Tomatoes Benefit Health And May Protect Against Cancer

Natural Medicine:
Tomatoes, once known as Love Apples, or Apples of Paradise, like the sun, and so long as they can get enough of it, with adequate watering, they will flourish in your garden. You can keep some seed from any good-tasting tomato from the previous year, throw a sprinkling of seed on some turned over ground, water occasionally, and they will be sure to come up.
Dig in a little organic fertilizer or compost about the plants once they begin to grow, to ensure that nutrient-rich fruits will later grace your table and give maximum flavour to your cooking. Do not plant tomatoes anywhere near potatoes, or your fruit trees.  They grow well next to beans and greens.
(Note:  This post first appeared on ‘Nutritional Tips’, a website which my son and I began. We have decided to put these posts onto this website because it already has a readership base.)
The humble tomato originated in South America, was brought to Europe in the 1700’s, and is today a mainstay of traditional Italian cuisine, which has proved to be one of the healthiest cuisines in the world. In Napoli, Southern Italy, where people eat vast quantities of tomatoes, olives, fruits and pasta in their mainly vegetarian diet, the incidence of cancer is low.
Cooking tomatoes does not ruin their nutrients, and some people believe that cooking may even enhance their healthful effects, which means you can eliminate guilt and enjoy that sauce-covered Italian pasta all the more.
 “La Tomatina is a food fight festival held on the last Wednesday of August each year in the town of Buñol in the Valencia region of Spain. Tens of metric tons of over-ripe tomatoes are thrown in the streets in exactly one hour” – see Wikimedia.org.
Tomatoes are a great addition to those rich items on the menu not only for their flavour, but because of their ability to break down fats. This attribute is considered helpful in preventing hardening of the arteries.
Tomatoes are a classed as a solanaceous vegetable. They are rich in potassium, which is important for the heart, for stabilizing blood pressure, and maintaining healthy brain cells.
They contain a variety of antioxidant and anticoagulant compounds, including Vitamin C, which are effective in reducing the risk of heart disease, stroke, and cancer.
Tomatoes have been used as a detoxifying agent in some cases of chemical poisoning. As well as their antioxidants, they contain rich levels of chlorine and sulphur, which can greatly aid the body in combatting toxic overload from chemical environments. According to John Heinerman, there are
51 mg of chlorine and 11 mg of sulphur to every 100 grammes of raw, sun-ripened vine tomatoes.
A good dose of tomatoes daily can help to restore a tired liver and help combat cirrhosis of the liver. Earlier studies have suggested that the nutrients in tomatoes can even help rebuild liver cells, as in cancer.  Tomatoes could be important to restore the liver, when part of the liver has been removed.
Vitamin C, Lycopene, Quercetin and Lutein are some of the vital-to-health antioxidants found in tomatoes.
These compounds are all natural blood-thinners which can help to prevent blood clots from forming, thus reducing the risk of strokes.
Tomatoes contain another natural blood-thinner in the form of salicylate acid, which is reproduced in aspirin. (also found in white willow bark, a natural alternative to aspirin) Salicylate medicines are often given to the elderly who otherwise might be susceptible to having a stroke.
If you are taking these synthetic, blood-thinning salicylate medicines, then you probably need to go easy on natural blood-thinning vegetables, fruits and vitamin C.
Why not eat more tomatoes, dandelions, and other natural blood-thinning foods instead? (ask your doctor)
Vitamin C, Lycopene, Quercetin and Lutein are all thought to be helpful in preventing cancer, especially prostate cancer, breast cancer, and cancer of the colon.
Lycopene is one compound which is especially important for helping to prevent prostate cancer, but it also helps to prevent the blood clots which cause strokes, and it is beneficial to the heart.
To protect against prostate cancer, some sources recommend serving generous helpings of Lycopene-rich tomatoes at least twice a week. or using tomato sauce liberally each day. This is supposed to reduce the risk of prostate cancer around 34%. (see The ABS Diet, David
Zinczenko, p.88)
Lutein is one compound which is now recognized as being greatly beneficial to the eyesight. It is even given as a supplement by some orthodox eye specialists these days for helping to treat and prevent macular degeneration.
Quercetin is another ingredient of tomatoes which is beneficial to the eyesight. It is thought to help prevent cataracts from forming, and is strengthening to the heart.
The heart muscle, blood pressure, the brain, the eyesight, and the immune system all benefit from eating tomatoes on a regular basis.
Conclusion: Unless you have an allergy to them, tomatoes are greatly beneficial to the health and may go a long way towards protecting you from disease.
Sources:
Heinerman’s Encyclopedia of Fruits, Vegetables and Herbs
Heinerman, J., Parker Publishing Company, 1988
Food is Better Medicine Than Drugs
Holford, P., & Burne, J., 2006
The Nature Doctor
Dr H.C.A. Vogel, 1995
100 Best Health Foods
Wills, J., Love Food Parragon Books Ltd., 2010
The ABS Diet
Zinczenko, D., Rodale Inc., 2004

