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Natural Remedies
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Healing Foods
( 25 items )
 Nearly 2,500 years ago Hippocrates is purported to have said, "Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food." Granted, there weren't many drugs around in 400 b.c.e., so the Father of Medicine might just have been covering his bases. Still, science has since proven that Hippocrates was indeed onto something—namely, that the food we eat can prevent and in some cases fight disease.
There are a tremendous variety of foods and components in foods that our bodies are programmed to use to keep us healthy, and if we're sick, to make us well again. If we want to stay healthy, we have to eat these whole, nutritious foods.
In Healing Foods you will find extensive information about some of the most powerful disease-fighting foods. Of course, simply eating healthy does not mean that it will treat any disease or condition and healthy diet should not supplement the advances of conventional medicine. But adding these foods to your diet might just mean you spend less time in the doctor's office reading about these superfoods and more time at home enjoying them.
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Vitamins
( 2 items )
 Vitamins are natural substances found in plants and animals. Your body
uses these substances to stay healthy and support its many functions. There
are thirteen different vitamins and your body must have all thirteen to function
properly. Vitamins promote normal growth, provide proper metabolism (energy in your
cells), ensure good health and protect against certain diseases. As the building blocks
for the majority of chemical reactions in your body, vitamins combine with proteins and
minerals to produce enzymes (which speed up your internal chemical reactions) and
hormones (which regulate organ functions and activities including heart rate, blood
pressure and glucose levels.)
There are two groups of vitamins: ones that are fat-soluble and others that are
water-soluble. Fat-soluble vitamins such as A, D, E and K can be
stored in your body -
mostly in fatty tissue and in the liver. Because your body can store these vitamins,
you don't need to ingest them everyday for good health. But since they are stored,
there is a danger in getting too much of them and they can build to toxic levels in the
body.
Water-soluble vitamins like C and the Bs, on the other hand, do not stay in the body
long. Since they dissolve in water, any trace of the vitamins that your body doesn't
need will be carried away in wastes. It is essential to receive a healthy supply of
these vitamins everyday. Except in cases of massive overdosing, water-soluble vitamins
can rarely reach toxic levels.
Since the body cannot produce vitamins on its own, we must get them from the foods we
eat. Unfortunately, we can rarely eat well enough and with a wide enough variety of
foods to get all thirteen vitamins in healthy levels. Only two vitamins, biotin and
pantothenic acid, are so easily obtained in almost any diet that deficiencies are
extremely rare. So, although it's best to get as must of your needed vitamins from
natural foods, supplements are often necessary to keep the body functioning properly.
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Minerals
( 1 items )
 Minerals are inorganic compounds (not containing carbon) that make up the
major part of the surface of the earth. Minerals are absorbed by plants from
the soil and water and then become part of the foods we eat. Of the more than
sixty minerals present in the human body, only 22 are considered essential.
Minerals make up about 4% of our total body weight. A 150-pound person's
body has about 6 pounds of minerals, some present in very small amounts. The
body needs only about four ten- millionths part of iodine, but calcium needs
to be present in nearly two hundredths part. Although mineral deficiencies are
uncommon, without proper nutrition three minerals may be lacking in some
people. Additional calcium, present in green leafy vegetables and animal
products, may be needed if too much protein has been ingested. Iron, present
in peas, beans, green leafy vegetables, nuts and whole and enriched grains, as
well as red meats, is needed for blood. Zinc, present in whole wheat, meats,
shellfish and eggs, is needed to heal wounds, for sexual development and to
help keep our senses of taste and smell sharp. Iodine deficiency used to be
common, causing goiter and thyroid gland problems. In the past 70 years,
iodized salt has supplied all the iodine the body needs, amounting to about a
half teaspoon of salt a day from all sources. Much of that iodine comes from
salt in processed foods.
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Supplements
( 4 items )
 If
you are young and healthy, you probably rarely think of taking dietary
supplements. You may consider that your diet is healthy enough, but
vegetables and dairy food can only be as good as the soil in which they
are grown and many farmers will agree that their soil is worn out.
And
when you get sick, the search for a quick-fix pill or any kind of
dietary supplement may begin too late. No dietary supplement can
provide eternal youth or perfect health, but with the assiduous use of
vitamins and minerals and balanced nutritious diet, you can often
achieve optimum health for your age and certainly ease the symptoms of
many potential and existing diseases.
Dietary supplements can be
divided into two main types; nutritional, (vitamins and minerals and
amino acids) and botanical (herbal types).
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Herbs
( 2 items )
 Herbalism, also known as phytotherapy, is folk and traditiona medicinal practice based on the use of plants,botanicals. The power of herbs cannot be denied as their therapeutic values have
been proven and attested to by billions of people around the world. The
World Health Organisation estimates that 80% of the world's population
rely on herbs and traditional medicine for their primary health care.
Finding healing powers in plants is an ancient idea. People in all
continents have long used hundreds, if not thousands, of indigenous
plants, for treatment of various ailments dating back to prehistory.
There is evidence that Neanderthals living 60,000 years ago in
present-day Iraq used plants for medicinal purposes. These plants are
still widely used in ethnomedicine around the world.
Plants have an almost limitless ability to synthesize aromatic
substances, most of which are phenols or their oxygen-substituted
derivatives such as tannins. Most are secondary metabolites, of which
at least 12,000 have been isolated, a number estimated to be less than
10% of the total. In many cases, these substances serve as plant
defense mechanisms against predation by microorganisms, insects, and
herbivores. Many of the herbs and spices used by humans to season food
yield useful medicinal compounds.
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'Natural Health and Vegetarian Life' |
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'Conscious Living' |
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'Natural Health' |
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Natural Remedies 
