Spice Up Your Plate for Health-Recent Highlights on Food as Medicine!

The top
holistic, wellness, nutrition, nutrigenomics, and integrative medicine health
news for July is posted on my homepage.

Some of
the highlights include:

Quinoa- is
it okay for celiacs?

Why
watermelon has health uses beyond its childhood game of spitting seeds

Can coffee
be used for boosting athletic performance?

Junk food
nation ramifications

Vitamin D
updates

Fish oil
and brain health- another study

Updates in
mammography and pelvic screenings for women

How air
pollution hurts the brain and how scientists are trying to get the message out

How your
electronic device could be making you break out in a rash

Updates on
medications including:

How
increased cardiovascular risk is linked to stimulants in children and
anti-inflammatory drug use in women

How
sperm health is affected by statin drug use in men

Now, let’s
move on to more exciting health news on powerful, natural, and tasty solutions to some common ailments.
Below are additional news updates from this month on how spices and herbs can
help keep you healthy.

Ginger for PMS

A clinical,
randomized, double-blinded trial of 70 participants sought to determine if
ginger capsules taken twice daily would assist with women suffering from PMS if
taken 7 days prior to and 3 days after menstruation for three cycles. At the start of the trial there were no
differences between the mean scores of PMS symptoms in the two groups, but
after 1, 2, and 3 months of treatment, the ginger imbibers fared significantly
better! (3)

Ginger for Migraines TOO

According
to another trial of 100 participants, a 250-mg dose of powdered ginger can be
just as effective as the medication sumatriptan in decreasing the severity of
acute migraines, according to a new study of 100 adult migraine patients. (4, 5)

Cinnamon Oil to Combat Food Borne
Illness

According to MedicalXpress.com:

Recent
findings published in Food Control
journal online suggest Cinnamomum cassia oil can work effectively as a natural
antibacterial agent in the food industry. The study results add to a body of
knowledge that will help improve food safety and reduce or eliminate cases of food
poisoning and related deaths. (6, 7)

Garlic Cures Warts in Study

Greenmedinfo.com,
an amazing website for science-based evidence in integrative medicine recently
report on a clinical study published in the International Journal of Dermatology. The author, Sayer Ji,
reports on its findings that compared garlic to chloroform: methanol (control
group), which showed no improvement in comparison to herb power! (8)

• Water extract of garlic: “[F]ive
  cases received the aqueous garlic extract for 30-40 days, which
  resulted only in the disappearance of small warts and partial improvement
  of larger warts. Treatment with the aqueous extract of garlic needed a
  period of more than 2 months to achieve a partial recovery in the
  patients.”

• Fat-soluble extract of garlic:
  “Twenty-three patients with 2-96 warts, and nine patients with 1-2
  corns were treated by applying the lipid extract. In this group, complete recovery was observed in all
  cases with warts after 1-2 weeks of treatment (Fig. 1).
  Seven out of nine patients with corn(s) showed complete recovery (Fig. 2)
  while two cases showed marked improvement close to full recovery with no
  further improvement on continuation of treatment. The period for the
  treatment of corn(s) in this group was between 10 and 20 days.”
  (8)

If you’d
like to learn more, please visit my webpage and post some comments. On my blog
I also include a highlight on a very frugal and tasty solution to
mitigate the negative impact of toxic exposure on health.

Please share your comments or news that impacted you this month below. I’d love to
hear how your empowering yourself with wellness, nutrition, and natural
medicine information!

For
references, please see my website.