It’s not just health advice. Seeds of doubt and areas of knowledge have expanded with Google and smart phones and social network. We stay connected and are often clueless. Is the advice that is free and given out on the many Internet sites for real, and should we be scared of the trends in health and other areas of life?
It’s back to charcoal for toothpaste. Coconut oil for teeth whitening. Back to sesame oil, groundnut oil, coconut oil for cooking. No corn oil, no refined oil, no sunflower oil or other refined oils as they are refined using chemicals, not native to our country and also harmful to health. Olive oil is also fake.. here’s how..
Use turmeric as it is the best way to avoid cancer. We had stopped using this ingredient for its yellow colour and slight bitter taste. Also, we cannot add that to noodles, pastas or fryums, can we?
Get back to those Indian spices. They are the answer to cold, cough or cancer. It’s the best antibiotic that has been around for ages.
Buy organic. All others with chemical fertilizers and pesticides are causing the illness in you from cold to cancer. Stay away from genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. It can cause mutations and various other illnesses in your genes.
MMR vaccination is out. Zika and H1N1 are now around, so do we vaccinate for those as well? More vaccinations are around, and parents have no clue whether they are all necessary, safe, or could be banned at a later date. Are we guinea pigs? A whole list of allopathic medicines remain banned, and yet they are sold in our very own shops and that too over the counter.
Drink cucumber lemon and mint, lemon and honey, ginger, coriander, cinnamon honey… you have a whole list of drinks, plain and simply home-made, to drink to get back to good health. Lose weight, get rid of pimples, avoid premature greying, walk tall, move those sluggish bowels, avoid sleeplessness, have bright and shining white teeth. All with a simple drink or through home-made ideas. The grandma cures are back, only the herbs are either unavailable or not known to the user.
Wear cotton clothes, especially undergarments, for they’re the best for healthy skin. Can we please go back to cotton pads during menstruation as the plastics and synthetic material are bound to cause ailments and is also a pile-up in garbage?
Get your Vitamin D from the sun. Do suryanamaskar every day. Artificial intake of Vitamin D could cause ailments. All of us as little children learnt that Vitamin D could be directly got from early morning exposure of the body to the sun. But we choose to sleep late and take it in the form of tablets or spoonfuls on the doctor’s advice. Nature decides. Combinations of calcium will get absorbed in the presence of natural sunshine, but we know little about it and take it in the form of tablets.
They did away with ordinary salt. No lumps in salt anymore, all free-flowing. All because people at the helm of health affairs decided that iodine-infusion is a must. The fear that recent issues relating to sperm counts and childlessness should be debated; fear exists when there is a doubt.
The milk from the indigenous cows is the best. Cows were gifted abroad from Gujarat ages ago and they have their own breed now. The cows here are partly responsible for the ozone hole with their anal exhalations. There are no Indian hump cows around anymore; only the imported ones, all fat and slow- moving, are around, eating away plastic and whatever is fed to them as fodder. So where do we get the best milk for children, or for coffee and tea?
Yoga for health is now recommended in schools. We are fighting tooth and nail against, seeing a religious angle. The sun is common to all? Does saluting the sun — which is a part of Yoga — make you align with a particular religion? Here we are slowly getting over our inhibitions and trying out Yoga sessions as it could work out cheaper than all those visits to allopathic clinics and specialists. Pranayama, a part of the practice of Yoga, is special and easy. There are many ways to get rid of simple ailments and even hard-hitting, chronic ones. Acupuncture, hydrotherapy and oil/mud baths are all in now. Classical music for sound therapy, certain ragas to cure certain ailments, are all back now and people are searching Google and YouTube for these.
Idli is the best option and a healthy food, says one article. It has the ingredients listed out and mention the health benefits. The best way to cook is steam cook, and here is a healthy food that was available all along generations.
Get back to soapnut as lakes are foaming and frothing with detergent bubbles. Use simple sandalwood oil/paste or rose water instead of all those perfumes — that could be the reason why you itch, vomit or are nauseated.
There is not a clue as to how we could get back the native strains of rice, wheat or other grains. Farmers are going in search of people who have seed vaults at home and have continued to stock traditional varieties.
The list is long and endless. We as a nation are storytellers. Each story had a moral. Be it Pancha Thantra, Akbar and Birbal or Tenali Raman. There was a man who sold caps, and one day he decided to take a nap under a tree. Monkeys in the tree took away all the caps and refused to give it back. The man then put down his cap angrily and the monkeys all threw back their caps too, imitating him. This story seems simple. Now let’s apply this to our actions post-colonisation.
We’ve aped the West in virtually every action, be it food, clothing, dwelling, health care, education, or governance. Although not all of it is bad, the health of the common person has taken a beating. While everyone knew how to take care of their acute problems (which, left unattended, could become chronic conditions) we were tutored to meet the doctor who knows all about it. In the end we are left with no knowledge of how our own body works and what we should take to alleviate pain.
We’ll have to wait till the man (the West) puts his cap down in anger to throw away our caps too and believe in our own…the best system of healthcare, agriculture, farming, hospitality, governance, spirituality, that we have ourselves had here through the ages.
sathyavijay1@yahoo.com
