Black cumin seeds or common jeera – one of the spice seeds recommended as useful to boost immunity during coronavirus times! But here’s a confusion because there’re several kinds of cumin seeds ranging from our familiar jeera as also a darker, smaller version called kala jeera (Bunium bulbocastanum). Cumin, black cumin, black onion seeds (kalonji), black sesame, even lovely fennel fat and slender, they’re all seeds of herbal plants in Mother Earth’s medicinal cupboard. Study up on their properties first before self-diagnosing yourself of whatever ails you! Kalonji (Nigella sativa plant seeds) are sometimes referred to as black cumin too, but they’re just the black seeds of a plant of the buttercup family of flowering plan (in Persian kalonji is “shonaiz” and used for flavoring many recipes).

ACTUALLY, my dears, these days of corona virus fears I’ve been trying to keep track of the life and times of mesmerizing Indian American personality Dr V A Shiva Ayyadurai! He’s currently campaigning for an American Senate seat from Massachusetts in US of A and I hope he wins. I’ve been discovering his books all that he’s been doing as inventor of Email, scientist, innovator, entrepreneur extraordinary, calls himself a systems biology analyst or some such thing.
Alas, I haven’t yet been able to download his books but he’s got several books amongst which are Systems Health’,Your Body, Your System’ and The Science of Everything’ and several more. It’s one of his videos which caught my attention where he waxes lyrical over black cumin seeds and their black oil (a super food in health food stores abroad)! Ayyadurai has apparently studied and researched the powerful medicinal plants of Ayurveda and Siddha medicine (which his grandmother practiced in Tamilnadu) and every now and again has been enlightening the people of USA in his books, videos, talks, election campaigning, etc. With Covid-19 on all minds amongst several things I’m taken up by his prescription of black cumin seeds being an awesome nutrient for immune health. At first I couldn’t make out which black cumin he was referring to and got thoroughly confused. What he is referring to is “seeragam” or jeera, not to be confused with caraway seeds. We know jeera is widely used in Indian cuisines, I mean there’s no Indian cuisine without jeera! DID you know that jeera or cuminum cyminum is related to the parsley family and offers lots of medicinal properties? I mean let thy food by thy medicine, right? Something we’ve lost track of in today’s mod con times. Jeera or cumin seeds are native to Egypt, India, Middle East, China, Mediterranean countries and hey, cumin was used as one of the ingredients to mummify the kings of ancient Egypt – archeologists discovered a bottle of cumin seeds in the tomb of King Tutankhamen; in ancient Rome the spice was seen as symbol of greed and status. There are several relatives of the humble cumin but Ayyadurai’s video talk endorses “seeragam” or jeera as rich in iron, an important component of hemoglobin, it helps in the transportation of oxygen to lungs and body, produces energy, regulates metabolism, leads to healthy immune system, is anti-carcinogenic, scavenges free radicals, enhances detoxification, etc, etc. All this including being anti-virus, anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory. What more do you need. I learned long ago that in most traditional Tamilian homes down south India they start the day by drinking hot jeera water or water in which jeera has been boiled. Probably, Siddha medicine recommends it, Siddha is the oldest system of herbal medicine in India and worth reading up about. Somewhere I read during my reading up that cumin was used as currency for priests. All this and much more, I suggest you go look up Dr Shiva Ayyadurai. His other books --The Science of Everything,’ Your System, Your Life,’GMOs, The White Man’s Burden,’ The Connection,’Big Pharma is the Disease, We Are the Cure, ’ `Be Happy, Be You’ and more.
I LIKE what he says about life not being about perfection but about commitment to a goal and making constant adjustments while achieving the goal. Having a goal is important. He also says the nutritive value of food is defined by the type and proportion of bioactive compounds present in it. Bioactive compounds are polyphenols, flavonoids, saponins, carotenoids, anthocyanins, vitamins, essential oils, enzymes and so on and so forth. It follows that if our earth is contaminated, our food is contaminated, our water is contaminated, our nutrient levels for fighting fit health is compromised as we see all around us today.
Also, our body’s functioning is dependent basically along an engineering system and it’s primarily about what we put in our mouth, its digestion, transportation, conversion, and storage. Storage causes maximum problems or so I understand so far. A lot of what Ayyadurai writes about goes over my head but this much is clear, that in Ayurveda transportation is to do with vata, conversion to pitta and storage to kapha. It’s worth studying Ayurveda which is a far more a complete science of medicine and health. Mainstream Allopathy has its uses but it’s a reductionist science (even our incomparable De BM Hegde says this!) and so incomplete in so much that it doesn’t perceive a sick human being in totality but as in the story of blind men touching an elephant and describing different body parts…a medical science which sees biology in specialized parts should be more or less obsolete now! What kind of a system each one of us is depends on our inputs of food, supplements, exercise.
Clearly, Allopathy must find a meeting ground with our ancient medicine systems and not skeptically. In this sense Ayurveda is not a reductionist science of medicine but a far more pragmatic science dealing as much with prevention as curing diseases which ail us. All this and much more courtesy this Dr Shiva Ayyadurai. Do you know that nitric oxide (the happiness alchemy) production is directly related to cardio-vascular health? Or that arginine alone can increase nitric oxide concentration….
WELL, if you’re a student of medicine you’ll make the connections better than me. Do you know that we have only 20,000 genes, same as worms? Apparently genes can also turn on and off, go check it out and revert to me here by sending me a letter. Says Ayyadurai, “My love for biology made me look at human cells and chemical reactions…and make models for my PhD work.”
This is to say that Dr Shiva Ayyadurai (says he is the personification of the American dream) has a company called CytoSolve whereby he can map a system to discover cures for major diseases from pancreatic cancer to Alzheimer’s. Hey, one can skip all the torture of animal and human testing in laboratories which goes on with mega funding for an oftentimes obsolete “fake science!” He has founded a Center for Integrative Systems and is leading a new American Revolution if he comes to power…yes, his call for action is commitment to “truth, freedom and health,”– because if we don’t know the truth, there can be no freedom and if there is no freedom, no health either. That at least makes perfect sense to me.
Think about it and our troubled times of today, my dears. Once again my advice is you catch up with this man, I don’t mind confessing I’m totally fida over him because he is still newly discovered! You may get in touch with him via his VA Shiva.com blog. On that note it’s avjo, poite verem, selamat datang, au revoir, arrivediccei and vachun yetta here for now.

— Mme Butterfly