Antidepressants Blog

Fresh herbs can be used wherever dry herbs are called for in a recipe, and in most cases the flavour is vastly superior. Drying any plant removes a lot of its vitality, oils and vitamins; but if you wish to use chives in mid-winter, you must either dry or freeze the fresh herbs to maintain a continuous supply.

Very high quality dried herbs are now packaged in Australia. One firm is Somerset Cottage, the family business of Rosemary Hemphill, the author of Spice and Savour and Fragrance and Flavour. In general, when dried herbs are called for in a recipe and you wish to substitute fresh herbs, use 3 times the quantity listed.

You can dry your own herbs in many different ways. The best and easiest way for the home gardener is to lay out the fresh-cut leaves or flowers on screens made by stretching those left-over ends of nylon net or terylene curtaining (or even clean hessian) over one or two old picture-frames. Tack the material around the outer edge, and put the frames where air can circulate under as well as over the drying herbs. A dry shelf in the laundry (if it’s not too sunny), or in a storeroom, or even on top of that old cupboard in the garage (not where your car exhaust fumes are going to hit the tray), are all good places to dry the herbs. Never dry them in the sun; you will lose almost all their goodness.

You can also dry herbs tied in small bunches hung head downwards from tacks along the edge of a shelf, or from brackets, or underneath overhead cupboards in your kitchen. I often have bunches of lavender or the scented geraniums drying like this hung from the black iron brackets of my herb shelf in the kitchen. This way you can get some of the perfume while they are drying. Never hang them in a spot where steam or condensation will get to them.

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Valeriana officinalis VERBENACEAE

An unassuming,, small herb, valerian gives very little outward evidence of the value it has always had in herbal therapy. You might pass it by altogether and not comment on its tufts of droopy light-green leaves. Even the flower stems are not really attractive, looking anaemic and skinny, with a pale head of creamy pink tiny blooms in the late spring.

Valerian has two important qualities: the strong sedative powers in its roots; and its ability to stir up and increase phosphorus activity in the soil around it, and provide rich mineral content for the compost bin.

The herb has been known and used for thousands of years. Sedative plants are rare amongst common herbs, and if your diet is right and you live as naturally as possible, if you are happy in your work or in the home and life is not too frustrating, you should never need a sleeping draught made from valerian root. However, illness involving severe pain, an accident, or any crisis that keeps you worried or tense so that sleep will not come night after night: all these depleting circumstances can find you in dire need of a safe, natural sedative like valerian.

Valerian grows on banks and near stone if possible, and Chaucer called one variety “Setewale”, wryly commenting on its rather unpleasant odour and taste. Nature has put out her warning signals here, so don’t use this herb lightly. Unlike sleeping pills and many synthetic drugs, valerian will cause neither addiction nor side effects, and it does not have narcotic properties. There is no immediate effect—you do not fall asleep five minutes after the first dose; it has a slower far-reaching action, promoting healthy nerves that do not feel the slings and arrows so much. Once again, natural medicine reaches not only the symptoms but the cause of the bodily discomfort, the jangled nerve centres sending frantic, anxious signals instead of calm relaxed ones.

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Parsley can be very slow to germinate, and no doubt much of its reputation of being hard to grow stems from this. It can take anywhere from five days to eight weeks, and must be kept moist all the time. An old English phrase says it goes nine times to the Devil and back before it germinates; and he likes it so much he keeps some of it. I have always found it much easier than its reputation suggests, if a good potting mixture is used in the seed box. This gives the shoot no hard crust of soil or sand to force its way through, and my parsley seedlings have never taken longer than 14 days. Soaking the seed in warm water first is also recommended before planting, but I have found a simple way to get the same effect. Sow your parsley seed on soil that has been soaked with water, cover with about i inch of seed-box mixture, then place the box out in the hottest sunny spot with a sheet of clear polythene plastic over the top in which a few air holes have been cut. Leave the box out all day, and your parsley seed should by nightfall have got the message. Next day and afterwards, just give it the usual seed-box care.

Ample nitrogen is needed for parsley to produce abundant leaves, so keep the compost content of your soil very high, with any animal manures you can lay your hands on, too. It will grow well in a trough or pot, and unit-dwellers will find it a herb they can have success with: a sunny or partially shaded balcony suits it very well.

The leaves dry easily in a luke-warm oven. Rub them through your hands to crumble them when dry, and store for convenience near your food preparation area in the kitchen, to remind you to use parsley with a liberal hand.

