Playing In the Grass Makes Me Itchy: Natural Relief for Itching, Rashes

May 22, 2013 – 12:46 pm

homeopathic relief for itches and rashes.

Natural relief for itches and rashes.

Last night, after an hour or so of rolling around and playing games in the park across the street from our house, my daughter came into dinner and began complaining that her arms, legs, and face were itching. I could see her skin was looking irritated.

I sent her directly into the shower and held her plate aside. I knew exactly what she was feeling because I’ve been known to react the same way after sitting on a lawn.

Not only does grass contain pollen to irritate eyes, nose, lungs, and skin, but today’s commercially-maintained lawns are cared for with heavy chemical fertilizers and pesticides which can transfer onto skin during the course of playing games and running around.

Natural Relief for Itching and Rashes

What should you do if you find yourself itching after contact with an allergen? Here are some good steps to take:

1. With any topical exposure, the first step is to rinse and cleanse the area to remove any lingering substances.

2. A clean lotion may then be applied all over the body. I like Everyday Shea lotion, but just be sure that whatever you choose is free of fragrance, colors, and petroleum products that could cause further irritation.

3. If the skin is still red and itchy in spots after cleansing, a good soothing spot creme is Florasone Cardiospermum Creme.

4. If the skin is still not calming down, or the person is still literally coming out of their own skin, try a homeopathic anti-histamine remedy* like Histamantium. This works like Benedryl, but without the side-effects, and is safe for babies, too.

* To order a homeopathic anti-histamine remedy mixed just for you and ready to take at any time, purchase the hayfever remedy here and specify that you want the anti-histamine remedy in the Comments field when ordering.

By Elizabeth | Posted in Kids, Living naturally, Natural remedies | Comments (0)

Fruit Smoothies Are Easy and Healthy

May 21, 2013 – 5:31 pm

Huge carrots ready for the juicer in a Tel Aviv market.

I love getting freshly blended fruit and vegetable juices when I travel to tropical locales: maracuja juice at the Jugo bars in northeastern Brazil and papaya juice in Costa Rica stand out in my memory. And now I can add to that the fresh watermelon-mint juice smoothie I enjoyed at the Israeli markets last week.

Back at home, mangoes are coming into season somewhere as low-priced mangoes are all over the grocery stores. I’ve loved mangoes in the tropics since childhood, and now that they are available up north, I’m thrilled to hook my kids on this vitamin C powerhouse. Strawberries, blueberries, kiwis, cantaloupe… I’ll throw almost any fruit (or vegetable) into a smoothie. Sometimes I’ll add a “milk”; other times, not. There is not a “magic” recipe for a smoothie as any combination of fruits or vegetables and ice or water or juice or a milk or milk substitute will turn out a frothy delight. Lately, I’ve been making fresh mango-banana-almond milk smoothies and my kids are going crazy for them.

Loading a mango-strawberry smoothie into a Magic Bullet blender cup.

When I received a Magic Bullet mini blender as a gift, I wasn’t sure I’d ever use it. But when it comes to producing quick, delicious, healthy smoothies for my kids, the single-serving Magic Bullet sure comes in handy.

Be sure to always wash mangoes before cutting into them, as filth, pesticides, or bacteria can travel into the fruit on the knife if it cuts through a dirty peel. I use a veggie wash on all produce before cutting to reduce the risk of contamination.

To cut a mango, hold it up on end so it’s a flat, vertical oval. Slice the “cheeks” off on either side. Lightly score each cheek, taking care not to cut through the skin, then invert it and slice the mango flesh from the peel. You can find great instructional videos on YouTube for peeling mangoes.

Beware of packages of pre-sliced mangoes as they likely have been sprinkled with anti-microbial product like sodium bisulfate or sorbic acid, which may cause headaches, stomach distress, inflamed joints or other symptoms in sensitive people.

By Elizabeth | Posted in Recipes | Comments (0)

Tart Cherries Combat Jet Lag

May 20, 2013 – 4:38 pm

Here I am walking through the market in Tel Aviv.

Jet lag doesn’t have to be an unavoidable byproduct of traveling if you eat some dried tart cherries.

My family recently returned from a fantastic family reunion on the other side of the world. It was a short vacation – only 10 days – without a lot of time to spare recovering from jet lag from the 20+-hour travel day and 9-hour time difference from our home in Colorado. Jet lag can be a serious bummer when you only have a short amount of time to enjoy a distant locale.

Dried cherries contain melatonin, which is known to help encourage and regulate sleep. My family ate the cherries while my sister’s family on the same itinerary didn’t. Besides a few early mornings in the beginning when we all woke up around 4 or 5 am, my family was generally on-schedule and feeling good within a day or two. Because of the nature of a city vacation, my kids stayed up later and slept longer in the mornings than they do at home, which worked perfectly for our plans.

My sister’s family struggled more with the effects and discombobulation of jet lag. Given: a toddler with jet lag can thwart all best efforts to re-set everyone else’s clocks. Yet, I feel as if my family handled the jet lag better. It’s possible the cherries helped, along with some of the other strategies we employed.

