It’s a choice anyone can make—change my diet, or take medicine to correct an eating pattern that’s caused a chronic condition? If I take medicine, will I choose a prescription from conventional medicine? Or will I choose to follow the wisdom of the ancients and use herbs? If I do both, is that even more efficacious?
The difference will likely be this: prescriptions may take care of one single, isolated aspect of my health. They may not help me get rid of my condition—especially a chronic condition—one that may be with me for the rest of my life.
Herbs and plant foods can powerfully work with your body to help mitigate a chronic condition and at times heal an acute one. And yet, medicine of any sort is only a percentage of the picture. Lifestyle plays another role, faith and philosophy still another, possibly the most important role, in our health. For more on this, see Carolyn Myss’, Anatomy of the Spirit.
Amazing results of research lately has involved measuring and describing the energies of plants with that of human beings—plants’ metabolic activity (of making chlorophyll for example) with human metabolic activity. Because we use plants in every aspect of living, one of the outcomes of the clinical research shows that food is energy-giving according to its color, and science is reporting the benefits of colorful plant foods on human health. In this enlivening and very hot topic, there are quite a number of authors. For more, see Deann Minich, Quantum Healing, and Whole Detox, a 21-Day Program… or Jonathan Glass, Total Detox, a 28-day Program…, reviewed on this blog.
Which reminds me, the content of this blog is almost exclusively engaged in material about plant foods, plants as medicine, as beverages, and any number of creative ways to get plant foods on your radar.
Food is such a complex subject! And I prefer books focused on plant-oriented recipes, and authors who have gone out of their way to purify their offerings. One of the best examples of this, even destined to be classic, is Any Phyo’s Ani’s Raw Food Asia : Easy East-West Fusion Recipes. In the raw cookbook, she describes many of her recipes as having been inspired by traditional dishes which she redesigned for her raw renditions of the dish. That’s not only creative, but to be admired. Recipes are really delicious, too!
Warnings for vegetarians and vegans: in any reviews on books which include standard eating fare, that is, typically meat-oriented dishes, I write a reader or diner-be-ware comment. Whenever a topic such as spices, special foods like mushrooms, or herbs are the main feature of a book, extremely few exclusively vegetarian ones have been published. There always seem to be the ubiquitous meat and fish dish recipes to showcase the herb, spice or mushroom, etc. Okay, already! We know it’s true that these special foods taste good, it’s their nature. Authors of these books want to get their ideas on your radar, too! Their ideas of infusing the omnivores’ eating habits with plant foods. As for this blog-writer, not wishing to exclude topics on special foods, such books are reviewed on the blog, despite being vegan-unfriendly. I hope to provide the nudge for a vegan or vegetarian chef to research, develop and write a vegetarian-vegan friendly book on special topics.
