Hands on herbs colour/b:Incredibly Sexy colour
28/3/08
11:22
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Helpful herbs for health and beauty
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Horrible griping pains? Try fennel tea. It’s so mild that Italian mammas give it to their colicky babies, but it’s highly effective for griping pains and wind, especially drunk just after a meal. You can get it as tea bags, or you can try this wonderfully warming brew suggested by the nineteenthcentury German herbalist, Abbe Kneipp: ‘A spoonful of fennel seed cooked in a cup of milk for five to ten minutes… and drunk as hot as possible.’
At the next consultation, Sue goes through the diary. ‘You can often spot the problem straight away,’ she says. ‘Saccharin is a massive trigger – those dreadful diet foods. So are artificial flavourings and colourings. Monosodium glutamate is one of the worst, omnipresent in our Western diet – packet soups, burgers, crisps. Pork – bacon, salami, pate, sausages and pies. In my experience, though, wheat and dairy products are seldom the problem.’ Once trigger foods are avoided, Sue finds problems often clear up fast. Only then does she prescribe herbs to deal with the distressing symptoms IBS brings in its wake.
Slippery elm is the herb she’s most likely to prescribe – one of the most useful herbs English colonists learned about from North American Indians. The inner bark of the elm tree is loaded with mucilage, a smooth slippery substance that coats the walls of the intestines to soothe, protect and heal them. It’s nourishing too, and will help clear up diarrhoea. Buy it in pill form or as a powder, and prepare it according to the maker’s directions.
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