Like many people in the UK I have Irritable Bowel syndrome and was looking for a dietary method of treating this, hopefully to achieve prevention rather than just treating the symptoms with medication. I figured if I could make some adjustments to my diet ,. well if you look online on this subject you find allsorts of things you should try excluding from your diet such as lactose and gluten etc but this presumes that your IBS is due to an intolerance for these things, and if this is the case well it isn’t IBS. I have IBS-A and am not lactose or gluten intolerant.
So having done some research on the matter I found that I can use liquorice root as an anti-spasmodic, flax seed, okra and fenugreek for their mucilage (Instead of Ispaghula husk). So looking on line I found a health food shop apparently located within 400m of my house so I put my hat and coat on and went to find it, guess what ? It went out of business and is now a pet-store. never mind I thought, there will be a Holland and Barrett in the shopping centre, and sure enough there is. I know from my research that ‘fenugreek’ is both a herb and a spice and commonly called ‘methi’ in India, a common ingredient in curry, the leaves are used as a herb and the seeds as a spice. That’s fine I like my curry as well as the next Englishman,.
I found ‘Fenugreek’ in Holland and Barrett in capsules packaged as a medicine (100 capsules 610mg for £4.12 , previous price £8.25) . I found other items similarly packaged, such as ‘linseed oil’ (£13.35 for 120 capsules), along with various other herbal ‘remedies’. I stormed out of the shop literally swearing under my breath, they are literally repackaging common herbs and spices , oils and so on as ‘medicines’ and charging a fortune for them!
When I got home I did some more research and found that I can buy 250g of fenugreek seed for £1.35, 500g of brown Linseed(flax) £2.42, and to complete my order 250g of liquorice root for £4.68. Where from ? Amazon.co.uk : ‘Buy whole foods online storefront’. Okra is a vegetable and I figure if anyone has any fresh Okra it will be Tesco.
My point here is simple, lets stop paying people like Holland and Barrett to grind stuff up and put it in capsules and learn what herbs, spices and vegetables can help with our health problems, most of them have been around for centuries for good reason.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please do not spam comments onto my posts, all comments are moderated and only genuine 'on topic' comments will be published. Anyone repeatedly trying to spam the same off topic links into comments will be reported to Google/blogger .