Tips for Minimizing Jet Lag

1. Sleep as much as you can on the plane. Take your cues from the in-flight schedule for dinner service, and aim to be asleep within an hour after dinner is cleared.

2. Eat a handful of cherries an hour or so before you’d like to sleep, trying to come as close to your new local time as possible, and they will help you sleep more deeply and longer, getting you closer to your target schedule. Do this until you are on-schedule with your new time-zone.

3. After you arrive at your destination, try not to nap or sleep when it is not nighttime, and try to stay awake during daylight hours as much as possible. Push yourself to stay awake until you simply can’t stay awake any longer. Then sleep through until it is morning, or as close as you can get to morning.

4. During the day, get outside and open your eyes to the sunshine as a cue to your body to adjust your internal C ircadian rhythm.

By Elizabeth | Posted in Living naturally, Natural remedies | Comments (0)

Diet Can Help Heal Chronic Anal Fissures

May 10, 2013 – 5:13 pm

File this one under: There’s not much that a change in diet can’t help heal…

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Apr 29 – Along with medical treatment, a diet that curbs food hypersensitivity might help chronic anal fissures to heal, Italian researchers suggest.

Roughly a fifth of patients whose fissures healed with this combined approach had recurrence on double-blind placebo-controlled challenge with wheat and/or cow’s milk proteins, but they didn’t react to placebo administration, Dr. Antonio Carroccio told Reuters Health by email.

Anal fissures are seen in up to 15% of proctology patients, said Dr. Carroccio of the University of Palermo and colleagues in a paper online April 16th in The American Journal of Gastroenterology. Chronic anal fissure prevalence in the general population isn’t clear, but Dr. Carroccio says diseases of the rectum and anus are common, “and the prevalence in the general population is probably much higher than that seen in clinical practice since most patients with symptoms referable to the anorectum do not seek medical attention.”

Research has suggested that anal fissures might be at least partly related to a high resting anal pressure due to unrecognized food hypersensitivity.

To investigate, the researchers randomly assigned 161 patients to follow one of two diets for eight weeks. The first was a “true oligo-antigenic diet.” It eliminated cow’s milk and its derivatives, as well as wheat, egg, tomato, and chocolate. The “sham diet” eliminated rice, potato, lamb, beans, and peas.

All patients also received treatment with sitz baths and bran supplementation during the eight weeks of the study, plus topical nifedipine 0.3 % and lidocaine 1.5% cream three times daily.

By the end, the anal fissures had healed completely in 69% of the “true diet” and 45% of the “sham diet” group (p=0.0002). The intervention group also had a significantly higher number of evacuations per week in the second half of the study.

In a second phase of the study, 60 patients who were cured on the oligo-antigenic diet were challenged with cow’s milk protein or wheat, or placebo. They continued to avoid dietary wheat, cow’s milk, egg, tomato, and chocolate.

While no one reacted to the placebo, 13 had fissure recurrence during the two-week cow’s milk challenge and seven had recurrence during the wheat challenge. Patients who reacted had significant increases in anal sphincter pressure over baseline. They also had more significantly more eosinophils in the lamina propria, and more intraepithelial lymphocytes, compared to non-reactors.

In all, 65 (40%) of patients remained uncured at the end of the study and underwent lateral internal sphincterotomy.

Dr. Carroccio concludes that “anal fissures could be etiologically related to a food hypersensitivity condition.” More work will be needed to confirm that, he admits.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/15Uvg8i <http://bit.ly/15Uvg8i>

Am J Gastroenterol 2013.

Apr 29, 2013
By David Douglas
Reuters Health Information © 2013

By Elizabeth | Posted in food sensitivities | Comments (0)

Be a Smart Label Reader at the Grocery Store

May 1, 2013 – 5:31 pm

Naturally Savvy published a new e-book: Label Lessons, Your Guide to a Healthy Shopping Cart. Filled with a ton of interesting information, it teaches you how to properly read product labels, and is their gift to you.

I really like the way this e-book is laid out with the familiar product on one page, like General Mills Honey Nut Cheerios, and the cleaner, more natural alternative on the facing page, in this case Barbara’s Classic Honest O’s Honey Nut. For each product featured, the undesirable ingredients are called out. In Honey Nut Cheerios, for example, there are Genetically Modified ingredients, 4 of the first 5 ingredients are sugars, and there are no actual nuts included (only “natural almond flavor,” which may or may not originate from actual almonds).

Naturally Savvy calls out the “Scary Seven” ingredients to avoid as you read labels in the grocery store and choose your food:

High Fructose Corn Syrup
Trans fats
Artificial Flavors
MSG
Artificial Colors
Artificial Sweeteners
Preservatives

Read the e-book and share it to help raise $10,000 for charity. You can download coupons for all the healthy products in the e-book, and you can win a $1,000 shopping spree at the natural products store of your choice!

By Elizabeth | Posted in Books, Living naturally | Comments (1)

8 Herbs for a Kitchen Garden

April 29, 2013 – 1:15 pm

Not much compares to the culinary joy of picking fresh herbs to add to your kitchen creations. Wherever I land, there are a few staple herbs I like to grow in garden plots or pots every summer. Here’s my list of staple herbs to grow for culinary creativity.

