Category Archives: Healthy Living

Mother’s milk for eye and ear infections

Healthy Living, Intentional Spending

Yesterday morning, baby Yirmiyahu woke up with an eye infection – one eye was sealed shut with dried gunk.  He had this several weeks ago as well, and both times I treated it easily, naturally and frugally.

The remedy for an eye infection in a baby is so easy that it’s almost not worth mentioning, except not everyone is aware of this!  You simply put a few drops of mother’s milk in his open eye.  For the first eye infection he had, I had to do this several times, but yesterday just one time was enough to totally clear up the infection.  This works because breast milk has an antibody in it called immunoglobulin A that limits the growth of the bacteria.

Breast milk is very useful in treating the small infections that babies get – you can use it for stuffy noses and ear infections, in addition to eye infections.  (Some use it for cuts and scrapes, but I’ve never done this.)  The approach is the same for all of these – just put some drops of milk in a few times a day, until it clears up.  It doesn’t sting, smell bad, or necessitate a trip to the store to buy a bottle of medicinal drops – you just need to be a nursing mother and voila! – with a few seconds you can easily help your baby feel better.

Avivah

Nursing baby with Down syndrome – not easy but important

Healthy Living, Trisomy 21
Yirmiyahu – (5 wks old)

When Yirmiyahu was born, I wasn’t able to nurse him right away – we were rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, then the nurses kept him in the nursery for hours until I finally saw him.  At that point, he was in the deep sleep that newborns go into a couple of hours after birth, and nothing could induce him to wake up.

That was before that we realized there were medical issues or Down syndrome; then he was transferred to the NICU. For the first week he was there, he was on a feeding tube.  When they told me he was strong enough to start nursing, it was very slow.  Initially he couldn’t get latched on, then once he could latch on, he couldn’t stay latched on for more than a second.  It was very challenging to teach him to latch on and I had to do it again, and again, and again (at five weeks old, he’s getting the hang of it but doesn’t latch on for more than a minute and never does it without my help, so he still needs a lot of assistance with this).

I continued pumping (he had gotten my milk from the first day via the feeding tube) and hoping that he’d get strong enough to nurse fully, but it was very discouraging.  He was such an easy baby, hardly crying at all – the exceptions were when he got a blood test and had a bris, and even then he stopped crying as soon as it was finished.  So you can imagine how hard it was when he would scream and scream as if he were in pain every time I tried to nurse him.

After three weeks, I contacted a local La Leche League leader for help.  I’ve nursed nine babies before this and never needed the assistance of a lactation consultant, but this was a different situation.  Since he was getting most of his nutritive needs via a bottle, I was concerned that he’d have a hard time transitioning to just nursing since the way a baby uses his mouth when nursing or when drinking from a bottle is so different.  I specifically asked about the SNS, supplemental nursing system.  She was eager to help until she heard that he had Down syndrome – then she told me that she didn’t have experience with that and gave me the number of a friend of hers who successfully nursed her daughter (who had DS) for two years.  But I wasn’t interested in traveling to yet another city to meet with her.

Anyway, the LLL leader met me on her way out of the city for Shabbos, and gave me the scaled down equivalent of an SNS – a feeding tube.  I told her I could work out how to use it with the help of the internet, and dh got busy rigging a makeshift SNS system for me (my husband is very good at finding creative solutions!).  When I tried to use that, I came very close to crying or screaming with frustration.  I ended up flinging it off and later put it away in the kitchen cabinet, where it’s never emerged from since.  🙂

A lot of time was being taken up every day with the feeding process: I’d nurse him, pump, then give him a bottle so he’d actually be full.  It was very tiring and time consuming, so much so that it felt close to a full time job sometimes.  At one point, a good friend responded to my exhaustion and told me I wouldn’t be any less of a mother if I just gave him formula. And she’s right, I wouldn’t be.  Breastfeeding isn’t what makes you a good mother; how you parent does.

