I have heard this many times before & have spoken to infection control nurses who agree that this is fact. If you are in a hospital and have any broken skin or wounds if you apply a layer of ACTIVE manuka honey to the skin it acts as a barrier against infection to the likes of MRSA. Worth packing with your bed clothes if your aware of a looming stay in a hospital bed.

This article was on Yahoo news today http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/01052009/36/world-s-first-chocolate-powered-racer-0.html    This is the worlds first formula 3 race car, which has been made with sustainable products such as, carrots, potatoes,  & cashew nut shells and runs on chocolate!

Recently there has been plenty of talk & debate on the subject of carbon emmissions, electric cars e.t.c, & all the positive aspects being outweighed by negatives. Electric sounds o.k. at first, but how much extra electricity woud your household bills incurr by charging your car battery & if the battery will only get yo 50 miles or so, would you consider changing your car to an electric at this time. Not me.

Could this car be a role model for future thinking in car manufacturing?

See the full Yahoo news on this Formula 3 car http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/01052009/36/world-s-first-chocolate-powered-racer-0.html

Last night, courgettes were in the bargin bucket in the local co-op.  So I took home, 2 very big, & mint condition  courgettes for 20p & stuck one in a juicer, with 3 slighly sad looking kiwi fruits. I was planning on executing a banana into this drink but after tasting just the kiwi & courgette I decided to leave it at that.

Very refreshing, low calorific value & a good fix of folate, Vitamins A, C & E .  And kiwi’s have almost as much potassium as a banana. Nice!

P.S   NO MICE WERE INJURED IN THE MAKING OF THIS SMOOTHIE

Here is a great way to prepare a very de-stressing bath using oats & honey.

Put some oats into a muslin, clean sock, or any type of cloth bag & tie this to the hot tap, so the hot water runs through the bag as the bath fills. Oats are fantastic for the nervous system & great for combating stress.

Then put some milk,  maybe about 1/2 cup, into a saucepan & warm on the stove ( don’t allow to boil). When the milk is warm pour in some honey, about half the amount of the milk that you used.

When this is warm pour it into your bath & enjoy a relaxing soak. You can scrub your skin with the cloth bag of oats too, this is really good if you have dry conditions such as exczema.

If you have any achy muscles add some rosemary too. Either add a few drops of essential oil into your milk & honey, or you can put fresh or dried rosemary into your oat bag. The milk helps to disperse essential oils throughout the bath. I would use 4-6 drops in a bath.

I’m off to run my bath, warm my milk, light some candles, turn off my computer & switch off my phone & have a long relaxing soak with a nice cup of camomile tea.

Good night

Sweet dreams

Tx

Comments on this bath, the day after:-

Well it definately was relaxing & de-stessing. It is a little mucky though, but I decided not to have a shower after so I could see how good the skin felt from the benefit from the honey & milk & oat soak. ( yeah I didn’t use soap either ) Well the whole point of this bath was for deep relaxation, I was already clean!

The best thing about this bath was squeezing the oat bag, extracting the  glupy hot, white, starchy juice and rubbing that on my skin. It was like a warm wax or dead sea mud treatment & it felt great. I lay on a towel on the bed to air-dry my skin & for the rest of the night my skin was literally glowing. I have had milk in the bath before & used oats in the bath but, this must have been more oaty & hotter as the gloop was great. I think next time though, I will put an oat bag & warm milk & honey in the sink to do a hot wax on my face or feet then have a soak in a slightly cleaner bath after. Boy, did I sleep well though. Very relaxed.

I found this conversation between Dr. Batmanghelidj & Mike Adams very interesting.

We all know that water is the most important thing that we need to put into our bodies each day, but some of the things mentioned in this conversation really made me stop & think. Most people probably recognise some of the more obvious signs of dehydration e.g. yellow urine or maybe a headache & then drink a couple  of glasses of water, but with asthma or severe stomach cramps is water the first thing we try to relieve our symptoms?

Does the body manifest dehydration in the form of pain?

