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Friday 30 May 2008

Diabetes and Food Style: Turn Your Food into Your Medicine

Fast paced life of modern world has necessitated us to give only lower priority to nutrition. This is at a time when nutrition awareness of everyone is high. Instead of taking well cooked food items, fruits and juices, people go after carbonated drinks, fast 'junk' food, frozen and preserved food, microwave food. People also don’t take the time to enjoy and appreciate the food they eat. Today most of us just need any food that fills the belly for sometime.

This food habits have given rise to a variety of health problems. Significantly important one among them is diabetes.

Ayurvedic principles tell us food is one important element that keeps a person in a balanced state of body, mind and soul. Taking healthy food translates into healthy body.

Ayurvedic view on diabetes is no different. There are times when diabetes can attack without any warning sign. Ayurvedic food style combined with certain herbal applications helps one effectively manage his or her condition of diabetes.

High sugar level is the most dreaded thing about diabetes. Ayurveda recommends food items that don't release excess sugar into the blood. Food items that are too sweet, ice cream, chocolate, friend food items, white flour, preserved food, fast food, junk food etc are to be avoided. Bad habits like smoking and drinking should be given up.

Ayurveda recommends Ayurvedic herbal tea for diabetic patients. Replace sugar with honey or jaggery (thickened molasses - sarkkara) or better still palm jaggery (thickened palm molasses - karippatti).

The advantages or drinking more than eight glass of water everyday is not easily told in an essay. Drink a minimum of 8-15 glass of water in the day time. After sunset take only minimal quantities of water. Another thing is to drink plenty of water an hour before a meal and an hour after the meals. Drinking water close to meals dilute the digestive fire (in Ayurveda it is called pitta) and makes the process of digestion difficult.

Take fruits like grapes, fig, pomegranate, citrus fruits etc. Bitter melon (bitter gourd, karela) is used as medicine for diabetes.

The point about Ayurvedic management of diabetes is never a hard task. All you will have to do is to incorporate Ayurvedic principles as your daily routine. Having healthy food and exercise regime itself can help one control his or her diabetes to a great extent.

Include turmeric and garlic as spices, bitter gourd as vegetable, triphala as a laxative and drinking lot of water as daily habit. These are not very difficult to follow. You can't eat or drink all the food items you have. But living a sweeter life sometimes means giving up some sweet for tongue food items.



About The Author
Dev Sri provides insider information about Kerala Ayurvedic practices at http://keralaayurvedics.com/








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Thursday 1 May 2008

Aloeride Helping The Heart

One of the most important health challenges of our time is the preventing of hardening of the arteries. Hardening of the arteries is one of the major consequences of aging. Fortunately now days there are a number of things, which can be done, to prevent and in some cases reverse arteriosclerosis or hardening of the arteries.

Because of the aloe, Aloeride can benefit the circulatory system. Aloe lowers triglycerides and LDL or the “bad cholesterol” and raises HDL the “good cholesterol”. Several studies have shown when aloe is added to the diet, symptoms and signs of coronary artery disease disappeared. The people in the study never developed heart problems. The same studies noted patients were able to discontinue their prescriptions of the pills they had taken the in past for chest pain, blood pressure and blood sugar control.

A study done in 1985 before the information regarding aloe vera and Aleride was known used 5,000 people with acknowledged coronary artery disease and angina pectoris, which is chest pain on physical exertion, which indicates a lake of circulation of blood to the heart muscles, were fed with aloe vera added to their diet. The results were no more signs of angina pectoris, no development of lethal heart attacks and prescription drugs were no longer needed to control symptoms, but didn’t cure them.

Hardening of the arteries is a complex disease, which involves microscopic damage to small and large arteries alike. Hardened plague lines the arteries. When the small arteries have a plague line, which builds up, the smaller the passageway making blood circulation difficult. The organs and tissues needing the blood and the oxygen are deprived, which causes damage to the organs and tissue due to the lack of oxygen and blood, and the build up of carbon dioxide and other toxic waste, which should be carried away by the arteries.

When the coronary arteries are blocked, blood no longer flows freely; it will sludge through the arteries. With physical exertion the heart muscle needs more oxygen. When it request for more oxygen and blood is not delivered, a heart muscle is damaged and it dies. When the heart muscles dies, it is called a heart attack. If the right muscle of the heart dies, the person will die instantly.

By reducing the platelet stickiness, Aloe vera alleviates the coronary syndrome the same thing aspirin and Plavex are currently used for. The usual job for the platelet is blood clotting to stop bleeding when blood vessels are injured. When the platelets become sticky more than normal, the platelet will form a clot in a blood vessel whose walls are lined with too much plaque. Sometimes it will permanently shut off the blood flow through that artery or blood vessel.

The clotting can cause damage to the tissue of the brain by causing a stroke and kidneys in people with hardening of the arteries and those with diabetes. The diabetes will accelerate the process of small vessel disease and the damage to organs and tissues.

Aloe vera has the ability to reduce platelet stickiness and decrease the inflammation caused by microvascular injury. It reduces the build up and can even reverse the hardening of the arteries as well as prevent it.

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