So many recipes abound where parsley is used that here I will give you only a tasty seventeenth-century one.

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Garden, or sweet fennel, is a perennial, a tall rampant-growing plant some 3 to 4 feet in height. It closely resembles dill in appearance, and the two should never be sown close together; they will cross-pollinate and their flavours intermingle and deteriorate. Fennel is best planted on its own, in calcium-rich soil, away from the formal herb beds, in a spot where its gangling leggy growth will not overpower other plants, and with space all around it, not cramped by shrubs or trees. It thrives best in rather rocky, sandy soils, being undemanding of extra feeding. Overfeeding can make the herb more susceptible to aphis attack, and to young snails, which find shelter in the leaf stem junctions. Plentiful water in the early stages is essential. After this period, ordinary watering should suffice. The plant may need staking or tying if exposed to strong winds.

Harvest the seeds when they turn from green and plump to brown and dry, and save them for pickles, chutneys and flavouring borsch soup. You can also do as our grandparents did; chew fennel seed to allay hunger pangs. The seeds were often carried to church and prayer-meetings; and when little Willie’s stomach started to rumble during the sermon, fennel seeds were an unobtrusive way of damping down his need for Sunday dinner. So gain a twofold benefit from fennel: if you want to slim, chew some of the seeds not with but instead of lunch.

Leaves of fennel are sometimes placed on the bottom of the pan when baking bread in Italy. A few seeds sprinkled on the top of pastries or bread rolls before cooking give a delicate aniseed flavour and a delectable aroma.

A traditional recipe for fennel is to use it with any oily fish, as in the following recipe. Fennel grows naturally near the seashore round the Mediterranean, once again showing Nature’s provision for counteracting the disadvantages of one food by ensuring its opposite or complementary ingredient is near by.

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Sanguisorba minor ROSACEAE

This plant I call the “fountain herb”, because it grows just like the fountains on those old bird-baths; the outside leaves lie down towards the ground and the new leaves spring upright in the middle. It is a perennial, and stays green and fresh all winter, a boon to the herb gardener.

If you are a vegetarian and like your salads all the year round, plant salad burnet. Its cool cucumber flavour and delicate green leaves add a fillip to those winter greens when other salad vegetables and fruit are not so plentiful. You will be doing your health a favour, too, for burnet, like borage, is a general blood purifier and tonic, with a cooling relaxing effect. It helps to reduce the indigestibility of cucumber, and is often used with or instead of this vegetable for people with digestive troubles. The chopped leaves can be added to herb vinegars too.

The plant grows easily from seed, and will self-sow if in the right conditions. It is quite a small, compact herb, some 12 to 15 inches high, in a tidy little rosette, and would be very suitable for a window box or small pot, and ideal for home-unit dwellers who want to grow a few herbs in a limited space. Pull off the old leaves from underneath if you wish to keep it tidy for pot cultivation; but if it is in the open garden the old leaves will just decompose happily out of sight under the fountain of new leaves.

The flowers are not impressive: long slender stems with a tight knot of tiny green florets at the tip. Keep these nipped off unless you want seed to start off new plants; the flavour of the leaves is better if the plant is not allowed to flower.

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During winter, use a humidifier or vaporizer to raise the humidify inside your home. Low humidity dries out the mucosa lining nasal passages and increases risk of catching a cold or other upper respiratory tract infection. Being in an air conditioned room in summer also exposes one to low humidity with a similar effect on the nasal membranes.

Steeping with the mouth open also permits membrane linings to dry out and become more susceptible to viral invasion. Persons with a clogged Eustachian tube, or with sinus problems, are also more susceptible.

A person with the flu should stay home from work. If possible, that person should be restricted to one bathroom and should use only his or her own towel and washcloth. As far as possible, a cold or flu sufferer should be isolated in his or her own room and other family members should stay out. Only disposable tissues should be used.

It’s safest to avoid contact with anyone who has had a cold or flu for a week after the symptoms first appeared. However, a cold becomes contagious approximately twenty-four hours before symptoms appear.

Especially if you live in a small town or community, travel exposes you to new virus strains which can increase your risk of a cold or flu. If you live in a large city, where travelers are frequently importing new virus strains, risk of exposure to a new virus strain through travel is diminished.

