Alternative Cures

I was asked in a comment on the post: Alternative Healthy Sunshine,to come up with a post about the benefits or otherwise of washing your face with dew. That was a tough one as there’s not very much information to be sourced on that subject, but I had a scout around and this is what I came up with.

Some of the popularity, if it can be called that, about washing your face with dew for its supposed benefit to the skin stems perhaps from a song that Dolly Parton made famous with the lyrics: “Then I’ll wash my face in the morning dew bathe my soul in the sun /Wash my face in the morning dew and my journey will be done.” So what’s the truth behind the lyrics?

There is a folk tale that says that “First thing in the morning on May 1st, young girls used to rush out into the garden to wash their faces in the May dew.” The reason, is supposedly that the May dew has certain magical properties and that anyone who has gone to the trouble to have washed their face in said morning dew will be blessed with a beautiful complexion throughout the coming year. Included as part of this folk tales was that dew was supposed to be able to remove freckles, spots and pimples from the skin.

Is there any scientific fact based on this magical folk tale?

Unfortunately, no, in a word.

The only basis for benefits to the skin that can be gleaned is that dew is formed on the blades of grass and leaves close to the ground and this moisture is apparently free of the impurities that are contained in the water that comes out of the tap.

That would be true on grass in a field that is not of course sprayed with any pesticides or weedkillers. So not all dew is good dew, apparently!

That means that to go to all the trouble of rubbing it into your face may or may not have the benefits of purity of the moisture meaning it could be a bit of a lottery as to whether you are doing your skin good or even more harm by rubbing in some freshly sprayed pesticide into it.

Ugh!

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures

                                     

Health and beauty are two words that seem to go hand in hand all over the place, but I often wonder if that’s because they are intrinsically linked to satisfy fact or just the advertisers’ bank balances. I’m going to use this post to take a look at that association of words.

At first glance, you’d think the two words placed together in the same space was perfectly innocent and harmless, but on reflecting upon this viewpoint for a little longer, a realization then dawns. What in the blue blazes has beauty got to do with health?

These two words are thrown together in a way that makes people believe that to be healthy you have to have beauty. Well, I wonder why that is? If you are advertising a beauty product, do you think more people would buy it if they thought it would bring them health as an added bonus for using it?

Of course they would.

The only real link between the two that I can fathom is that if you are in the picture of health, then you would look a whole lot better than if you were sick. That would lead me to conclude that in that respect your level of “beauty” would be higher if you were healthy than if you were not.

So we can accurately assume that the words health and beauty are uttered in the same breath for no better reason than someone wants to sell you a beauty product and is using the health angle to make more sales. Am I cynical? You bet! Making yourself more beautiful by slapping on a ton of so-called beauty products will no more make you any healthier than by sleeping in a compost heap!

So with that in mind, here’s the point of view of the beauty products seller. Take a website like Health and Beauty which displays a whole range of beauty products grouped into neat categories on its main page. Then you could look into one of its categories like, say skin care and see further sub-categories each with a list of beauty products to sell you. You then go to one of those sub categories to see what they have in the way of actual products. Lets look at anti wrinkle face creams and see what’s what. Now this site actually gives you a few paragraphs of information about anti wrinkle face creams, which is more than most do so you at least go into this armed with some knowledge and aren’t led into the dark and cajoled into getting out your credit card blindly.

All the while the benefits of using a certain product are made clear. In the case above, they give you plenty of good information as to what ingredients are actually in the products they sell, which at least is on par with supermarkets labeling what goes into your food and a good thing. Not all website that sell beauty products would do that. Most would just go on about the perceived benefits of buying their products and the link between beauty and health would always be there as a hook.

So we can see that in reality beauty has very little to do with health, although good health can produce a form of beauty. If looked at from that viewpoint, then from the sellers and advertisers of beauty products point of view it’s not a lot of good to them unless they can convince people that there is some truth to it, which there is not.

However from the other side of the coin, health products would benefit from the association with beauty, because a healthy person is also viewed as more beautiful in reality by human eyes, because true beauty comes from within and a healthy body is also a more beautiful body than a sick one.

Ok, I’m done!

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures

                                     

Following on the last article here Alternative Cures: Meditation, we’re going to take a short look at an about turn in the fortunes of sunlight and its links to cancer.

In this case, however, you can use the sun not to risk causing skin cancer, but to help you prevent breast and colorectal cancer.

Recent research by the University of California has revealed that something like 350,000 cases of breast cancer and 250,000 cases of colorectal cancer that currently occur worldwide could actually be prevented by people getting more vitamin D.

As we all know vitamin D is produced in the body when exposed to the sun. Now we know that too much exposure to the sun can risk contraction of skin cancer, but in smaller doses it is beneficial.

You actually need a mere 15 minutes of sun exposure a day in order to boost your vitamin D levels enough to help your body ward off these cancers. In winter of course, this is not always something that is uppermost in your mind. But if you can get outside f0r 15 minutes at lunchtime, when the sun is at its strongest (even if it’s behind clouds) , this is enough for most people’s skin to produce a large amount of vitamin D.

That exposure time is much less than it would take for the skin to burn, so the risk of getting skin cancer is almost negligible. Its all about getting the right balance between enough sun exposure to produce sufficiant vitamin D to stave off breast and colorectal canvers and avoiding skin cancer.

Terry Didcott
Freedom Writers
Alternative Cures

                                     

In my last post Cracking Skin? An Alternative Cure Approach, I looked at ways to rehydrate your skin and get it looking and feeling more healthy. Now I’m going to take a look at one alternative cures style method of reducing your chances of cardiovascular disease.

Meditation as a way of relaxing and beconing more in touch with yourself is as ancient as the hills, but using this alternative cures and lifestyle enhancing technique has many more health benefits that the popularly realized ones.

If you have any worries about your cardiovascular health, then using transcendental meditation on a daily basis for about twenty to thirty minutes can really lower your your risk of cardiovascular disease without making any change whatsoever in your diet or exercise routines or habits. A US study back in 2000 discovered that by practising transcendental meditation daily, this lead to a significant decrease in the thickness of potentially dangerous fatty substances deposited onm the artery walls. That means that transcendental meditation could potentially reduce the risk of heart attacks by as much as 11% as well as reducing the risk of strokes by 15%.

It has been noted that the calming affect the mantras which are repeated during transcendental meditation helps to lower the blood pressure and stress hormone levels while at the same time reducing psychological stress. These are, of course all associated with cardiovascular disease, so transcendental meditation is a good alternative cures style technique to use on a daily basis.

Terry Didcott
Freedom Writer
Alternative Cures