Dr, Batmanghelidj mentioned a situation that made him look deeply into the answer to this question. He said that he gave 2 glasses of water to a patient who was doubled up with abdominal pain, as he had no other medication to give at the time. Within 3 minutes the pain had diminished & within 8 minutes the pain had totaly gone. He then tested this on 3,000 patients with similar conditions and the water worked as a pain reliever every time. He notes that the pharmaceutial industry  would give  antihistamines for this type of condition and histamine is a regulator of water, but water is free & drugs are big business. He had created an organization called National Association for Honesty in Medicine & his website is http://www.watercure.com

 To read the full conversation on the water cure go to http://www.naturalnews.com/Report_water_cure_0.html

Even if you do not like the taste of it one ingredient I think you should always have in a kitchen is HONEY. After working for years in commercial kitchens, I swear by the use of honey when a minor burn occurs. The amount of burns suffered in commecial kitchens is huge. The first time I was offered a jar of honey after a burn I thought they were joking, but I tried it and have used it every time since. Applying a thin layer of honey to the skin & leaving it on for a while first takes out the heat of the burn, but it also helps to prevent blistering. You can have a special burn treatment jar of honey by adding a few drops of teatree oil to the jar to make it even more effective. I have also heard of this being used for healing a dog bite inflicted on a lady who said the healing of the bite was clean & rapid by using honey & teatree to treat it with.

Potato poultice:-

Well, if you don’t like or don’t have any honey, try this remedy. Peel a potato & grate it. Grab a handful of the grated spud, give it a gentle squeeze and place it upon the effected area. This poultice again draws out the heat from the burn, but as always with minor burn treatments, including the one above, running the effected area under cold water is the first thing to do. You can wrap some cloth over the potato poultice and gently tie it around where your skin is burnt to be able to leave it on for a longer period.

Sunburn:-

I think that using Aloe Vera for sunburn is very well known & there are lots of products available for sunburn which include this great plant as it’s main ingredient. If you do get sunburnt & you do not have any Aloe products to hand or an Aloe plant close by to pick your own skin soother than this one is much easier to find.

 A good, old fashioned, simple teabag.

A used teabag, cooled and dabbed onto the skin, helps to take the heat out of the burn & prevent blistering. This, I think, is due to the tannins in the tea but it does work & you should never be too far away from a nice cup of tea.

Ingredients:-

About 6 oz stigging nettles

2 big cloves of garlic

1/2 cup grated parmesan

1/2 cup pine nuts

approx 100ml olive oil

salt & freshly ground black pepper

Method:-

Rinse the nettles, then blanch in boiling water for about 1 minute.

Strain the nettles, decant ont a chopping board & roughly chop.

Put the nettles, pine nuts, parmesan, olive oil & seasoning into a bowl & blitz with a hand blender or put all the ingredients into a food processor & blitz away.

Simple, tasty dressing for pasta, fish or salad & ready in 2 minutes.

To make approx 2 dozen bottles, all you need is the following:-

About 30 Elderflower heads, picked in the prim of their blooming ( End of May- beginning of June is usually a good time ) by July most are starting to die off.

2kg Sugar

6 litres water

4 lemons

2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar

Bucket & a muslin cloth or an old, clean t.towel or t.shirt. I used an old dress and parcel tape to secure it to the bucket.

Then Simply:

Heat  4 litres of water & put into your ( spotlessly clean ) bucket along with the sugar. Let the sugar dissolve, then add annother 2 litres of cold water.

Zest & juice the lemons & add to the bucket, add the vinegar & pre rinsed Elderflower heads.

cover with muslin & leave in a cool, airy position for 2-3 days.

Check the brew for signs of fermentation, i.e is it getting foamy? Elderflowers should naturally ferment the brew,but if there are no signs of fermentation add a pinch of yeast at this stage.

Leave the bucket alone for 4 more days, then strain through your muslin & bottle up. Do make sure you sterilise the bottles first! Seal & leave to ferment for 8 more days & serve chilled.

