Make Your Cough Syrup Work for You: How to Use Herbs & Spices to Treat Your Symptoms

Have you ever looked closely at the ingredients listed on a cough syrup label? It's poly-this & prop-that along with dyes, high fructose corn syrup, & a ton of modified sugars. Used in soap making & other commercial uses, I noticed that even glycerin is even listed under inactive ingredients in Robitussin DM (although there are objectors, its generally regarded as safe for internal use by the FDA- is even used as a sweetener-  but as a humecant I'm not sure it makes sense to have it in a product that is used to dry up mucus). Regardless, fillers destroy our natural occurring enzymes & good bacteria in our digestive tract- where 80% of our immune system is located! Not something I'd like to damage, especially if you're trying to heal from an illness.

But what do you do when you have a bad cough & need relief fast? First, try to avoid products with lots or sugar, as we all know that sugar increases mucus production & will actually make your cough worse- very counter productive! Secondly, sugar should be avoided during an infection because you are essentially feeding the bacteria & encouraging them to reproduce- instead, eliminate the factors that encourage their growth & your body will heal more quickly as you make the environment more inhospitable to foreign bodies.

Pasta Primavera for Spring

Pasta Primavera

In Italian, pasta primavera literally translates as“spring pasta”. 

Add other spring vegetables or try spaghetti squash as a tasty & super healthy substitute to pasta

Facts: The Tomato

DID YOU KNOW?

Eating 1-2 raw tomatoes daily will lower blood pressure.Tomatoes encourage digestion absorption & are excellent in treating low appetite, indigestion,food retention & constipation.

Although considered acidic, once a tomato is digested it alkalizes blood.
Reducing acidic blood helps to treat rheumatism & gout.

The Tomato- Food of the Month

  Food is the foundation of medicine; food has been used as medicine for thousands of years to prevent & heal the body from sickness. Eastern medicine is not alone in using healing foods; one of Western medicine’s greatest antibiotics, penicillin, was discovered in mold growing on an orange! 

  Traditional Chinese Medicine (or TCM), uses many approaches to healing the body such as acupuncture, herbs, & food energetics. All three of these approaches treat the whole person, not just his symptoms or a part of the body. If you are being treated with acupuncture or herbs, food energetics will help to supplement those treatments. By eating foods that help to balance your constitution, not only will it help you stay healthy, but it will also help the benefits of acupuncture & herbal treatments last longer. 

   The energetics of the tomato are very cooling in nature. Cooling foods tend to move energy inward & downward, cooling the upper & outer parts of the body. For this reason, tomatoes are an excellent aid in digestion & increasing circulation, especially in the limbs. 

  Tomatoes have a sweet & sour flavor. The sour flavor helps with absorption of fluids within the body, therefore tomatoes help relieve dryness & thirst. The sour flavor of tomatoes also helps to counteract the effects of fatty foods that tend to cause stagnation. The sweet flavor balances all other flavors in our diets while nourishing us & stimulating circulation.The sweetness of tomatoes are cleansing & cooling to the body which helps to relieve heat.  

The sweet flavor is also what gives the tomato its ability to moisten dryness. These are just a few energetic properties of the tomato!

Because of these energetic properties, tomatoes are great for helping high blood pressure, red eyes, headaches, indigestion, low appetite, food retention, constipation, cleansing the liver & blood, & detoxifying the body in general.