Food is medicine

No, Positive Cycle has not gone ayurvedic, but we do have something to say about the condition your body is in at any point in your life, and how closely related that is to what you have been eating. For the baby boomers, it was an accepted reality that you ate meat and veg, sometimes fish, all thoroughly cooked. When you got sick, the doctor was able to supply you with all manner of chemicals that were supposed to make you get healthy.
Today it is becoming clear that this approach is not only flawed but indeed the cause of much of the discomfort and disease that even affluent people are all to easily afflicted with in what was supposed to be a better and brighter future.

Gardening, and especially food gardening, is such a wonderful way to learn about the value of diversity and also of natural relationships. How all the little bits of nature work together to create life that sustains itself. Diet works in very much the same way. Eating foods that complement each other, and that are in their natural and unprocessed state, is exactly what produces the diversity of beneficial microorganisms in the gut without which good health never even gains a toe hold. It follows perfectly logically that in order to gain control of anything going wrong in the body, we need to address the food that our bodies are trying to function on. If you are developing a tumour, it seems inescapable that your body must have been damaged by something it encountered. Something small even, but to which your body was unable to respond in a healthy way.

What this really means is that for true health, it is necessary to think preemptively. Treatment is possible using foods, we all know about thyme and sage with ginger for the sore throats and the wheezes for example, but if you eat your raw broccoli, sprouts, seeds, cauliflower crumbles (delicious) and you pick what you eat on the same day, from your local environment, you are providing your body with perfect food. Food that almost never triggers a damaging response like a tumour in your body.

Mulled Wine

It all started hundreds of years ago when wine was safer to drink than water. Unfortunately wine did not keep very long, so when the wine started tasting funny they would add spices to improve its flavour and make it pleasantly drinkable.

The process meant heating the ingredient, which was very warming in winter. Other than the enjoyment of drinking the warmed wine it seemed to keep its drinkers healthy and free of colds and flu during winter, this is mostly due to the spices that are added.

Spices have stimulating and healing effects such as cinnamon and cloves, which part with antibacterial, anti-fungal, antiseptic and antiviral properties into the hot water as it steeps, cinnamon has many other benefits. Citrus is also an important ingredient which contains ascorbic acid (vitamin C). Other spices can be added to adjust the flavour and to improve the properties.

The nicest recipes I have found where at lisashea.com, she has some really tasty ideas and my favourite one is the Mulled cranberry.

Check out my Grow Your Own Food lessons to find out how to grow your own ingredients which will taste a lot more flavoursome and will have better health benefits as they will contain higher nutritional content.

Things that warm you up in winter

Chillies, pepper and exercise all speed up your metabolism, layers of clothing and blankets shield you from the cold and trap body heat. You loose a lot of your body heat through your head, hands and feet so protect them. Warm food firstly warms up your tummy which feels good and then it fuels your metabolism, warm drinks like hot chocolate, soups, eggnog and mulled wine also warm you from the inside but it is more temporary than food and the most effective way is shared body warmth. Happiness also works as it is a state of mind that puts your mind somewhere warm and fuzzy so you will feel warmer when you are happy most people attribute this to the the distracted state of mind.



Something that makes the cold worse is huddling next to the heater or fire, because of the way your senses work, they will acclimatise to the change in ambient temperature over a period of days but the moment you sit by a heater your metabolism does not need to work as hard to keep you worm, and your body then does not need to acclimatise to the cold. Every time its cold or you walk away from the heat you feel the cold worse.



Alcohol is another problem you feel warmer when you have had a few because it lowers your body temperature which means there is less of a difference in temperature for you to feel.



As you get older your metabolism does not cope as well and you will feel the cold more and more. It was nice being a kid when your metabolism worked overtime, and you did not feel the cold as much.



The heater or fireplace is not the problem, it is sitting to close to it that causes the problems using a heater of fireplace to warm up your environment is perfectly acceptable, it just adds to global warming, which in winter sounds like a good thing.



Chillies can be added to almost any meal and you don’t have to add very much to get the affect, but not everyone likes chillies or pepper. Growing chillies is easy and I go into the subject of how to grow chillies in my Grow Your Own Food workshops.