Benefits Of Coffee And Its Help For Cancer

Natural Medicine
People all over the world love coffee. Coffee bars have sprung up in even the most remote of towns, to cater to the very enjoyable social aspect of coffee drinking.
So long as you do not indulge in more than a few cups of coffee per day, the general consensus is that coffee does no harm providing that your general health is good.
(note:: this post first appeared on ‘Nutritional Tips’, which my son and I began together.  We have decided to put the posts from that website onto this one, since this has more readers)
Moderate coffee drinking may even be benefitting your health in several ways.

Coffee Can Increase Brain Power: Coffee is well-known as a brain stimulant, and recent research suggests it may even make you more intelligent by opening up unused pathways of the brain.  However, beware – if you drink too much coffee, the brain can get fagged, which will not help your memory.

Coffee Acts As A Digestive: Coffee helps stimulate bile production, which makes it a helpful aid to digestion after eating a rich meal. Roasted coffee beans contain the vitamin niacin, and one cup of brewed or percolated coffee is supposed to give around 1 mg of niacin.

Coffee Grounds For A Skin Tonic: Ground coffee can be used as a defoliant for the skin. The used, moist grounds can be rubbed onto the skin, which helps to shed old skin tissue and improve the circulation. John Heinerman says this treatment was popular in Japan at the time of writing his book in 1998.
Coffee As A Cancer Treatment: Coffee enemas were famously popularized by Dr Max Gerson, who used them as part of his cancer therapy, with very good results.
Coffee enemas work very effectively to release toxins from the liver, and to remove long-standing toxic congestion in pockets of the bowel. I
Coffee May Help Prevent Colon Cancer: It was previously thought that coffee drinking could lead to the development of certain cancers, such as pancreatic cancer. (see John Heinerman, p.178) But recent research has indicated that people who drink a few cups of coffee per day have less risk of bowel cancer than those people who do not drink any coffee. (see Reader’s Digest, Tom Sanders,
The benefit of coffee to the bowel is partly because it has a laxative, cleansing effect. But it is also because coffee has the power to neutralize some toxins: Coffee as a medicine was well known in the ancient world as an antidote for certain types of mild poisoning.  The Egyptians were supposed to have used coffee to treat some forms of food poisoning.

Best to avoid coffee if you suffer migraines, as the caffeine in coffee can be a trigger.

Addiction to Coffee:  Coffee is addictive, so one needs to be mindful of the quantities drunk in a day.

Hypoglycaemia: Be cautious in your coffee-drinking if you have hypoglycaemia, as coffee can disturb blood-sugar levels. If you suffer hypoglycaemia, then you should never take coffee on an empty stomach, if at all.
Osteoporosis: It is generally recommended that middle-aged women avoid excessive coffee-drinking, as it could lead to osteoporosis at this time of life. This is because coffee can interfere with calcium absorption. Anything over three cups a day could be undermining your health.
Heart Attacks, Strokes, High Cholesterol: Brewed coffee increases the heart rate and raises the blood pressure slightly. For this reason, most health writers advise the avoidance of coffee if you are susceptible to strokes, or heart attacks, or high blood pressure, but not all writers prohibit coffee entirely under these circumstances.
Filtered Or Instant Coffee Is Less Harmful: It has been found that the method of producing your cup of coffee will decide the effect on your blood cholesterol. Drinking plain, brewed or boiled coffee is not advisable, as there are two chemicals found in coffee beans, cafestol and kahweol, which can raise blood cholesterol. However, these harmful chemicals are removed in the process of making instant coffee, and they are also removed when a filter is used in making percolated or brewed coffee.
So people with mild cholesterol problems may find one or two cups of filtered or instant coffee will be tolerable.  Ask your doctor.
For The Organic Garden:  Coffee is a rich fertilizer and is wonderful for the plants in the garden.  It also helps keep the bugs away.  Just water down any coffee grounds you have, and sprinkle a bit of the mixture around several plants.  Note:  I have discovered that orchids hate coffee fertilizer so much that they perish.  So do not put it anywhere near your orchids.

