If it is honey you love as a sweetner… make it raw honey. Much of the honey in the market is refined, pasteurised and sometimes even adultered with sugar or jaggery. Do your homework before you buy honey for it has now become an expensive natural ingredient! Raw honey is also an Ayurveda medicine for boosting the immune system.

By Tara Narayan

HONEY, honey! Frankly, I’d rather someone called me honey than sugar, that’s for sure. I don’t why honey is on my mind lately, there’s a bottle of good honey in my kitchen but I hardly use it; there was a time when I liked to soak my poha (of red rice, and with some white in it too) in water till it was soft, then add some coconut or soy or whatever milk you fancy, these days oat milk is in vogue to use by health freaks (I’m not a health freak but sometimes I try very hard and there’s nothing wrong with that you understand, you want to be fighting fit you have to be a health freak in our crazy times when most everyone is bullying everyone).
But to stay with my simple evening meal of a bowl full of dudh-poha, instead of sugar add a teaspoon of honey to sweeten it and life can be a little sweet too in a most agreeable way.
Dudh-poha is a country Gujarati early evening meal and very often fasting food for Mondays, Tuesdays, Saturdays or even de-tox days you single out for yourself. By all means add a handful of seeds, nuts and berries to your dudh-poha and jazz it up. It’s yummylicious and used to be one of my all-time favorite meals. Why now no more, that’s another story, but I’ll get back to dudh-poha one of these days for I’ve got a pile of cranberries drying up in the fridge. Instead of raisins I reckon I can add cranberries in my dudh-poha! Check it out. You may soak the cranberries in a bit water first and add the whole mass in when it’s time to eat.
I won’t tell you about the goodness of cranberries and all berries here because this is for honey. As folk have got wise about the evils of refined sugar consumption they’ve been switching over to expensive honey as a sweetener. I add honey to a raita too and honey and curd is something delicious. For example, chop or grate some bottle gourd or pumpkin and steam cook it. Cool. Spike in a good chaat masala, lemon juice, and curd if you wish it to be a proper raita. Nice, very nice. Bottle gourd and pumpkin are an alternative to the usual grated or diced cucumber or onion-green chili in a raita. Always present a raita simple or done up to dance for at a meal – it’s easy to do and makes a difference to the meal.
Of course, add a teaspoon of honey, raw honey if you can find it. Raw honey has maximum medicinal and nutritional values compared to the pasteurized versions we get in most shops – although there’s a whole slew or organic honeys in the market nowadays. My Australian friend Paris Yves Read in Melbourne introduced me to Medicalmedium.com and I was reading up this bit of raw honey which is the honey as far as fighting fit health is concerned.
Raw honey is said to be the honey of all honeys because of is therapeutic, antibiotic, antifungal, antiviral, antiseptic, anti-aging and anti-cancer properties. For your information raw honey is not filtered, strained, or heated above 115 degrees Fahrenheit (for pasteurization purposes) and provides far more goodness than regular honey in the commercial or organic markets. Raw honey is said to be full of active enzymes, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids so vital for keeping body beautiful on top of the world or something like that.
Raw honey has B-complex and vitamin C as well as minerals calcium, magnesium, potassium, and zinc. It is the food for the immune system, it promotes good digestion, reduces throat irritation; yes, even stabilizes blood pressure, calms nerves, relieves morning sickness, balances blood sugar, heals ulcers, purified blood, wards of colds and flu, soothes sore throats, laryngitis…all this and it is said to “flush the kidneys.”
Well, what’s there not to like raw honey then, it’s also said to be a probiotic and we need this in most of our eating patterns good, bad or ugly. If you have to eat honey eat raw honey to keep your gut bacteria happy and healthy! “Raw honey also functions as an expectorant and is known to benefit respiratory conditions such as bronchitis and asthma…it promotes restorative sleep and can aid in healing and rebuilding the body during the night.” I am quoting largely from this new blog I’ve discovered.
There’s more, raw honey is “hygroscopic, which means it draws all the moisture out of germs which ultimately kills them. This is why raw honey is an excellent first aid cream and can be applied externally, like a natural neosporin, to cuts, abrasions, ashes, and sores to keep the wounds sterile and quicken the healing process.”
You may well consider adding a teaspoon of raw honey to your lemon water/herbal tea every and see the instant energy it provides along with all the other good things. If I can find I will add it to my dudh-poha too for a special treat! You are welcome to check out medicalmidium.com to learn more things about body beautiful and how to stay away from debilitating health problems which never seem to end these days in our idiotic coronavirus times.
I strongly recommend you switch from our adulterated dairy milks to coconut milk, this is easy to do in Goa for mother earth’s sake. Goa doesn’t even have a dairy milk culture, but it does have a coconut milk culture, I would say coconut and coconut milk is superior to dairy milk! Nowadays it is not honest dairy milk we get but pasteurized, toned, double-toned, homogenized, ULT treated and what not and what not. Sorry, milk has become an industrialized produce as far as I am concerned and despite the fact that every morning I go out to pick up packets of cow’s milk courtesy Goa Dairy to make my morning pot of tea….never mind the rest of it.
REGARDING the arrogance of the current Rotary Club of Panaji sponsored CCP campaign of “First Ponje, Let’s Get Panaji 100% Vaccinated’ posted all over on lampposts and trees, I would like to point out that coercing or mandating anything is evil, including vaccination. It’s a personal choice whether I want to get vaccinated or not and to orchestrate life itself to coerce people in vaccination is an utterly despicable thing to do – akin to terrorizing people courtesy any powers-that-be, governmental or non-governmental.
Do you know that the 30 odd vaccines children are put through in the US of A has actually led to something called collateral damage. That means if a certain percentage of children pay the price by way of vaccine damage – it is okay. It’s collateral damage for a larger cause!
Needless to say there’s a growing movement of mothers in the countries of the West against vaccines with just reasons. A lot of educated mothers and parents are asking, Do vaccines really make us healthier people? Does I make for better or worse health in the short and long run? If a vaccines damages my child may I sue the pharma company who did the vaccine (like I can in the case of a drug)? Now from the sound and proof of it coming out our gaguantan mercenary, even killer mainstream drugs-dependent healthcare system, wants governments to mandate vaccines for everyone from birth to death! Like do you deserve to be born or do you deserve to live or do you deserve to die? Macabre world, indeed.
I haven’t seen this video yet but it records the view of 400 people who gave their testimonies at the Joint Committee on Public Health Virtual Hearing in Massachusetts, USA, recently. There are 100s of people opposing bills regarding mandating vaccines and they are people who have been directly affected by vaccine injuries to their children. A whole lot of sad stories here submitted by way of written testimony fiercely oppose the mandating of any vaccine schedule for children or adults. Surely there are better ways to reap better health? There are.
Hey, in any case who gets to decide what percent of collateral damage is permissible? The government of the day or we, the people? I wish we in India would be a little more wiser about all this with healthcare professionals with courage enough to protest against any kind of bullying or coercion when it comes to such matters as vaccination progroms! Never mind all the tall talk of herd immunity, which is nonsensical for people die every day of chronic conditions of degenerative ill-health and how many of these are covid-19 patients nobody really knows, at least not in India where it is getting harder to sieve truth from lies.