But even though it was so demanding, I felt like this was something I had to do for him.  Babies with Trisomy 21 have weak facial muscles and this is a big part of why breastfeeding can be so challenging – they often lack the oral strength for nursing (his weak muscle tone in his tongue was responsible for his episodes of apnea when he was in the NICU).  Most babies with T21 develop tongue protrusion, and this practice is encouraged by bottle feeding.  That’s not something I want to encourage.  Nursing can help prevent this from becoming an issue – an excellent article that I read by a well-known speech therapist detailed how some of the features associated with Down syndrome are part of a cascade of consequences that begins with bottle feeding.  It’s called The Oral Motor Myths of Down Syndrome.   Breastfeeding is an oral workout for a baby, since it works the facial muscles, including the tongue.  So I think of every nursing session as oral motor therapy for him.

Nutritionally Yirmiyahu needs the qualities of mother’s milk since his health was compromised when he was born, and also because it’s typical of those with T21 that they have weaker immune systems.  Studies have also shown that breastfed infants have IQs that average 5 – 10 points higher than bottle fed babies.  I’ve never thought of this as a big deal with neurotypical children, but it’s worth the short term discomfort and pressure for me in order to give Yirmiyahu this long term benefit; there’s a lot I can’t control or change about him having Down syndrome but this is something that I can do.

I had pressure from his doctors to stop nursing him and give him formula.  This was because his weight didn’t go up for the first few days after he came home from the hospital.  I wasn’t worried, since I saw he had plenty of wet and dirty diapers, but they were concerned.  But the numbers on the scale were more important than my opinion in this case.  It would have been so, so easy to quit. It’s challenging to be working so hard at something and then to be told that your baby is better off without your efforts.

Yirmiyahu (5 wks)

I’m not yet at the stage of fully nursing; I’m still pumping for about fifty percent of feedings.  When I nurse him, it takes a long, long time, and often he’s still hungry forty five minutes later; in those cases, we give him a bottle afterward.  But we’re getting there and I’m confident that we’ll make the transition to full nursing.  Most mothers with babies who have T21 don’t nurse them, because the experience can be so daunting.  I totally understand them!  The main thing that helped me was remembering why I felt this was important, keeping my eye on my goal.  And the other aspect of this was not giving up.   Sometimes you have to keep on keeping on when you have tough situations to get through, and this is no exception.  Persistence, persistence, persistence!

Avivah

Craniosacral work for baby, Mozart for brain development

Healthy Living, Trisomy 21

Today I spent the first part of my day in Tzfat, where I had two appointments.  Since I already had one appointment scheduled in the city, I thought it would be good to maximize my time in the area and found a craniosacral therapist there to treat the baby, so that was my second appointment.

I think that craniosacral therapy is valuable, particularly for a newborn who has recently had to fit through the birth canal and probably experienced some kind of pressure on the skull that causes misalignment.  There are a number of potential issues that can be positively impacted by doing craniosacral adjustments, including colic, difficulty in sleeping or feeding, and birth trauma.  The main downside of this therapy is that it’s not something that is covered by health insurance, but then again, it seems that most of what I find most valuable relating to health care isn’t!

Another thing I had wanted to do this morning was to meet up with someone in the area giving away classical music cassettes.  I’ve been doing hours of research on Down syndrome every day beginning when the baby was two days old, and one thing that I came across was the importance of music therapy in stimulating the brain.  Mozart and Bach were particularly recommended.

I started looking into purchasing some classical music (you should see the list of things I think would be valuable to buy for this baby!) but was delighted to see a posting a short time later by someone in Tzfat giving away lots of classical cassettes.  A neighbor had given me a cd/cassette player around Pesach time, so I have a way to play the cassettes.  I emailed to ask if she had any Mozart or Bach, and sure enough, she did!  I told her why I wanted them and she very generously put aside 11 cassettes for me, 6 Mozart and 5 Bach!  That was such an amazing thing!  I’m looking forward to using them next week after Tisha B’Av.

