Great Way Weekly

Agua Fresca, a beverage made from melon, water and lime or lemon juice, is a wonderful way to keep cool in the heat of summer. Gourmet foodie blog Smitten Kitchen describes how to make it.

In Chinese medicine, melon has cooling energy. But be careful: while refreshing, it’s best not to have melon with breakfast as it is too cold for a morning stomach just heating up to digest food all day. Save melon for later in the day.

And I agree with Smitten Kitchen: leave out the sugar. Melon is plenty sweet on its own. If you do need more sweetener, I recommend agave nectar, a sweet, honey-like product of the agave cactus (tequila!), which has a low glycemic index so it’s gentler to the system.

Head over to Smitten Kitchen for the recipe and more info.

Found this tidbit via StumbleUpon.

EDIT: Before I could get this piece up on the intarwebz, Lifehacker beat me to it. But I still found it first! Ha!

From Great Way Blog

Mushrooms like Reishi, Cordyceps and Poria have long been used in Chinese herbal medicine as tonics for the body. Modern research has shown that these and other varieties of mushrooms have immune building, cancer-fighting and anti-inflammatory capabilities. It’s important to try to include some in your diet–no need to try to over do it, just to have them be a regular part of your weekly or monthly diet.
Here’s a post from Dr. Andrew Weil about some mushrooms to try to incorporate into your life. Cordyceps is a great mushroom, but I haven’t had much luck finding it outside of my Chinese herb suppliers. When you can find it, it’s incredibly expensive (too expensive for me to stock it in my pharmacy). Reishi is pretty easy to find and much more affordable, so I would choose that over cordyceps. Shiitake and Maitake (also called Hen of the Woods) are expensive to buy fresh, but relatively inexpensive to buy dried. I add some dried shiitake and maitake to any soup stock I make (or, if I’m in a hurry, I boil them along with some whole garlic cloves in some Imagine Foods No Chicken stock for a quick almost-home-made tasting stock). I get my dried mushrooms from MountainRoseHerbs.com.

Here’s Dr. Weil’s post, and you can go the original here:

Mushrooms are a big favorite of mine because they’re delicious and often have medicinal properties. If you’re not allergic and don’t find them hard to digest, try these:

1. Cordyceps: A Chinese mushroom used traditionally as a tonic and restorative. You can add whole, dried cordyceps to soups and stews, or drink tea made from powdered cordyceps.
2. Maitake: This delicious mushroom provides anti-cancer, anti-viral and immune-enhancing properties, and may also reduce blood pressure and help regulate blood sugar. Find it dried or fresh in Japanese markets, gourmet stores or upscale supermarkets.
3. Reishi: Too woody and bitter to eat, reishi mushrooms are available in tea bags, capsules and liquid extracts. Animal studies have shown that reishi improves immune function and inhibits the growth of some malignant tumors. It also acts as a natural anti-inflammatory agent.
4. Shiitake: The shiitake has been found to have immune modulating, anti-viral and cholesterol-reducing properties. Certain extracts of shiitake mushrooms are used in Japan as adjunctive therapy to strengthen the immunity of cancer patients during chemotherapy and radiation. Find it – fresh or dried – in grocery stores and Asian markets.

Note: I advise against the regular consumption of cultivated white or “button” mushrooms because they contain natural toxins that may act as carcinogens.

We visited Chinatown on our last trip to NYC because I wanted to visit a Chinese herb pharmacy. We found this rather large, well-organized pharmacy, and were drawn in by the big barrells of ginseng that they had on display. The rest of the shop was filled with hundreds of different patent formulas (Chinese herbs prepared in pill form), as well as raw herbs that one of their pharmacists could use to fill a prescription.

Ear Acupuncture Chart

According to this article at the Chinese Medicine Times, the military is using acupuncture (primarily ear acupuncture) to relieve pain in wounded soldiers.  They’ve found that it helps reduce the amount of pain medication they need to administer, reducing that hazy sensation pain meds can produce.  By reducing the pain level overall, the body is better able to heal itself, so recovery is faster.

I’m pretty excited that the military is using acupuncture–perhaps this will lead to more wide-spread acceptance of acupuncture, and more insurance coverage across the country.

Here’s a link to the article: http://www.chinesemedicinetimes.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1224#post1224