Coconut And Its Healthful Properties

Natural Medicine For General Health
Coconut has many well-known health benefits. It is used in many cosmetics, soaps and skin creams. It is a great, healthy substitute for dairy milk and cream.
In Indian Ayurvedic medicine, coconut kernel has been used for dysuria, coughs, bronchitis, and to help prevent the greying of hair.
(Note: This post first appeared in a website my son and I had started.  We thought it best to add these posts to this website, since this website has a reasonable reader-base.)
Pacific Island peoples traditionally use large amounts of coconut in the daily diet.  These peoples of Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, and other Pacific Islands, are famous for their good looks, wonderful teeth and hair, and strong, well-built bodies.  These attributes are due to the high consumption of coconut and fish, which are the most important components of the Pacifica diet.
In Africa, traditional medicine uses coconut oil for healing wounds and for skin infections.
In some parts of South East Asia, coconut oil has been used to treat tooth decay.
In Central America, coconut is used with salt to treat colds and throat infections
.
The main active healing ingredients of coconut are contained in the coconut oil.
Coconut contains 45-50% of a fatty oil known as lauric acid; 13-20% of myristic acid; 7-10% of palmitic acid, 5-10% of caprylic acid; and quantities of stearic acid, linoleic acid, and caproic acid.
Coconut contains 3-5% free fatty acids.
Studies have indicated that coconut oil could be an effective anti-cancer agent:  An inhibiting effect has been observed ‘on the growth of carcinoma cells of the colon in vitro’.
Coconut contains a good amount of caprylic acid.  This is a compound with antiseptic and antibiotic properties.  Caprylic acid is used in some pharmaceutical preparations to combat candida albicans.  It is probable that caprylic acid in the diet helps prevent cancer from developing.
Coconut oil helps to keep the teeth healthy. Eating fresh coconut provides cleansing fibre which keeps the teeth clean.  Caprylic acid, and other antiseptic agents within the coconut oil, help to combat bacteria in the mouth.
For Hair Health:  Coconut oil encourages hair growth and helps prevent the greying of hair.  Eat fresh coconut, or use the milk or cream in curries and casseroles several times a week to boost your fatty acid intake.
Apply the cream or milk externally to the scalp once or twice a week as a conditioner for the hair.  Leave on for an hour or more, then wash out with good quality soap or shampoo.
For Skin Health:  Coconut in the diet helps keep the skin smooth and elastic.  Coconut oil can be also be used externally on the skin.
For Candida Infection: The caprylic acid in coconut can help prevent candida infections.  For Bowel Health: Including coconut in the daily diet can help keep the intestines healthy and free from parasites.
Sources:  PDR for Herbal Medicines, published by the Medical Economic Company, Montvale, New Jersey, 2000

Homeopathic Sulphur And Its Useful Sequences

Natural Remedies

Homeopathic Sulphur is regarded as the greatest of Hahnemann’s anit-psoric remedies.

Sulphur has the power to draw out toxins and bring them to the surface, thus enabling them to be expelled from the body easily.  It is a powerful antiseptic tool for the homeopath.

Sulphur is very often given when other well-chosen remedies have failed to act.  Sulphur can unblock resistances to pave the way for other remedies to work better.

Sulphur is often effective in bringing up deep-seated health problems.  Skin afflictions are usually a sign of organ imbalance, and poor elimination.  If only the skin is seen as the problem, and cured by medications, and perhaps antibiotics, then the real underlying cause, which is not being treated with the skin remedy,  becomes more deep-rooted within.  Often, lung diseases and other internal problems arise, or worsen, when the skin has been healed in this way.

Sulphur can bring these old complaints out so that they may be treated with appropriate remedies.

Then a healing of the whole system can occur.

Symptoms of a Patient Needing Sulphur: The Sulphur patient usually displays several of these symptoms:  Feels worse for prolonged standing. Burning soles of the feet or palms of hands, and hates feet to be covered up with blankets in bed. Worse for warmth of bed. Better for warm, dry weather, worse for cold and damp, and better, generally, for movement.

