MEDICINAL FOODS-2 : Pineapple

    Among the plants in the family Bromeliaceae, also called the Bromeliads, pineapple seems to be the most popular food plant. Its botanical name is Ananas comosus, and it is believed to be native to South America, although it is actually grown in many warmer parts of the world. Pineapple is easily cultivated from the crown of an existing pineapple plant, just be cutting the crown off at the base, near the top of the pineapple fruit and sticking it in the soil under suitable conditions of moisture and sunlight. Pineapple is not a single fruit, but a “multiple fruit”. Crazy as that may sound, if you look at the surface of a pineapple fruit, you will see what looks like divisions. Each division is, in reality, a single fruit. The large pineapple fruit is made up of those may fruits. You could say pineapple is a bunch of fruits

        You only need to peel and enjoy a pineapple fruit to appreciate the deliciousness of it. The way you eat pineapple depends on who you are or where you live. Pineapple could be eaten as small occasional pieces with other fruits, or a lot of it could be eaten by itself. No matter how much of it you eat, you will probably end up wanting more. Its sweetness, just like those of other fruits depends on the degree of ripeness. Pineapple is very tart and acidic if you do not allow it to ripen properly before eating it. This is one thing which may, unfortunately, form the taste-opinion of people who do not live in places where pineapple is grown. In fact, there is nothing to compare with the taste of freshly-harvested ripe-on-the plant pineapple fruit. Whether you get it ripe from the plant, or you leave it at home to ripen, the riper it is the sweeter it becomes, but peeling a very ripe pineapple could be a bit messy, even with a sharp knife. How do you know when pineapple is ripe enough to be eaten? Unlike most fruits, such as oranges or most mangoes, pineapple may not necessarily be yellow when ripe. A rule of thumb when you have certain varieties is to pull at the leaves one by one. If they come off very easily, it is an indication that the fruit is ripe within.                                         

     Peeling a pineapple is one thing you may not enjoy. Remnants of the flower parts are fused together, and will need to be removed to free up the juicy part. Well, there are different types of pineapple peeler-corers, but you will probably be having just three quarters of the edible part when you use one. On the other hand, if you hand-peel it, you may have some trouble getting rid of the inedible “thorns” individually within the flesh. It is your choice to either use a corer or to hand-peel it.

     Pineapple is extra-rich in nutrients even for a fruit. It contains a high amount of vitamin C. It is also quite rich in potassium, and also contains iron, copper and magnesium. Do this qualify pineapple as a “medicinal food?” This is a matter of opinion and definitions. However, it does qualify to be called medicinal in some other respects. An enzyme, appropriately named Bromelain is extracted from pineapple stem, although it is found in all parts of the plant including the fruit. It is a protein-digesting enzyme. As a result of containing this enzyme, pineapple is useful as an aid for digestion. The same enzyme makes it useful in breaking down dead tissues in the body. Dead skin layers are “digested” by the enzyme when applied to the skin. As a result, pineapple could be used as a skin freshener. By the same token, it is used for wound debridement; that is the removal of dead, decomposing part of a wound so that only living tissue is remains. When intended for a directed medicinal use, it is not clear if the amount of bromelain enzyme in the pineapple fruit itself is concentrated enough, but it cannot hurt to take in a helper protein-digesting enzyme in your food. If higher concentrations are desired, there are extracted bromelain brands available as supplements in the market.
   Another medicinal use of pineapple, which is commonly employed in West Africa, is boiling the unripe fruit with other plant materials to treat malaria and jaundice. It is not clear what the active ingredients are in this case, especially since it is used with other plants. Pineapple, nonetheless is not only good food, but has obvious medicinal properties.

 

YOUR PANTRY MAY BE YOUR MEDICINE CABINET

      Hippocrates has been famously quoted as saying "Let your medicine be your food your food your medicine"  This saying has been disputed as being a misquote. But if we want to examine the saying of a great philosopher, it will be useful to examine it in greater details for facts or lack thereof.
Needless to say that food is actually medicine in a manner of speaking. We must go back to the basics and ask the following questions

   i.    Where do we get energy from?
   ii.   Where do we get immune boosters from?
   iii. Where do vitamins come from?

     If the general answer to these question is "food", then we are beginning to see what we put in our mouths as the means of staying healthy, and in some cases, not staying healthy. We must first agree that food could be medicine or poison, depending on what we chew, drink or smoke. Let us face facts, some of the things we eat could be dangerous to our health. While this is a well known fact, not a lot of people are mindful of what go into their gut. Let us take the case of eating that leads to improper digestion, like eating too much meat products. Don't get me wrong, I do eat meat; but when I eat too much of it, it simply stays there for days, making me to feel sluggish and uncomfortable. This is especially so when the meat is well cooked. Also, if you drink too much alcohol, you are likely to have a hangover the following day, after a night which feels like you are riding on the high seas instead of sleeping peacefully on your bed.
      In this series, I will discuss briefly about some food materials which may be found on kitchen shelves all over the world, but which also double as very potent medicine. Not only by the definitions above, which may lean toward prevention of the body against diseases, but the fact that they could actually prevent and cure diseases.

