Healthy living and eating healthy

Cinnamon Health Benefits: The Spice That Heals There is a spice so ancient and so valued that it was once worth more than gold. Egyptian pharaohs requested it as a gift from foreign nations. Arab traders guarded their supply routes for it with extraordinary secrecy, inventing elaborate false stories about where it grew to prevent competitors from discovering its source. Medieval European physicians prescribed it for virtually every ailment from digestive complaints and respiratory infections to joint pain and poor circulation. And Chinese medicine had been using it for thousands of years before any of this, describing it in one of the world's oldest medical texts dated to 2700 BC as a fundamental medicine for warming the body and supporting healthy digestion. That spice is cinnamon, and while it no longer commands the extraordinary economic and strategic importance it once held its medicinal reputation has only grown stronger with the passage of time. Modern science has now exami...

Moringa Health Benefits: Why Moringa is Called the Miracle Tree In Kenya it grows along roadsides, in home gardens and on the edges of farmland, sometimes treated as nothing more than a hedge or a windbreak. In other parts of the world it is sold in health food stores at premium prices as one of the most nutritionally dense superfoods available. It is the same plant. Moringa oleifera, called the miracle tree, the drumstick tree and in Swahili mlonge,  is one of the most nutritionally extraordinary plants on earth and one that Kenyans and East Africans have historically had extraordinary access to without always recognizing the treasure growing in their own backyards. The statistics that describe moringa's nutritional profile have been repeated so often in natural health circles that they can start to sound like exaggeration, but they are real and they are verified by laboratory analysis. Gram for gram moringa leaves contain more vitamin C than oranges, more calcium than milk, mor...

Apple Cider Vinegar Health Benefits: What the Science Actually Says Few natural health remedies have generated more passionate enthusiasm, and more heated controversy, than apple cider vinegar. Its proponents claim it can do almost everything: dissolve kidney stones, cure diabetes, eliminate cancer, banish acne, accelerate weight loss and reverse aging. Its critics dismiss it as a folk remedy with no real evidence behind it. The truth, as is so often the case in natural health, lies somewhere between these extremes and is both more modest and more genuinely useful than either camp typically acknowledges. Apple cider vinegar has been used medicinally for thousands of years. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, used vinegar preparations for wound care and management of persistent coughs around 400 BC. Traditional medicine systems across Asia, the Middle East and Europe used vinegar for digestive complaints, skin conditions and general health maintenance. And modern science has n...

Honey Health Benefits: The Ancient Superfood That Never Expires Archaeologists excavating ancient Egyptian tombs have found jars of honey that are over three thousand years old, and still perfectly edible. No other natural food on earth has this extraordinary property of never spoiling. And the same qualities that make honey so extraordinarily stable as a food, its low water content, its acidic pH, its natural hydrogen peroxide production, are precisely the qualities that make it one of the most medicinally powerful natural substances available to human beings. Honey has been used as both food and medicine across virtually every human civilization in recorded history. Ancient Egyptian medical papyri from 1550 BC list honey as an ingredient in hundreds of remedies. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, used honey for wound healing, pain relief and fever management. Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, Greek medicine and African traditional medicine all independently...

Turmeric Health Benefits: Why Turmeric is One of the Most Powerful Healing Spices on Earth There is a spice sitting in kitchens across Africa, Asia and the Middle East that has been used as both a culinary ingredient and a powerful medicine for over four thousand years. It is the spice that gives curry its characteristic golden color, that has been used in Indian Ayurvedic medicine as a universal healer since ancient times, that traditional Chinese medicine prescribed for pain and inflammation, and that has in the past three decades become one of the most intensively studied natural substances in modern biomedical research. That spice is turmeric, and the scientific attention it has attracted is not accidental. Over ten thousand peer-reviewed studies have now examined turmeric and its primary active compound curcumin. The findings consistently confirm what traditional healers across four thousand years knew empirically, that this golden root contains compounds of remarkable therapeut...