Be careful about flying if you have a cold and are susceptible to ear infections. If you have a cold and fly, the plane’s descent may aggravate ear pressure. A sharp pain, or a discharge from the ear on landing, may indicate a middle ear infection or even a perforated eardrum. In either case, medical treatment is required.

Otherwise, ear infections can usually be prevented by blowing the nose gently and steadily. Sniffling is another common cause of ear infection, especially in children.

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Recent research suggests that such time-honored remedies as a cup of lemon tea or a bowl of chicken or onion soup may be safer and more effective than many of today’s OTC cold medications. These hot beverages, it has been discovered, raise the throat temperature thereby inhibiting viral replication. Furthermore, acid drinks, such as lemon tea or tomato juice, create an acid environment in which the virus cannot exist.

Anyone with a cold or flu should try to drink eight to ten glasses of non-alcoholic liquid during the course of each day. Fluid replacement is especially important during fever when significant loss of body fluids can occur. Among the best drinks are warm, bland soups including onion soup and miso broth, both fruit and vegetable juices— including unsweetened orange, grapefruit, apple or grape juice and also carrot and tomato juice—and carob drinks and teas. Although they contain caffeine, an occasional cup of black or green tea can contribute to the patient’s feeling of wellbeing. Try to drink at least half a glass of water or other liquid every half hour.

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Preliminary studies have suggested that moderate amounts of vitamin E (in the range of 200 1U per day) assist phagocytes in destroying pathogenic invaders In contrast, a deficiency of vitamin E has been found to diminish antibody production and to inhibit lymphocyte proliferation in response to a non-self antigen.

Vitamin E is an antioxidant, meaning it has a powerful capacity to neutralize free radicals (stray electrons which can reactively damage the genetic nucleus of body cells). Several studies have shown that in enhancing immunocompetence, vitamin E works synergistically with other antioxidants such as vitamin C and the mineral selenium.

It has also been observed that megadoses of vitamin E have had the opposite effect. They have inhibited immunocompetence and in some cases, they have increased Wood pressure. For this reason, many nutritionists suggest a daily maintenance dose of 100 IU of vitamin E during the cold season. During a cold, this can be increased to 200 IU, returning to the 100 IU dosage some two weeks later. It has also been suggested that during a cold, older people could take up to 400 IU per day because of poorer absorption potential. This amount should not be maintained for more than 14 days.

It is important to be certain that you are taking vitamin E only in the form of d-alpha or d-alpha tocopherol. Other varieties such as beta, delta or gamma tocopherol offer fewer benefits. For best absorption, the acetate form of alpha tocopherol is often preferred.

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Because the respiratory tract is a series of cavities (sinuses, lungs etc.), connected by air passages, viruses can spread from the nose to the sinuses and throat and into the middle ear trachea, larynx, bronchial tubes and lungs. Secondary infections spreading to these locations can cause complications, some quite serious.

This is inflammation of the pharynx, that portion of the throat above the larynx. Pharyngitis can be caused by either a virus or bacteria. Strep throat, a bacterial infection, is the most common and dangerous form of pharyngitis. Invariably, strep throat is accompanied by a high fever and an excruciatingly painful sore throat. Difficulty may be experienced in breathing, swallowing and speaking and the throat is red and raw. Although strep throat is not particularly common, it can lead to kidney disease, rheumatic heart disease or rheumatic fever. It can be positively diagnosed only by a two-day throat culture taken by a physician. Strep throat responds fairly readily to antibiotics.

Fortunately, most sore throats are not due to strep throat. Simply sore throat can be treated at home by resting the throat with a liquid diet, using slippery elm lozenges and gargling with salt water to relieve throat distress.

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When pitted against cold or flu viruses, the immune system eventually always wins. But the speed with which a person’s immune system can wipe out a cold or flu is largely governed by his or her immunocompetence. In viral infections, immunocompetence focuses on the speed at which specialized white cells can manufacture antibodies and other virus-fighting immune system components.

In a person with low immunocompetence, a cold may linger on for ten to fourteen days before the immune system can finally muster sufficient antibodies to destroy it.

In a person with average immunocompetence, a cold typically lasts about seven days. A person with moderately high immunocompetence may be rid of a cold in only four days.

But a person with optimal, peak immunocompetence can often recover from a cold completely within twenty-four hours.

New research is showing that many of the therapies which have been suggested in the past, such as taking vitamin C or zinc gluconate lozenges, are effective boosters of immunocompetence.

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