And on a different note, traveling to Tzfat made me once again appreciative that the baby was in the NICU in Nahariya rather than the Tzfat hospital that I was in labor at.  The ride there is along a winding road and so nauseating that I don’t know how I would have managed it every day.  I took dd11 and ds10 with me today, thinking they would enjoy walking around the Old City of Tzfat while I was taking care of my appointments.  Poor ds10 tends to get carsick, and threw up on the way there and the way back.  We were all very happy to get home.  🙂

Avivah

Supplements for female hair restoration

Healthy Living

About eight weeks ago, one of my daughters started experiencing sudden and dramatic hair loss.  After a few days she mentioned it to me so I got her started on some vitamins; I thought it might be a seasonal change or something about the water here, but I wasn’t concerned.  When it was continuing a few days after that, I took a look.  As soon as I saw her scalp, I got a sick feeling in my stomach because the loss was much more visible than I was expecting to see – in a week and a half she had lost half of her hair – and I immediately made an appointment with a naturopath.

The naturopath made some suggestions for dietary adjustments (not really different from how we were already eating), some suggestions for supplements (that I had already given dd), and some suggestions for relaxation.  Hair loss like this is generally connected to stress, and when we got home from our appointment I gave dd some of my relaxation cds to listen to at night.  I also got busy online doing more research and looking for answers because I wasn’t confident that the suggestions we received were enough, since I had already been implementing prior to the appointment and the hair loss hadn’t slowed down.

I also took dd to the pediatrician, who didn’t bother looking at her scalp and told her she shouldn’t feel stressed.  Then she chastised her for not speaking Hebrew more fluently (though she didn’t even hear her say anything – she only heard me ask dd if she understood a medical term that was being used and that dd said no) and started lecturing her about needing to read books in Hebrew to her younger siblings to improve her Hebrew.  Dd and I afterwards were like, was that supposed to be helpful?  Whatever.  All I needed from her was a recommendation for blood work so we smiled and left once we had that.  It’s a good thing I wasn’t relying on her help to resolve the situation, because I would have been shopping for wigs given another couple of weeks of things continuing as they were.

Despite our efforts, the hair loss got worse before it got better.  Dd had a great attitude about it and we tried to stay positive and optimistic that her hair would start growing back soon.  Dd religiously followed the protocol given to her by the naturopath, along with my additions, and after about a month from when her hair first started falling out,there was a visible change.  One day she told me, “Mommy, look at my hairline – all these are new hairs!”  All over her head she had new hairs filling in where the scalp had been visible before.  When she said that I got a huge lump in my throat and almost started crying; I had been really worried.  It was then that I told her I had been afraid she was going to lose all of her hair, and she shared that she had been worried about the same thing.

Obviously I’m not a doctor and not making promises that what worked for us will work for anyone else, but I’ll share what we did.  (Those with an asterisk in front were recommended by the naturopath.)

  • vitamin D – 2000 IU
  • *vitamin C – 1-2000 mg
  • *vitamin B complex – 500 mg
  • *vitamin B12 – 1200 mg
  • *zinc – 60 mg x 2 daily
  • cod liver oil – 1 teaspoon
  • homeopathic cell salts – silica 6x, 4 pills several times a day
  • liquid activated silicon – 10 drops

There were some other things I suggested dd do, like scalp massage, hanging upside down for a few minutes in the evening to stimulate blood flow to the scalp and the use of rosemary oil but she didn’t do any of those.

After seeing dd’s hair growing back, the naturopath told me that in situations like this, it’s not called hair loss but alopecia.  I’m really glad I didn’t know that beforehand, because I know only enough about alopecia that hearing the term would have worried me even more.  Thankfully this is now a situation that has been resolved!