I. Turmeric (Scientific name: Curcuma longa)
 This plant is a relative of ginger. It also grows as a rhizome, a kind of underground stem. The rhizomes are somewhat smaller than ginger and have a golden yellow coloring, due to the yellow pigment called curcumin. It is a widely used spice, and constitutes a major part of curry powder. It is eaten in many other forms. The amount taken in depends on whether you are using it as food or as medicine.
      It is consume either fresh or powdered. It is even made into tablets by manufacturers of nutritional supplements. However, it has been used as medicine in many parts of the world for centuries. I do have a personal experience of its medicinal use ever before I came to know is as a spice in foods. In Africa, it is used to cure malaria in a very delicious way. Remember, no one likes to take medicines, especially bitter ones, the reason children's medicine are sweetened to increase palatability. The use of turmeric for malaria in this context is a standard way of "making medicine into food", or "food into medicine" depending on the way you look at it. It is merely made into a stew by grinding the fresh "roots" into a pulp and cooking with other spices, including pepper, palm oil and salt. It is made very tasty by cooking it with raw beef cut into small pieces. The sick person usually needs very little persuasion to eat this soup.

      It has also been recommended for lowering cholesterol. It is obvious that curcumin, which is the golden yellow pigment abundant in this spice, is very useful as an anti-oxidant. It has also been mentioned as an anti-cancer agent. One other common use is the reduction of inflammation, as well as the relieve of arthritis. Turmeric definitely has very strong medicinal values. However, it is a practical fact that it needs to be eaten in larger quantities than when it is used as food to be effective as medicine. So, while it is true that your food could be your medicine, and your medicine your food, you may want to decide, in case of turmeric, whether you intend is as food or as medicine.
   We will follow up with other "Kitchen Medicines" in subsequent discussions.
 

PILLS OR PLANTS - A QUESTION THAT NEED NOT BE ASKED

      It is common knowledge that there is a tug of war between people who believe that only conventional medicine works for sicknesses, and those who believe that plants are better for healing. This is a controversy that is likely to linger for a very long time to come. There are folks like me, who will utilize one or the other, depending on the situation. It is strange that there should even be any controversy about the usefulness of plants as medicine because the foundation of medicine is actually plants. To people who are rooted somewhat in indigenous communities in various parts of the world, it is second nature to try plants for ailments first. For people who grew up in cities, talking of herbal remedies is alien to a large proportion of folks. In most rural areas of Africa, India and Asia, plants  still remain the primary source of healing.  The range of ailments plants are useful for is limited only by the available knowledge of the individual or group of people.
      For one thing, if any plant is at all edible, it will be a useful for health purposes in one way or another, since plants contain healing nutrients just by their very nature. Basically, they contain chlorophyll, carotenoids and a lot of other materials that promote health by supplying essential nutrients. Specifically, plants are naturally endowed with specific chemicals which target different ailments. It is funny that even animals know this specifically. It is not clear how they do, but they certainly do. Animals have been known to go out of their ways to eat plants they normally would not eat except when they have certain ailments. A scientist once observed a sick chimp in Africa to eat a plant called bitter-leaf when sick, and the same scientist reported improved health in this animal shortly afterward. I have always been amazed by the above account. How do they know to eat a healing plant when sick?  I can only guess that these animals communicate and may even have some oral traditions by which they pass these pieces of "medical" information from generation to generation. Who know?
 Back to us humans. I am amazed that this debate even exists at all, judging from the variety of so-called conventional pills which are actually extracted from plants. Many of them have names which are linked the plant source! Some of the plants contain so much of these active medicinal materials that their scientific names reflect the chemicals. It is an open secret that one of the most popular analgesics of all times, namely aspirin, comes from the bark of a type of willow tree. There are hundreds of other examples. Morphine is an analgesic derived from the poppy plant Papaver somniferum, quinine, a drug previously popular (and still in limited use for malaria) is from Cinchona ledgeriana or quinine tree. Santonin, which is used as a worm expeller, specifically roundworms such as Ascaris, is a product of Wormwood, Artemisia maritma. Thymol is a drug applied to kill fungi on the skin surface, and it is derived from the Thyme plant, Thymus vulgaris.
Our focus above has been on the more common plants and medicines which are more commonly known, to avoid ambiguity. However, the list goes on and on. The funny thing is that many people use plants directly on a daily basis as drugs, but will not recognize their use for healing purposes. If you drink tea or coffee at all, then you are using the caffeine in Coffee or Tea plant to keep yourself stimulated. Now, nobody gets prescribed coffee by his doctor, but we get our coffee fix anyway. On the flip side, many "herbal tea" enthusiasts use chamomile to induce some sleep, and other sedatives abound in the plant world. Their products are even used in concentrated forms in the hospital. Dosage seems to be one of the stronger points of those who campaign against plants' medicinal products. Overdosing, or taking under doses  of the plant product could be an argument against using plant materials. A full knowledge of  how to use plants is important to using them. In fact, overdosing on a plant product is not common, since the amount of the active ingredient is such that a sick person will have to take a humongous amount of the plant material to overdose. We need to note though, that some medicinal plants double as medicine and poison, depending on the amount taken in.
When I think of it, I have a feeling that my garden is one huge medicine cabinet, I only need to know which one works for what, and how to apply them. Next time you look out of your window and you see a plant such as Yarrow, think that you are looking at another potent medicine, not to talk of Peppermint or Spearmint. When people talk of an incurable disease, it is just because they do not know which plant to turn for healing!



