sake, I say, eat your food cooked. This is especially the case if you choose to eat a diet high in whole grains, beans, nuts, vegetables and fruit. That's the way I eat, so I cook most of my food. But I keep a herd of dairy goats so I can have raw milk, raw milk cheese, and raw milk yogurt. I do enjoy raw meat and raw fish on occasion, but more often slow cook my goat into barbeque, a special kind of healing "soup" I learned to make in Texas.
The cook dances with the element fire. The cook stirs the cauldron. The cook transforms the parts and turns them into our whole. Blessings on the cook. Praise to the cook. May your food be well cooked.
References:
Aiello, L.C.; Wheeler, P. "The expensive tissue hypothesis: the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution." Current Anthropology. 36:199-221, 1995
Alvi, Shahnaz; Khan, K.M.; Sheikh, Munir A.; Shahid, Muhammad. "Effect of Peeling and Cooking on Nutrients in Vegetables." Pakistan Journal of Nutrition 2 (3): 189-191, 2003
Blumenschine, Robert. "Hominid carnivory and foraging strategies, and the socio-economic function of early archaeological sites," pp. 51-61. In: Whiten, A.;
Widdowson, E.M. (eds.) Foraging Strategies and Natural Diet of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. 1992
Bower, Bruce. "Ancient Origins of Fire Use." Science News. 157(18): 287, April 29, 2000
Cobb, Kristin. "Processing Corn Boosts Antioxidants." Science News. 162(9): 141, Aug. 31, 2002
Davidson; Noble "When did language begin?" p. 46. In: Burenhult, Goran (ed.) The First Humans: Human Origins and History to 10,000 B.C. New York, NY: Harper-Collins Publishers. 1993
de Pee, S.; West, C.; Muhlilal, D.; Hautvast, J. "Lack of improvement in vitamin A status with increased consumption of dark-green leafy vegetables." Lancet. 346:75-81, 1995
Foley, Robert. Humans Before Humanity. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishers. 1995
Groves. "Our earliest ancestors," pp. 33-40, 42-45, 47-52. In: Burenhult, Goran (ed.) The First Humans: Human Origins and History to 10,000 B.C. New York, NY: Harper-Collins Publishers. 1993
James, Steven. "Hominid use of fire in the lower and middle Pleistocene. A review of the evidence." Current Anthropology. 30:1-26, 1990
Megarry, Tim. Society in Prehistory: The Origins of Human Culture. New York, NY: New York University Press. 1995
Oste, R.E. "Digestibility of Processed Food Protein." Adv Exp Med Biol. 289: 371-88, 1991
Parker, R.S. "Absorption, metabolism, and transport of carotenoids." The FASEB Journal. 10:542-551, 1996
Preet, K.; Punia, D. "Antinutrients and Digestibility (in vitro) of Soaked, Dehulled and Germinated Cowpeas. Nutr Health. 14 (2): 109-117, 2000
Rukang, Ru; Shenglong, Lin. "Peking man." Scientific American. 248(6): 86-94, June 1983.
Sillen, A. "Strontium-calcium (Sr/Ca) ratios of Australopithecus robustus and associated fauna from Swartkrans." Journal of Human Evolution. 23:495-516, 1992
Sussman, R.W. "Species-specific dietary patterns in primates and human dietary adaptations," pp. 151-179. In: Spuhler, J.N. (ed.) The Evolution of Human Behavior: Primate Models. State University of New York Press. 1987
Tortora, G..J.; Anagnostakos, N.P. Principles of Anatomy and Physiology, New York, NY: Harper and Row. 1981
Walker, Alan; Shipman, Pat. The Wisdom of the Bones: In Search of Human Origins. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. 1996
Young, V.; Pellett, P. "Plant proteins in relation to human protein and amino acid nutrition." American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 59:1203S-1212S, 1996
Susun Weed
PO Box 64
Woodstock, NY 12498
Fax: 1-845-246-8081
Visit Susun Weed at: http://www.susunweed.com and http://www.ashtreepublishing.com
For permission to reprint this article, contact us at: susunweed@herbshealing.com
Vibrant, passionate, and involved, Susun Weed has garnered an international reputation for her groundbreaking lectures, teachings, and writings on health and nutrition. She challenges conventional medical approaches with humor, insight, and her vast encyclopedic knowledge of herbal medicine. Unabashedly pro-woman, her animated and enthusiastic lectures are engaging and often profoundly provocative.
Susun is one of America's best-known authorities on herbal medicine and natural approaches to women's health. Her four best-selling books are recommended by expert herbalists and well-known physicians and are used and cherished by millions of women around the world. Learn more at www.susunweed.com
Crohns Disease, Symptoms and Treatment
Introduction - Description
Crohns Disease is a disease of the gut. It was named after Dr. Crohn in the 1930's after he first described the disease. It can affect any part in one or more places although it affects the ileum (the final section of the gut) in around half of all cases.
It affects approximately 1 in 1500 people, affecting slightly more women than men with the age group predominantly affected by Crohns Disease being more affected.
Crohns Disease is also a chronic disease which means that it is persistent. Once you have it, you will always have it. The symptoms may vary over time in their severity.
What Causes Crohns Disease
It is now known exactly causes Crohns Disease. There appears to be enough evidence that it could possibly be inherited as about 1 in 10 sufferers have a relative who has also suffered from this condition. The evidence isn't absolute, but of certain degree to be significant.
It is possible that some people may be genetically predisposed to suffer from Crohns Disease although it needs some kind of germ to trigger it. The theory is that the germ triggers the immune system to cause inflammation of the gut. Interestingly, Crohns disease has become more common in recent times. The reason for this is unknown, however, smokers and women who use a combined contraceptive pill are at higher risk.
The Symptoms of Crohns Disease
The symptoms of Crohns Disease are different dependant upon which part of the gut is affected and to what degree.
The pain is normally located in the area where the inflammation is. Using the example of the inflammation being in the ileum, then the area of pain would be on the lower right side of the abdomen.
Ulcers may develop which affect the raw area of the lining of the gut.
Diarrhoea may be mixed with mucus or blood. What is common is the feeling of wanting to go to the toilet but when you get there, of not having anything to pass.
Some general feeling of being unwell with a loss of appetite, fever and tiredness.
If you lose a lot of blood, then you may suffer from anemia
Mouth ulcers are common
Painful cracks in the skin of the anus called anal fissures.
Treatment of Crohns Disease
As we don't know the cause of Crohns Disease, it is only possible to treat the symptoms. Some common treatments are as follows.
Drugs can be given which will firm up the stools.
Antibiotics can be given to fight any infection
Acute inflammation is normally treated via application directly up the back passage using various drugs such as corticosteriods.
There may be some surgery required to fix damaged portions of the bowel or to remove obstructions. The problems with surgery though is that it normally causes the Crohns Disease to flare up again.
If you want to read more about this subject, then visit Crohns Disease . Also, related to this topic are Piles Cure and IBS where you will hopefully find something of interest to you.