Avivah

Cellular memory – emotional imprinting on unborn child

Healthy Living, pregnancy

Several weeks ago I met with the midwife I was planning to have at my birth, and we we had a long and fascinating conversation.  One of the things that I appreciated about when taking my detailed personal birthing history was how insightful her questions were.  For example, when I detailed one very long and difficult birth in which the baby was asynclitic, she told me it sounded like a child who wasn’t ready to be born.  And then she asked me about that child’s personality and way of dealing currently with new situations, and how it correlates (strong correlation).  It was fascinating, and very much in line with my belief that every unborn child is imprinted at a deep level with the emotions his mother experiences during her pregnancy.

When I recently took one of my children for an appointment for reflexology, a meditation was played aloud during the session and the practitioner told me I would probably benefit by letting myself follow along with it, too.  I told her that I already do regular meditations and surprised, she asked why.  I answered that I have so many stresses in my life right now that I feel I have to make a conscious effort to stay emotionally balanced in order to be present for my family and myself in a healthy way.

After she finished the session, she asked me about how the pregnancy and birth of this child were.  At the end of that pregnancy I had a lot of stress in my life and correspondingly, a lot of negative thinking.  (Since then I’ve tried to be much more careful about my thoughts and feelings during pregnancy.)  I told the practitioner, who knows that I’ve been recently dealing with some  intense stresses in a very concentrated period of time, that this is a large part of why I’ve made a conscious effort to relax with meditations.  I don’t want to imprint emotionally in a negative way on this baby.  She immediately agreed with me that imprinting happens on the cellular level, known as cell memory, before a child’s birth, and becomes part of a child’s makeup.

It was very interesting to have had these two conversations with the midwife and naturopath.  This is the kind of thing that people don’t talk about much, you don’t see much written about, because it’s not quantifiable.  It’s something that happens almost at the soul level to a child, and is very real regardless of if you can see it or not.  When I used to go to my chiropractor in the US, she did deep energy clearing at this level, which I appreciated.  Now I don’t have access to that, but I did bring my Bach flower essence kit with me, and this is an ideal tool for facilitating soul level healing.

You know the saying, “You are what you eat”?  I think it’s just as accurate, perhaps even more so, to say, “You are what you think”!

Avivah

Homemade vitamin B supplement

Healthy Living, Intentional Spending, nutrition

Recent bloodwork showed that a couple of our family members were very low in vitamin B – one was almost totally deficient, while the other was just regular low.  Seeing these lab results, I am assuming that other family members would also benefit by boosting their B vitamin intake.

Vitamin B is important for so many things, and are known as ‘the happy vitamins’.   Common symptoms of being deficient in vitamin B include low energy, being tired all the time, and being depressed.  Eating sugar, processed foods, caffeine, or experiencing stress all burn through your body’s supply of vitamin B.  And though we hardly eat any processed foods or caffeine and not much sugar, moving overseas and integrating into a new culture definitely qualifies as stressful!

A friend who is a psychologist recommended a particular vitamin B food grade supplement; she’s seen many people benefit emotionally by taking it and also said if she gets it to women right after giving birth, that there’s no postpartum depression.  I bought a bottle of it, and though her source for it was cheaper than what it would have been otherwise, it still wasn’t cheap.  When I looked at the ingredients on the bottle, I thought to myself, “I can make this!”  So that’s what I did.

Of course, I don’t know what the proportions are, but here are the ingredients as listed on the bottle: brewers yeast (vitamin B complex), molasses (iron), fruit juice concentrates,  water, assorted herbs, spices, carob, natural vitamin C or E.

Here were the proportions of the first batch of vitamin B mixture that I made: 250 grams brewers yeast, 200 grams carob syrup (I happened to have this in the house since someone bought some, didn’t like it, and asked if I could use it), 2 T. sodium absorbate (vitamin C), 3 small scoops bioflavanoids (I think each scoop is 1/4 teaspoon – the bioflavanoids balance the sodium ascorbate and should be taken together), cayenne pepper (I tasted this in the supplement I bought), and then I planned to add molasses and water.  When I started making my first batch, I didn’t have molasses but thought I’d be able to get it within a day.  But life happened and I didn’t get the molasses for a week, and so some of thick pasty mixture that I made got eaten by the spoonful.   Though it tasted pretty good, by adding the molasses afterward I can’t with any accuracy tell you how much was needed since I don’t know how much was already eaten.