Aggravated by wearing too much clothing which increases heat. Often a dislike of water and/or of bathing. Skin is dry and itchy, with often a redness about the nose or mouth or eyes.  Burning eyes. Piles or itchy anus. Constipation. Alcohol worsens symptoms. Often needing catnaps or 40 winks. Lethargic.

Patient often wakes around 3 AM.  Usually a sinking, hungry feeling around 11 AM each day.  Symptoms feel worse at 11AM in morning, and 11PM at night  Feeling of suffocation or burning sensation in the chest, worse for lying down on the back.  Relief sometimes gained by lying on the right side with legs drawn up to the chest.

Aloe and Psorinum complement Sulphur.  Can be used alternately or together. T.S. Iyer suggests these three to help treat metallic poisoning, such as lead or mercury.

Sulphur is compatible with Calcarea, Lycopodium, Pulsatilla, Sarsaparilla, Sepia.

Useful sequences recommended by Iyer, to be taken in the order listed, are:

Sulphur, Calcarea, Lycopodium OR

Sulphur, Sarsaparilla, Sepia

Sulphur is the chronic of Aconite, and can be used to good effect after Aconite.  Iyer recommends this sequence for some cases of pneumonia and other acute  disease.

Iyer suggests not using Sulphur after Mercurius or Calcarea.  Use the Sulphur first.

He says Mercurius and Calcarea are often useful remedies to use AFTER Sulphur has been given.

See merrilyn’s post entitled list of homeopathic combinations and sequences for more information on remedies.

Good Ecology And Conservation And BioLists

Our Global Environment

This article is to introduce you to Dr Cedric Woods, PhD, and his BioLists and NatureWise websites.

Today is St Patrick’s Day, 2017, and a wonderful sunny day it is too, here in Dunedin.

I decided to take a bus trip to Portobello, out on the Peninsula.  This is a gorgeous drive along the sea shore, which reminds me very much of Waiheke Island in all its former glory, before the island got vamped up by the greater Auckland Council, and was almost denuded of all its roadside plants and healthful weeds.

Kerbsides all over the country, and around the world, are so often sprayed heavily with what I guess is RoundUp/glyphosate, which is mainly to blame for the disappearance of many old garden plants and valuable weeds. This poison has been declared as ‘a probable cause of cancer’ by WHO, World Health Organization.

I believe that Waiheke is not currently using glyphosate/RoundUp on kerbsides, but nevertheless, much of Waiheke’s former beauty has been lost with the commercialization of Waiheke as a tourist destination.

These days, native plants are everywhere in abundance on Waiheke, which is a good thing, but these do not have the wonderful colour and variations of size and texture which we had before, and all the self-sown fruit trees which grew along the roadsides have been plucked out.

A good thing to be planting natives, but these have no colour except green and brown.  And so we also need the loveliness of things such as flowering magnolias, camelias, rhododendrons, oak, beech, silver birch, and fruiting trees to colour up the green and brown gardenscapes which New Zealand councils seem to be encouraging everywhere.

Anyhow, today’s was a lovely trip.  At Portobello, nature is abundant, with many varieties of English trees and exotics still to be found, growing in gardens and on the roadsides.

I bought a very nice pie for $4.00, which I had time to eat by the sea-shore, seagulls and sand all steaming in the sun, before the bus headed back to Dunedin.

On the way home, I met a very interesting Irish gentleman, a Mr Cedric Woods, PhD, who was on his way to join his wife in town, where they planned to celebrate St Patrick’s day in the traditional  way. We very soon began to talk enthusiastically about the state of the world and what we could do about it.  We both thought Angela Merkel is on the right track, leading Europe and the rest of the world at the moment, in terms of conservation and political, or social and humanitarian issues.

Mr Cedric Woods is a scientist who has the website www.BioLists.com  Cedric has worked in Libya, in Ireland, and many other places around the world.

He also has a site called [email protected]

I was so impressed by Cedric’s world-view, humanitarian approach to life and environment, I promised to put up a wee post about him and his work today, so that people may find his sites and hear what he has to say.  He has some interesting and sound ideas on how to fix many of the worls’s problems.

Mr Wood’s card reads ‘Today’s good Taxonomy is tomorrow’s good Ecology and Conservation’. I have not yet had time to explore his websites, but he apparently has listed every known plant on his BioLists website.

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