I'm reading a somewhat older Vermont Folk Medicine book (I think it's
early to mid 1900's). One of the things it mentioned was a concoction
I'm quite familiar with, but with water added. I never thought to mix
it with water.
2 tablespoons each of apple cider vinegar and honey [typically I hear
"raw" honey but it can be difficult to come by]
Mix this in a glass of water and drink it, with or without meals. In
the book, it was said that some people drink it at all three meals.
I've also read that it's excellent when drunk chilled on a hot day,
sort of like lemonade.
The one caveat the book has not mentioned to my point in the reading
is that vinegar can be bad for teeth. I read online somewhere that to
minimize the possibility of damaging teeth, you can rinse your mouth
with water afterward. I'd think this is good practice anyway to
dislodge food particles if you're like me and don't like to brush
right after a meal (which to me ruins the fun of eating). If I
remember right, the acid in the vinegar reacts with the calcium in the
enamel of the tooth, and weakens it. It makes sense to me because if
you put vinegar on marble (which is also heavily infused with
calcium), it can eat through the stuff and at the very least, make a
horrible scar on it.
I don't tend to hold 100% stock in folk medicine, but I think that
before the doctors of today, people were generally more instinctive
and likely had a LOT of household remedies that did help with many
things. (I don't believe our current science is the ONLY science or
that it's infallible, either.) Additionally, many of /their/ ills
were likely due to both lack of medical/scientific understanding and
nutrition. Today, we don't suffer from many of their problems such as
plague, measles, scurvy, etc, but I think by and large our populace
has forgotten many of its collectively learned remedies. Over the
years I've found that some remedies /seem/ to work, and at the very
least, they don't hurt to try. So, when I woke up with a sore throat
shortly before our Thanksgiving weekend a couple weeks ago, I went all
out on the remedies I had tried in the past. I didn't get sick after
all. Maybe I wouldn't have. But I do know that the honey and vinegar
trick has saved me from sore throats several times, so while I don't
believe in everything I read or hear, I do tend to think those two
items indeed have value. I have strong faith in Garlic, as well.
Particularly raw.
One thing I find interesting about the book is that it mentions how
before the age of 25, the human body tends to require far different
nutrients than it does later, because before 25, the human body is
still building its systems. After that, it merely needs to maintain
them. From my own experience, I think the body goes through many
stages of requirements. As a child, I was very finicky, as my mother
could tell you. At first I ate everything she gave me, then I went
through a year or so of eating little to nothing (yet I was growing at
a good clip). At one point I would eat meat as if there were no
tomorrow, then abruptly, I wouldn't touch the stuff for years, or,
very little of it, and it had to be just right or it sat on the
plate. When I moved out on my own, I often tried eating hot dogs, but
it never seemed right to me somehow and now I have trouble eating
those, too, if not just the right kind and cooked just right. I got
into a junk food phase and then in my mid-twenties, I craved steak and
potatoes by spurts, which continued for a few years. Interspersed
with that was a need for fish, chicken, and rice with lots of frozen
veggies mixed in. (This is how many of my rice dishes were born.)
Then I met Dale and we discovered Indian food, and now I'm getting
more into tomatoes to a small extent, and I love the medleys of
spices. Thai has crept in there. I love variety. Lately it's been
Wendy's burgers and at home, rice, eggs, frozen veggies... the rice
dishes continue to draw my appetite.
So, tastes do change drastically over the years of one's life, it
seems. My mother admitted this to me herself but she tends to stick
with what she knows and is limited in her ventures out of fear for the
unknown. Me, I don't mind sitting on the toilet for a couple of days
if it means I have found a new spice to love. Granted, Mother was
right when she told me I have in the past tended to overindulge in
newly discovered foods. The curried rice when I was in my teens is a
very well-known example. I wasn't kidding about two days on the toilet.
Oh, and tea - I LOVE that stuff. I have noticed a few things,
though. First, I tend to drink the oolongs and blacks far more than
the greens, and most of the time they're all laden with caffeine.
Generally I do not touch decaf anything unless it's naturally lacking
the stuff. BUT. Despite all supposed health benefits from drinking
tea, it is one of those things that should be combined with lots of
water. The stuff is a major diuretic. Here are some things I've
noticed most when I get into my tea phases: My face turns kind of
ashen, like the blood refuses to rise to the surface, or there isn't
enough water in it. I pee a lot more and sometimes my sides have very
minor aches in them, as if my kidneys are working far harder than they
should be. I get headaches, as I just discovered. And finally, I
feel very dry - my skin, especially, but also some sort of inner sense
that fluid is lacking. If I limit myself to a small cup per day, I
don't notice these things quite as much, but more than that and
inevitably I see the signs.
EGGS! I love eggs. One or two eggs in the morning, with a small cup
of tea, a slice of toast, and a small bit of corn mush... this seems
to make me very alert until lunch. Tea alone is energizing but it's
more of a high than it is an overall sense of purpose. "They" are
right about breakfast - people do better when they have it. And I've
found that even at early hours, I can take an egg most of the time.
Speaking of which, even the folk medicine book mentions those
things... they have everything needed to build a chicken, so they're
powerhouses of nutrition.
Anywho, I don't know where I was going with all this. Perhaps I'm
just finger-blabbing. LOL I think that if it were not this day and
age of computers, I would likely have learned everything there is to
know about plants through much experimentation and note-taking.
Perhaps one of those medicine peoples, as it were.
~w