When I did get the molasses, I made a second batch, being a little more creative.  What I did was mix nutritional yeast, molasses, sodium ascorbate and bioflavanoids, and spirulina powder all together.  (I was sure I’d remember the proportions to share here but of course, I didn’t.  :))  Then I added some water to thin it out until it was an easily pourable syrup.  Honestly, this doesn’t taste as good as the first batch – it’s okay but I can’t say I love it – but I think it’s probably much higher in vitamins that the first batch.  And it’s way cheaper!

Warning about using spirulina – it’s packed with vitamins but it gives everything its mixed into a dark greenish/black color that is unappealing.  The kids think this batch looks disgusting and not one of them was willing to taste it.  I don’t mind the color so much but I find the taste of molasses to be overly strong for my tastebuds, so I swallow down my tablespoon of mixture quickly and then take a drink of water.  But dh thinks the mixture tastes good, and regardless of taste, I think that this mixture is better absorbed by the body than taking a bunch of vitamins!

Avivah

(This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays.)

How to recognize redbud blossoms

Gardening, Healthy Living, Intentional Spending

I learned about these local edible blossoms just a few days ago here, and the very day after reading about them, saw a tree next to my house that looked like the picture shared.  I was pretty positive the first time I walked by the trees after reading about them that these were redbud blossoms, but to be sure, we picked some to bring in and compare.

Redbud blossoms
Photo by Bob Gress – the blossoms above are mostly closed and just beginning to bloom


Sure enough, it was a match, and I’m delighted to have another wild edible to add to my list of local foragable foods!  The tree is beautiful, and now that I know what it looks like, see that they’re in bloom all over my city.

How can you recognize these lovely edible blossoms?  The tree is usually less than twenty feet tall, with young trees having a smooth, gray bark.  More mature trees have a reddish-brown bark with flattened scaly plates.  The flowers are a beautiful pinkish color, and the central petal (called a standard) is flanked by two more petals (called wings).  Below them are two more petals called keels.  (Tell your kids all about this when you’re picking them and you’re learning about science and botany!)  The leaves of the tree are like a heart shape.  (More details here.)

Since we have so many dogs locally, I don’t do much foraging of things that grow on the ground for obvious reasons.  Seeing the abundance of these blossoms growing on trees so close by has got my frugal juices flowing!  I’ve scoured the internet for ideas on how to use them, and seen some yummy sounding ideas.  Use them in muffins, pancakes, for dessert with yogurt and berries, sprinkled into salad, pickled, or made into jam!

Redbud blossoms have an almost nutty flavor; they more closed they are, the more tart they are; the open blossoms have a sweet flavor that is very pleasant.  I wasn’t surprised to learn that they are high in vitamin C, because the tart flavor makes one think in that direction.

The young pods of this tree are also supposedly edible, but since they come out after the flowers, I haven’t yet had a chance to taste them.  I often wondered when I saw these pods if they were edible, but didn’t know what the tree was called.  Now that I know what the tree looks like, I plan to experiment by using the pods in stir fries in place of snow peas.

Avivah

Just in time for Pesach – the plague of lice

Healthy Living, Parenting

Head lice are more common here than the US (probably because insistence on kids going to school lice-free isn’t strictly enforced), and knowing that, I’ve kept a watchful eye on everyone since our move.  And it’s consistently been fine.

But recently when all the kids were sick for a while, it wasn’t on my radar to think about this and I overlooked one child scratching his head, something I would have usually jumped on immediately.  It wasn’t until two weeks after that that I checked the kids last week, and I saw signs of lice in three of them.  It was actually amazing that so few of them had it, being that it spreads so quickly and easily when children put their heads next to each other.