 

SNORING IS NOT TO BE IGNORED

    Snoring is a big nuisance to put it mildly. Breathing is a normal process, and exchange of gases between the lungs and the outside of the body is required for normal living. Unfortunately, when the process becomes heavy enough, and it is accompanied by some restriction of the passage way, the rumbling of soft tissues produce the unpleasant vibrations that is called snoring. In many cultures, it is often interpreted as a sign of deep sleep, but deep sleep can occur without necessarily resulting in snoring. Snoring is definitely not a sign of health, but it is actually otherwise.While gender is not the only variable in snoring, it is believed to be more common among men than in women. It also depends on body size. Overweight people tend to snore more. Other factors  include general state of health and age. Quite obviously then, someone who snores today may or may not snore some other time.
      While we do not want to separate the biology of snoring from its effects on the family, we want to dwell more on the immediate consequences of snoring on the individual (the snorer), the partners or other family members. It can also, impact other people with whom the snorer interacts. For example, people may occasionally share hotel rooms with friends to save cost. Obviously, the latter is a no-brainer. If you know you snore, you don't even want to try it. Anyhow, let us see what snoring does to the snorer, I think that apart from the fact that snoring is not a sign of good health, it can further decrease the state of health in a practical way. It is a form of noise, and it does not even matter whether the sleeper is producing the noise himself or not. I have been woken from sleep by my own snoring before!
Now, if my own snoring can do that to me, it means I can definitely interfere with someone else's sleep by my snoring if I share a bed or room with them. In fact, in certain types of buildings, snoring can be transmitted across wall barriers. Obviously, even if a partner can sleep through the other's snoring, the quality of sleep will still be certainly reduced. In some instances snoring could metamorphose into sleep apnea, a condition where the person actually stops breathing for a few seconds!
      Is it possible that snoring has been problematic between spouses? There is no doubt about that. While the ideal thing is for spouses to sleep together, a lot of spouses have had to sleep in separate rooms because of the problem of snoring. Let's be realistic, if I am going to work in the morning, I must do myself the favor of getting some shuteye before daybreak, or I will be too sluggish at work. However, finding myself another spot to sleep in the house is not the only solution. In fact, it is not feasible when an empty room is not available. Other solutions range from simple to more complex ones. By far the simplest one is to get earplugs. At least, it will block most of the noise out. Depending on the quality of the ear-plug, it is quite possible to experience an almost complete silence while some not so gently snoring is occurring around you. There are other solutions which are commercially available and are advertised all over the place, including some kind of "harness" around the jaws. But the most drastic and expensive solution is surgery. Now, surgery is usually considered the last option for snoring. It is rarely considered except in very severe cases.
    I think when snoring is a problem, especially between partners, it should not be ignored or treated as if it is not there. Some solution should be found, with a lot of understanding between the spouses. The solution preferred will depend on the individuals concerned, but there are options out there.
    

THE LEGENDARY STATUS OF ALOE IS FOR REAL

Aloe plant (Aloe vera), a succulent member of the lily family, has been a remedy for a huge number of ailments for centuries in many parts of the world. It thrives under a wide variety of environmental conditions. It is naturally resistant to drought, but it could also thrive with moderate amount of water, as long as the soil does not get soggy. The medicinal part of the plant is the leaf. The leaf is covered with a smooth epidermis, which may be speckled with white spots, depending on the variety. Contrary to what pictures of Aloe may portray, it could grow taller than the average human height if left for long enough.