1. Parsley. Parsley is great to grow in a garden patch because it’s a hardy perennial that doesn’t need much sun or attention to keep coming back every year.

2. Sage. In Colorado and other semi-arid climes, sage will blossom into a bush that sustains fragrant leaves through the winter.

Lemon Rosemary Salmon Glorious One-Pot Meal. Click the picture for a recipe and video demonstration.

3. Rosemary. Every summer I kill another potted rosemary plant, probably by over-watering, but while it lasts we make good use of the needles in savory Glorious One-Pot Meals and olive-oil rubbed oven roasted potatoes.

4. Basil. I grow basil in pots around my flagstone patio and harvest leaves for everything from marinara sauce to Italian-style tuna with olive oil, basil and capers.

5. Mint. For some reason, as much as I want mint to spread and go wild in my yard, it simply refuses to cooperate, so I grow mint in pots, too. I love a cold glass of Sun-Tea poured over mint leaves, and often use mint in rice pilaf-type dishes.

6. Oregano and/or Marjoram. I usually pick one or the other and while oregano is the more familiar, I find marjoram to be the more versatile herb.

7. Chives. The chives I planted seven summers ago still reappear year after year for me to snip to give a little zing to any dish, hot or cold.

8. Cilantro. Okay, I don’t actually grow cilantro because I can’t stand it, but it’s easy to grow and a lot of people would probably like to have it in their kitchen garden.

By Elizabeth | Posted in Gardening, Glorious One-Pot Meals, Recipes | Comments (0)

3 Ways to Improve Your Mood Naturally

April 25, 2013 – 8:39 am

Depression affects a huge number of people in our country and prescriptions of anti-depressants are so common that I’ll bet you can name at least two people off the top of your head who take something to feel happier. That’s to say nothing of all the people you know who haven’t told you that they are taking a drug for anxiety, depression, or unhappiness.

Heck, antidepressants are so common that you’ll find traces of them in most municipal water supplies.

But there are more natural ways to lighten your outlook on life and help you find a happier disposition. Here are a few to try:

1. Dance! I love starting off my day with a Jazzercise class and it never fails to put a smile on my face even when I’ve woken up on the wrong side of the bed. I have a friend who simply cranks the disco music at her house and dances in her own living room to put the spring into her step as she enters her sixth decade. Check out some of the great free dance class offerings on YouTube for a fun time. Here’s a reggae dancehall workout with Keaira LaShea that will put a smile on your face.

It’s hard to nurture hurts or grudges as you become engulfed in music and movement. Not only does dancing offer cardiovascular benefits, it works your muscles and your brain as well, which can keep those synapses flowing as we age.

2. Laugh! I’ve become addicted to the new 24/7 comedy channel on the radio: 103.1 Comedy. They play a continuous stream of stand-up comedians ranging from classic Bill Cosby on raising kids and Eddie Murphy’s hysterical “I’ve got some ice cream,” to current comics like Kevin Nealon, Dana Carvey, and Jeanine Garrafalo. I’ve laughed so hard in the car on my way to pick up my kid’s carpool that I’ve arrived with smeared mascara from the tears. I don’t mind when I’m stuck in traffic because I’m so entertained by what I’m hearing.

Laughter releases endorphins like exercise does, and endorphins give you a natural high while putting a smile on your face. They have mobile apps, and are online, too. Give it a listen and see for yourself if you don’t arrive at your destination a little happier from having laughed all the way over.

3. Go on an Anti-Inflammatory Diet! What? This doesn’t sound exciting or mood-lifting? Here the fact: depression and inflammatory conditions like MS, heart disease, diabetes, etc., go hand-in-hand. When there is inflammation in the body, it’s not limited to wherever you notice the symptoms (joints, bowels, skin, etc.). Many inflammatory actions are systemic, meaning they extend throughout our body’s systems, and include the brain. When the brain swells, brain function is disrupted and higher thoughts processes like reason and logic are affected. The stronger, more primal and emotional brain functions – fight and flight, lust, anger, hunger, etc. – can supercede rational thought in an inflamed brain.

Many of my clients report a lifting of “brain fog”, a return of a sense of humor, and a sunnier outlook as the inflammation in their brain recedes on a customized anti-inflammatory diet. It’s much easier to be happy when you feel better and your brain is not inflamed!

By Elizabeth | Posted in Living naturally, Natural remedies | Comments (2)

Recycle Your Underwear!

April 24, 2013 – 11:57 am

We compost, recycle papers and plastics, and limit our water usage, but one way to help the earth that never occurred to me was to recycle old underwear.

Rodale.com offers five surprising ways to recycle underwear, including cutting it up and adding it to your compost bin (only if the underwear is 100% cotton, of course!).

These tips come at a good time in our house as I just noticed a few pairs of my husband’s underwear that should be retired from active duty. Have you noticed that men will wear underwear until it literally falls to pieces?!

By Elizabeth | Posted in Living naturally, Misc., Recipes | Comments (1)