Of the three kids who had signs of lice, two had a very small amount that was easily taken care of.  The third was so heavily infested that I felt almost hopeless for the first few hours I was working on him on day one.  But when I started on day two, there was such an obvious difference thanks to all I did on the first day, and I’m happy to say that the issue is now resolved!

Since I lived here when my oldest four children were young, I had to deal with lice on an ongoing basis, so I’ve developed my approach to handling it that has been pretty effective.  There are many tips available about how to get rid of lice, but I’m going to share what I do.

Firstly, never use the poisonous lice shampoos like RID.  They are dangerous, and even carry warnings on them not to use them too frequently.  Not only that, I don’t think they’re very effective!

I’ve seen suggestions about using vinegar, mayonnaise, Listerine and other things to wash out the hair and smother the lice.  But unless it makes you feel like you’re doing something, it’s just extra work without much added benefit.

The first critical step is to make sure there are no live bugs in your child’s hair.  I have a two pronged approach to this – I check manually and I use a fine toothed metal lice comb to thoroughly comb through their hair. (I bought the least expensive one available at the pharmacy – 35 shekels.  Don’t bother with the cheap plastic ones, which don’t work at all.)  I absolutely don’t rely on lice combs on their own, since I used to see how much they missed, but if you use them regularly and well, they’re probably enough.  It’s like someone speeding – the cops might not catch you the first few times, but eventually you’ll get ticketed.  So if you  keep combing you’ll eventually catch the lice even though the comb will miss a few times.

It’s helpful to condition the hair well before combing.  (Ideally, combing their hair after every bath and shower should be done proactively to prevent lice in the first place – I wasn’t doing this, but now it’s been instituted as standard protocol for everyone.)  I comb firmly against the scalp, to get off anything that might be there.  Lice live close to the scalp, so that’s where you’ll generally find them, not further down the hair shaft.  I do this every day or two once for about two or three weeks if I see a sign of lice, since new eggs can hatch and then mature after the point you think there are no bugs left.  The newly hatched eggs are tiny – about the same as a speck of sand.  You’d have to look closely to even realize that it’s a louse and even then you might be hard pressed to believe it!  They don’t reach sexual maturity until 5 – 10 days, so you don’t have to worry about them laying eggs until then.

After being sure that there are no live bugs, you’ll need to attend to the removal of the nits.  This is a painstaking job (though I personally find it gratifying and don’t mind it), which is where the term nitpicking comes from!  A nit looks like a tiny teardrop shaped bump on a hair – you can tell it’s a nit and not dandruff by touching it.  A nit is firmly attached to a hair, and the only way to get it off is to pull it off each hair individually.   Dandruff can be flicked away. (A couple of kids had dandruff, and I asked them to do a vinegar treatment to get rid of dandruff before I checked them to make it easier for me – I didn’t want to look at every fleck on their heads.)

Nits are different colors depending on their age, so based on this you tell what’s been freshly laid and what’s oldest and about to hatch – white when just laid, getting darker brown and finally black right before hatching.  This can be of practical value to know when there are so many nits that you give priority to those that are the oldest – this is what I did with ds over the two day period I was cleaning him out; I took out the darkest nits and left the lighter ones for the next day.  I know some people rely on combs to get the nits out, but I really don’t think they work for nit removal – what I think you’re relying on is that the nits that hatch will eventually be caught by the comb.

Look particularly behind the ears and by the nape of the neck for both lice and nits.  For some reason, lice seem to love these locations.  I give these areas extra checks and go through the hairs in this area extra carefully.

A couple of myths to debunk:

– You don’t have to disinfect every corner of your house when a child gets lice.  The things people do in this area don’t do anything but make themselves crazy  – the vaccuming, bleaching, etc.  Lice need the head of a host to live, and nits certainly can’t hatch once they’re removed.  I kill every louse that I remove if it’s big enough; the small ones go into a container of water while I comb and then are flushed down the toilet. I wouldn’t drop the nits onto a pillowcase 🙂 but you can do what you want with them; it really doesn’t matter.