These do not have a long shelf life, but if you drink it within the first few weeks you should enjoy some refreshing, tasty & cheep home brew champagne.

I re-read the chapter on chicken this week & want to share some of the information given in this book. Felicity exposes some of the grossly unethical conduct of the meat industry, by doing undercover investigations & even taking low paid shifts in meat production factories to gain the inside knowledge of what actually happens to the meat that we eat. So often blissfully unaware , we often are, of what has happened to our meat before it goes anywhere near a packing factory or supermarket shelf. Felicity is /was a reporter for The Guardian Newspaper & writes very factually about her investigations.

In the early stages of poultry processing, the birds are put into a scold bath. 180 dead birds a minute are dipped into this to make the plucking process easier. The water in the scald bath is changed, just once a day so try to imagine if you wish, the amount of excrement & feathers that float around in the bath for hours. The temperature of the bath is 52 degrees, which is an ideal temperature for salmonella & campylobacter contamination.

During the next stage our  chickens are ridded of what feathers are left by a rubber fingered plucking machiene. Lots of faeces gets squashed out of the carcasses during this process. If just one of these birds is colonised with campylobacter the rest will be contaminated also. Organic & free range birds go through the same process, same machienes, same day, no less at risk of contamination than mass the produced, cheap, factory chicks.

Felicity went undercover, on shift, at a family run, Devon factory whilst doing a report for The Guardian. This factory supplied to Sainsburys & also produced West Country &  Organic Poultry for supermarket sales. Their website quotes ” total control & traceability “. Word had gotten out that chicken breasts from Dutch crates had been seen there, re packed, labeled with new use by dates & sent out for a Sainsburys special offer. A Brittish red tractor logo stuck onto them to identify the meat for un suspecting shopper to buy. Under UK food labeling law it is NOT ILLEGAL to label foreign meat with a Brittish red tractor logo as long as the meat is from the EU.

Annother company, Denby Poultry was annonymosly tipped off to Derbyshires Chief Envorionmental Officer. The caller reported that Denby Poultry was taking condemned chicken, diseased & contaminated birds ( which should have been sent for rendering or for pet food production ) . Denby Poultry was trimming it, washing it with bleach and selling it back to the human food chain. Denby poultry products was a pet food processing plant. It sold, cleaned up, waste meats to annother company who applied illigitamate health marks before selling it again to other companies. The owner of Denby poultry was found guilty in his absence at Nottingham Crown Court ( suspected of having fled the country ).

The tumbling industry is even more scary. Tumbling is the process where the ” bulking up ” of a chicken takes place. Most of this takes place in The Netherlands as chickens arrive their from Thailand & Brazil via Dutch ports.The chickens are often salted, as the tarrif on salted meats is significantly lower than that of unsalted. Tumbling helps to dilute the salt. During the tumbling process chickens are defrosted, then injected with additives & water & tumbled in huge, concrete mixer type machienes. Then they are re frozed and shipped for further processing. Tests conducted by Hull City Council & The FSA have found chicken breasts that have contained pork & beef waste & hydrolyzed proteins. Hydrolyzed proteins are skin, hyde, bone even ligaments and feathers, where the proteins are extracted through exposure to high temperatures or by chemical hydrolysis. Yep! then it’s injected into a chicken. Yum! By the way, adding proteins from other animals is NOT ILLEGAL either. Some of the concerns & implications of this are, with alduterated beef waste in our chickens, could that spread BSE ?   With antibotics being injected into our chickens, is that lowering our human tollerance to antibotics ?  And with pork being added to chickens that have even been labeled ” halal ” is that not an outragous abuse & insult to Hindus & Muslims?

We have the right to know what is in our food. The governments do not protect us on this issue and despot supermarkets have outragous levels of control.

 The chapters in this book are: 1) chicken, 2) salad, 3) beans, 4) bread, 5) apples and bananas, 6) coffee & prawns 7) the ready meal. All the chapters listed have raised my eyebrow several times at what the food industry gets away with.

An essential read.