 

                                       

When Aloe is mentioned as a medicinal plant, the first thing that comes to mind is the use of the gel to treat burns, but this is only surface deep (pun-intended) when you consider the many other important medicinal uses. I will make bold at this point to say that many people may be missing out on a lot of benefits of this plant due to lack of awareness of its uses and potency. Also, it is possible to believe in its uses and still be afraid of possible toxicity or side-effects. However, using the appropriate part of the plant is absolutely safe. The main concern about Aloe intake is about its latex, which ironically is the part responsible for the laxative effect of the plant. When Aloe leaf is freshly cut, the latex drips copiously as a yellow liquid, but it later turns to a brick-red color when dried. Although it has been extensively employed as a laxative, it should be used only as needed and in moderation. It should be noted that it is a very effective laxative and taking in too much of the outer part could lead to temporary diarrhea.

That having been said, let us now examine the gel. In order to harvest most of the gel without the latex, it is best to cut the leaf into about 2-3 inches lengths, use a small knife to cut the two edges of each piece, then carefully slice off the flat top, and cut out the gel from the remaining covering. The gel can then be treated in a variety of ways to facilitate consumption. It could be blended with water to make Aloe Juice. If appropriately blended and sieved, it could be made into a particle-free drink, which could be stored in the refrigerator for many days even without any preservative added. 

                               

In discussing the benefits of the gel, I will put those uses to which I am personally familiar first. It is obviously very potent in reducing blood sugar. The mechanism by which it does this is not clear, but its effectiveness is not in doubt. Also, the gel is known to contain essential amino acids, that is, the building blocks of proteins. While our system is capable of making most of them, the essential amino acids are those which our bodies are not capable of synthesizing and so must be taken in from an external source. This is good news if you want to avoid eating protein sources like meat. In addition to these, Aloe contains vitamins of the B group, including B12, B1, B2 and B6. Other vitamins found in this wonderful plant include A, C and E. No wonder this plant helps to boost the immune system. When any supplement contains this much nutrients, it must consequently be an immune booster. It is no wonder then that it is also reputed to prevent cancer. If any plant boosts the immune system, it will also help the body to destroy bacteria which invade the body, and help the body system to kill emerging cancer cells.

I have suffered a lot from indigestion, probably as a side effect of the medications I take for both high blood pressure and diabetes. However, I am lucky to be the keeper of a College greenhouse. I have propagated many potted Aloe plants there, and so there is no shortage of fresh Aloe for me. I usually cut myself a little piece before lunch, peel off the outer part and eat the gel directly! Yes, it is bitter, but I can assure you that the bitterness is easily removed by drinking water to wash it down, and does not persist in the mouth or spoil the taste of your meal. While I personally believe that the use of Aloe gel in skin lotions and cream is relevant, I simply wonder if the concentration of the gel included is high enough for it to be effective. This, I must confess, is a matter of personal opinion.

 

 

Added to the general benefits of this plant is the fact that it is a nice ornamental plant. It is easily grown in pots and could do very well indoor, as long as there is considerable amount of sunshine. Propagation is no problem. This plant literally propagates itself even inside the pot. New plants grow from the side, and these can be separated and grown in another pot. Within a year, a single plant can produce tens of others under a greenhouse condition.

A LITTLE LUXURY FOR NEXT TO NOTHING? TRY LEMON GRASS

There are many useful types of grass, but Lemon Grass is outstanding. In warmer climates, lemon grass is even grown as a hedge, and like so many other types of plants, it is often taken for granted. The fact that some folks call it "tea" is already a pointer to its delicious, aromatic taste as a plant rich in  essential oils. The stereotype about tea is to restrict it to the plant that bears the name, and the stereotype about coffee is to restrict it to the plant that bears the name also. However, it is obvious, though not to most people, that these groups of drinks have quite a number of substitutes among other plants.
Lemon grass is really good to drink as a very refreshing beverage. The preparation is easy. The leaves could be cut into small pieces and dried at low temperature, either in the sun or in an oven. The dried leaves could then be boiled in water for a while and sieved. I prefer to add dried ginger, as earlier discussed, to enjoy an excellent drink. To add to the spice of it all, lemon grass has been scientifically proven to cure certain forms of cancer. I read a story recently, where a grower of lemon grass in Israel got so much business selling lemon grass leaves after a scientific report indicated that it was useful in certain types of cancer. To add to the appeal of this plant is the fact that it contains insect-repelling properties. Citronella, an insect repelling substance, is extracted from it. It is also used for cooking in many cultures. This is not surprising since it contains aromatic substances which enhance the taste of foods
Luxury is not always a function of affluence. You can create some healing luxury for yourself, and that is where plants like this come in!