The Best Way to Use Herbs for Health
There are so many ways to use herbs to help and support your body for health and to get through an illness.
There’s teas, infusions, decoctions, tinctures, salves, steams, oils, liniments….and many combinations thereof to help us get well when we’re sick.
But there’s more than that. An easier way to use herbs to keep you healthy.
It’s simply to intentionally create your daily meals. Rather than help us get well when we get sick, this method works to keep us healthy and not get sick in the first place.
It’s pretty simple. Just be creative, use variety and spice up your meals!
Herbal affinities
Most herbs and foods have an affinity for a specific body organ or body system.
It can help support the overall health of that organ or system or it might heal and restore the organ or organ system.
This doesn’t mean it only works for things related to that specific organ, but its benefits will always help that part of your body regardless of what else it might be doing for you.
For example, oregano is great for digestion. It helps the digestive process work better. But it’s also good at helping a fever work better too.
The same with sage. Great for digestion, but I’ve used it for years for hot flashes. It’s also really good for cognition & memory. Sage tea anyone?
The properties of these two herbs both tend toward the elimination of toxins and waste products.
Hawthorn has an affinity for the heart. That can be its physical condition or it can help with emotional matters of the heart. It’s been used for centuries for broken hearts and grief.
It’s not that it stops the pain of heartbreak, but it makes it easier to eventually get through it and on to the other side of those emotional pains.
Spicing up your food.
One thing you can do is just spice up your food more.
Most of the time we’re in such a hurry to get things put together, anything more than salt and pepper isn’t even thought of.
Instead of a teaspoon add 2 of the culinary herbs and/or spices to your foods.
You may or may not be surprised to find out that most of the leafy herbals you have in the kitchen are good for digestion and for relieving gas and indigestion.
And freshly ground pepper helps our bodies take in and use more of the nutrients the foods we eat have to offer.
Leafy Greens
Years ago we decided we didn’t like the bitter taste and began breeding the bitter taste out of our greens.
That was a bad idea.
That bitter taste is what gets our digestion moving and helps get the bile moving so we can break down the foods we eat well, making the nutrition we take in more available and easier for our bodies to use.
Again, another way of making sure we get the most out of the foods we do eat.
There was a reason we were served a salad before the meal. That was to get our bodies ready to digest what was coming.
Try a salad with a mixture of many different greens and a light oil & vinegar salad dressing. That light oil & vinegar salad dressing likely has a lot of those herbs in it we talked about before, that are good for digestion, plus some.
If the vinegar you made that dressing out of is unpasteurized apple cider vinegar you have all that wonderful medicine for the gut flora added as well. Just one more thing doing good things in your belly.
Whole Foods
Use whole foods as much as you can. Shop the outer edges of the store as much as possible. Buy dried beans, nuts & seeds and add them where you can.
Veggies, seeds, beans, nuts, oils and even meats all have benefits for our bodies. The herbs and spices we think of when we think herbals, consist of our actual foods too, not just the spices we use on them.
We’ve become so accustomed to eating from boxes and bags that most of us (and our kids) are not fond of simple whole foods.
That, on top of the time it takes to cook, makes stepping away from the pre-made processed foods tough.
Those processed foods have so much artificial coloring, flavoring and preservatives in them, they aren’t too much like real food anymore.
All that stuff keeps it looking good and keeps it preserved so it can travel for days or weeks and then sit on a shelf in the grocery store.
Most of them taste good and look good, but only because of what has been added to it to make it that way. The GMO foods that have been inserted into our food system is another way our food’s been changed. Genetically modified foods have been created to change flavor, to look prettier, and to allow herbicides and pesticides to be sprayed on it.
Long term testing has never been done on GMO foods because it was determined the nutritional value didn’t substantially change. Therefore, it’s unknown exactly what, if anything, these foods may do to people in the long run.
I get that time is a commodity. I have a full time job and run 2 businesses on the side. Time is precious. Having my grandkids over can kill a schedule like no other and that’s only once or twice a month. I can’t imagine having kids at home anymore.
Choose your battles.
We can’t do everything. All we can do is our best.
So just pick a night or two that you can prepare for, even if one of those is on the weekend.
Prepare for a weekday meal by getting some stuff ready on the weekend. Cook up some extra meat or get some veggies cut up early.
Sometimes just thinking about what you’re making for that one meal is enough preparation that you can get it done. Try to make sure you have everything you need to make a meal you can throw together.
Whatever you try, start small. As you get used to doing this, it will get easier and you can add one more thing.
Or if it gets busy, just do the best you can.
But when you do prepare a meal, be sure to be as diverse as possible. Make your plate colorful. Those colors mean something. They belong to specific constituents that do good & different things for your body.
Try new things.
Don’t be afraid to try new things.
When I started trying to do this at home, is when I discovered several new veggies I liked, but had never tried before.
I had never taken the time to even learn that I liked them. Trying different things and learning I liked them, gave me a ton more options when it came to creating meals at home.
Some things my husband even liked. Let me tell ya, that wasn’t always easy. He’s a down home meat & potatoes kind of guy.
His family, like mine, used the same foods over and over again without venturing much from the basics.
So this has been a very slow process for us.
Keep it simple
Cook simple meals and use different herbs on them to decide which you like and which you don’t.
Decide what you like and then play with the amounts.
Search the net. You can type the foods/ingredients you have on hand into a search engine and come up with recipes that will come close to working for you. If it’s not exact, improvise or substitute. I’ve done this before for no other reason than ideas.
Try the herbs & spices you like in different dishes and build on that.
There’s a lady I ran across a few years back named Cassy Joy Garcia. She wrote a book called Cook Once, Eat All Week. You can find her at fedandfit.com. She has lots of recipes and step by step videos.
Her thing is to cook and prepare everything during the weekend. Then all you need to do is just put everything together quickly during the week.
I know we eat a lot of leftovers during the week, because I cook big on the weekends for this very reason.
Remember recipes are only suggestions. Start with a recipe and change it to make it yours.
I know we can’t make everything homemade and while this sounds easy in theory it’s much easier said than done. I’m terrible about eating right and getting food out and thawed so I can cook at night.
We don’t eat out, but I’m bad about getting variety in our meals and creating full meals, especially on the weeknights. They tend to be abbreviated, leftover & steamed veggie.
But if we can stick to the basics, what we use that’s not homemade can be kept to a minimum.
For every little bit we can do, it’s that much more we’re doing for our bodies to help stay healthy and keep from getting sick.