– Lice do jump.  I’ve read that people say they only can crawl from one head to another, and it’s true that heads need to be next to each other.  But I’ve repeatedly seen lice jump several inches when I’ve been combing them out.

Prevention: comb out regularly, use a rosemary essential oil/shampoo on your hair (lice don’t like the smell), and if you see a child scratch his head, immediately check them.

I’m happy to be going into Pesach having dealt with this, so that when we talk at the seder about the plague of lice, it will be past history!

If you’ve ever had to deal with head lice, what are the tips that have worked for you?

Avivah

Hungry for Change – view free until Mar. 31

Healthy Living, nutrition

‘Oh, great, another real food documentary.’  That’s the unenthusiastic thought that went through my mind when I saw the notice about a new movie, Hungry for Change, that is premiering this week worldwide.  I’ve watched several food related documentaries over the past few years, and though I found them all interesting (except one in particular that I couldn’t make myself watch through the end – Fathead), there’s only so much you can watch on the same topic without it becoming tiresome.

But for some reason despite my lack of enthusiasm I watched the short trailer, and that made me sign up so that I could receive free access to this movie until March 31.  I watched the entire thing today, and I enjoyed it so, so much – more than any of the other food films I’ve watched before.

It was intelligently done, so that someone without a background in health and someone with a lot of knowledge would still come away with something.  But what was really different, was that it wasn’t all about food.  Yes, it started off discussing obesity and ill health, and how food is manufactured to create addiction.  This is a huge issue.  But when I hear people talk as if eating healthy food is all you need to be thin, I feel frustrated because that hasn’t been my personal experience.  What if you don’t eat any processed foods and haven’t for years?  You can’t blame MSG and artificially concocted chemicals for your health issues.  Since my eighth child was born four years ago, I’ve been unable to get back to my ideal weight (after my seventh I did), despite an extremely good (WAP) diet.

Yet after this part of the film, it went on to talk about solutions – solutions that go beyond buying local or organic (though you can hear this referenced in comments, it’s not a main focus).  The way juicing was presented made me rethink my position on it, which I suppose was good since I haven’t seriously considered it since I mentally put it to the side years ago along with low fat vegetarianism as a path to health.

I loved that they then they went on to discuss the non food related aspects of ill health – stress, exhaustion, and the thoughts you put in your mind.   I think all of these are really critical issues, and the latter topic is one I have a special affinity towards.  In all of these points I was able to see areas where I had room to improve (I tend to burn the candle at both ends), and I felt inspired to make positive changes as I watched.

Where I’ve found other programs interesting, I found this something I would really strongly recommend.  I really, really liked this.  I’m going to rewatch it sometime in the next week, despite the pre-Passover period being, hmm, slightly more busy than usual.  🙂

Here’s a link for the film – http://www.hungryforchange.tv/.  To get free access, you have to sign in at the top right hand of the screen with your name and email address; at first I couldn’t find this and was a little frustrated that it was supposedly free and I couldn’t view it!

Avivah

(This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays.)

Home remedies for the flu

Healthy Living, home remedies, Intentional Spending

I realized early on this week that all the kids had the flu (funnily enough, ds18 called home and he has it, too!), though I didn’t feel like mentioning it to anyone in person because I didn’t feel like answering the inevitable question: “You didn’t give them a flu shot?”  Because if I was asked that, I would have felt it necessary to explain that the underlying assumptions about the effectiveness of the flu shot are false, along with a host of other points that I didn’t feel like getting into about vaccines concerns.  And sure enough, the first person I mentioned the flu to exlaimed, “What, you didn’t give them a flu injection?  I take it every year and I never get the flu!”

I really dislike that the seasonal flu is now on its way to being considered life threatening, along with everything else that we have vaccinations for.  Sure enough, this same woman told me about how many people die every year from the flu – as I said, I know when starting even a casual conversation about a topic like this how ready you have to be to intelligently counter the ‘facts’ that people have heard.   

