After a lengthy break, it’s time to get back to our mini series on having a healthy gut, here at Alternative Cures. So as our last post on the subject, Keep Your Gut Healthy Part 5, looked at water, liquid intake and the benefits of cranberry juice, now its time to expand that a little and look at some other gut-friendly drinks we can take.
An old wives tale or country alternative cure or remedy for a “tummy ache” was a hot mug of peppermint tea. That was for several very good reasons and today the medics all agree that peppermint is a good, natural and gentle stomach and gut calming remedy. Peppermint actually calms the stomach muscles while improving the flow of bile which the body needs to digest fats. A recent study showed that of a group of IBS sufferers who took peppermint capsules for a month, 79% of them reported that it did indeed help to relieve their symptoms.
Drinking a hot cup of peppermint tea has the added benefit of the warm liquid also aiding the calming, muscle relaxing properties of the peppermint itself, so enhancing the effect and making it one of the best alternative cures for many gut related discomforts.
Other tummy friendly hot drinks from the alternative cures cabinet can be made from fennel seeds, which makes a wonderful warming and stomach calming drink tasting mildly of anise. In fact anise is also a good digestive aid in itself and the seeds can be crushed and boiling water poured over to make an infusion similar to that of fennel. Ginger is a good digestive aid and a tea made from the sliced stem (it is not a true root) is also calming and warming.
Finally, don’t forget the many wonderful healing properties of green tea. A cup or two per day will also go a long way to helping to cleanse your entire digestive tract, so always keep some in your cupboard. I personally swear by it!
Firstly, my apologies for not posting in here over the last couple of weeks - things have been very busy and I simply haven’t had the time, but I’ll get back into the swing of things in the New Year once the pressure is off a little and post some more great alternative health information here.
But for now, I want to wish everybody a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous 2008…
Teapots are not used nearly as often as they were a few decades ago thanks to the popularity of teabags which can easily be popped into a cup for a single cup brew.
But they may be in for a come-back amongst alternative cures and health conscious tea drinkers.
Researchers at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland have found that polyphenols, which are the chemicals found in black tea that fight cancer, peak in strength after tea is brewed for a minimum of five minutes. The findings show that 60% more polyphenols in their test subjects’ blood after drinking black tea that had been brewed for five minutes, compared to only 30% more after drinking tea that had only been brewed for three minutes.
So why are teapots important?
You are more likely to brew tea for longer in a teapot than you would with a teabag in a cup.
In fact it was a part of the tea-making ritual when I was a child in my household. Because tea was not to be wasted, we used less tea to make a pot for the family than would be used to make individual cups, which meant the tea had to brew for several minutes to get the best flavour.
Little did we know back then that we were also doing our health a good turn by extending the brewing time for our tea!
Continuing on from the last post in the series, Keep Your Gut Healthy Part 4, where we looked at working on reducing stress, here we’ll look at a couple of things you can drink that will help to keep your gut healthy.
The first and foremost is to drink plenty of water. Water not only re-hydrates the body, but it also helps your digestive system to do its job properly as well as softening stools to make passing them easier. When your digestive system is not lubricated sufficiently, then problems will begin to occur.
This doesn’t mean you can glug a six-pack of fizzy, sugary soft drinks either. They contain too many harmful chemicals that cause problems for your digestive system. Especially harmful are the low-calorie or sugar-free soft drinks that are loaded with artificial sweeteners like aspartame, sorbitol and saccharine, all of which are harmful to the body - and I don’t care what any so-called experts says to the contrary, in my eyes they are lying. If you want to stay on the safe side -leave soft drinks of ALL kinds well alone.
Better for you in many ways is cranberry juice. It has already been proved to protect the urinary tract from bacteria that cause infections like cystitis. Further studies have shown that drinking a glass of cranberry juice a day helps protect you from viral infections of the intestines. It does this by preventing the virus from attaching to red blood cells.
Good news in the prevention of disease of the gut and helping to keep it healthy!
Terry Didcott is a qualified hypnotherapist and web designer among other things, but what truly inspired him to create this website was his life changing experience about thirteen years ago. Read the full article HERE
