While all fruits and vegetables are very good and healthy for you (for many reasons), most of our foods are not really medicinal-quality. Your doctor may recommend that you eat more legumes or meats to increase your protein or improve an iron deficiency, but these are dietary changes intended to improve your basic nutrition. Apples won't keep the doctor away when you are truly ill but you can sometimes treat small illnesses and symptoms with food. Here are a few examples.
Honey is a fantastic natural anti-septic and anti-bacterial medicine. Bees have devoted 100 million years to refining how they make honey and it is not only a great source of energy for both bees and humans it is a wonderful topical salve that helps wounds heal quickly and cleanly. Some hospitals even use honey to fight antibiotic-resistant infections when regular medicines fail.
Dark honeys have the strongest medicinal benefits. The best honeys to use as oral antibiotics are Manuka honey from New Zealand and Buckwheat honey from Illinois. And there are many other benefits we derive from honey.
Bitter melon Tea is a traditional oriental medicinal tea but it has been shown to reduce blood sugar in people with Type II diabetes. Some diabetic medicines are very harsh on the digestive tract. Bitter melon tea is not quite so harsh.
The tea does have a strong flavor and may require some getting used to but it works very well according to scientific research. Some doctors recommend the use of bittermelon tea to supplement a low carbohydrate diet to help manage blood sugar.
Chicken Soup is just what the doctor thinks you should eat when you have a cold or the flu. Research has shown that chicken soup has strong anti-viral properties and it helps our bodies recover from colds and flus much better than most medicines.
In fact, when you buy cold and flu medicine over the counter at the drug store you are only buying medicines that treat the symptoms of your colds and flus. You are not really treating the viruses that make you sick. Your bodies must still defeat those viruses on their own, but chicken soup's anti-viral properties help shorten the time most people are ill.
There are indeed many foods that we can use as medicines. I consult the WebMD site when I am not sure about the safety of such foods because some of them may cause allergic reactions or, if taken in too large a dose, may be toxic.