Anyway, let me not get onto the flu vaccine issue!  The flu isn’t fun but it’s really just a super bad cold, and if you can find ways to move through it faster or more easily, that’s a good thing!    Everyone around here has been sleeping lots and drinking plenty of fluids (chicken broth and tea).  My go-to remedy for any sickness is high doses of sodium ascorbate dissolved in juice, but not all of our kids like taking it like this.  

I realized tonight that my brain was on automatic, and I needed to pause and think about other remedies I might have on hand that would be helpful for the kids.  Here’s what I thought of:

– Aconite – this is a homeopathic remedy ideally given at the onset of the flu, which I didn’t do because I wasn’t thinking along these lines.  The early dosage would be 3 pellets of 30 c each; I’m thinking three daily doses along for treating it at this point would be good.  Homeopathics aren’t my first line of defense because it’s not the area I feel most competent with (and I don’t know what happened to most of my remedies when we moved), but I do have aconite on hand so this is a good option even though we didn’t catch it early. 

– Most people are deficient in vitamin D, especially in the winter when the sun isn’t out as often and doesn’t shine as intensely.  Did you ever think about why it’s so common to get sick in the winter and not the summer?  Our vitamin D levels have a lot to do with that!    One of the main immune system functions of vitamin D is to help trigger production of a substance called cathelicidin. Cathelicidin is a naturally produced antibiotic that is able to be made only in the presence of high vitamin D levels in the bloodstream.

The littles have been having cod liver oil a few times a week, but the rest of us haven’t been very consistent with it after my initial efforts.  That’s a good option for vitamin D, but I have high quality vitamin D3 in my cabinet, and this has been shown to be very effective in fighting the flu.  (I researched this back when there was the H1NI/swine flu hysteria going around – here’s one article if you’re interested.)  3000 – 5000 IU of vitamin D3 seem to be recommended just to maintain adequate vitamin D levels; today I gave everyone 10,000 IU right now to fight the flu (this includes all the kids from age 9 and up – the littles are getting just 5000 IU). 

Olive leaf tincture- I made a good sized batch of this back in November.  So I pulled it out and put it to use!  Rather than make everyone aware I was giving them a dose of it, I made a big batch of regular tea (which everyone requests as soon as they wake up from their extended naps), and added a couple of spoonfuls of the tincture to the large container.  The heat will cause the alcohol to evaporate, and the flavor is hardly noticeable because it’s so diluted.

Also, yesterday my first batch of home-cured olives were finished!  These were from the olives that I picked on an outing with ds5 and ds2.  I thought I’d share instructions for this process once we tasted them, but I’m not fully satisfied with the end results – they’re okay but still have a hint of bitterness underneath.  However, as I was eating some today, I was thinking that the effective component in olive leaves is oleuropein, which is bitter.  And the reason that you spend three weeks curing the olives is to remove the oleuropein.  So maybe our health is benefiting by eating olives that still have some bitterness remaining in them!!

A couple of kids had ear pains in addition to other symptoms, and I fortunately had a batch of what I call my ‘ear oil’ already prepared!  Very simply, this is minced garlic that has steeped in olive oil to pull out the healing properties.  Strain, and put a few drops into the ear that has pain.

Another child had red and irritated eyes yesterday – I usually use the homeopathic euphrasia for something like this, but as I said above, most of my remedies disappeared when we moved.  So I did a bit of googling to see what I had in the house that would be useful, and learned that an eyewash made of fennel seeds or raspberry leaves would be helpful to bathe his eye. 

It’s nice to be able to deal with this at home – everyone is feeling kind of yucky, but it’s so valuable to have something in my home arsenal to help my family. 

What are your favourite home remedies for the flu, or even just a cold?   Have you tried any of the things I mentioned, and if so, how effective were they for you?

Avivah

(This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays.)