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What Is Ayurvedic Medicine, and Can It Help Me?

The Ayurvedic system of medicine was born in India many thousands of years ago, and handed down through oral tradition. It’s a ‘whole body’ system of medicine whose practitioners believe everything is connected, and good health comes about as a result of our mind, body and spirit being in harmony with the universe.

Many see Ayurvedic medicine as a form of healthcare which prevents disease instead of just reacting to it. It takes into account factors less commonly considered in Western medicine, such as emotional state, family relationships, food choices and even the weather. It recognises that each of us has a unique system of energies and that these life forces (or doshas) in combination with our bodily constitution (or prakriti) is the key to maintaining a healthy balance. It stresses the importance of massage, yoga and meditation as well as natural medicine.

Ayurvedic medicine uses a huge array of plants, including many herbs and spices. Modern scientific research has proved that many of these have awesome healing and health-giving properties. So let’s examine some of them to uncover the health benefits of Ayurvedic medicine….

Explore Sussex Wholefoods Dried Fruit!

Fruit is one of the most bountiful and enjoyable gifts from nature, but is dried fruit good for you? Well, great news – it’s superb for human health! Regular consumption of dried fruit supplies our bodies with essential vitamins, fibre, antioxidants and minerals. These can lead to significant lowering of the risk of all kinds of chronic conditions, such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Best of all, dried fruit is fantastically versatile and exciting as a cooking ingredient and as an addition to all sorts of dishes, both sweet and savoury. Drying fruit massively increases its shelf life, sometimes from mere days to many years, as it removes the vast majority of its moisture and therefore its capacity to spoil. Dried fruit snacks are pretty much the best way to snack – they’re healthy, light, portable and convenient, and by removing the moisture from the fruit, the flavour is intensified and the texture changes, making it truly delicious! So what are dried fruits? Allow us to take you through it, and show off some of the highlights from our range….

Explore Sussex Wholefoods Nuts!

Are nuts good for you? Yes, they are! Nuts are fantastic little packages of fibre, protein, healthy fats and minerals. They’re so good for human health that even if they didn’t taste so utterly wonderful, we’d probably still eat them for their superb medicinal value. They’re not just great to munch as snacks, though – nuts are incredibly versatile, and you can use them to make milk, cream, sauces, desserts and even cheese. Many types of nuts also lend themselves wonderfully to grinding down for flour, and can be used in this form to make bread, cakes and biscuits.

Health-wise, although they’re calorie dense, eating a small handful of nuts every day can kickstart various biological processes whereby we actually lose weight. They can also help us maintain heart health, fight diabetes, improve our skin and hair, strengthen our bones and even improve the functioning of our brains. At Healthy Supplies, we spend ages looking for the very best nuts in the world so you don’t have to, so let us take you through some of our very finest examples…

Top tips from the Healthy Supplies team for a happier, healthier you

Here at Healthy Supplies, we like to keep a close eye on developments from the world of nutrition, and the latest health research on various foods and the ways they affect the human body. We’ve done the investigation so you don’t have to!

The Covid pandemic has brought home to everyone that mental health is just as important for our wellbeing as physical health, and opened our eyes about how closely the two are intertwined. It’s a struggle for everyone to maintain health and happiness sometimes, but there are a few things the team members here do that we’ve found work wonders for us, and we’d like to share a few of these with you!

The Joy of Soy

The soybean is one of the most widely cultivated crops on the planet. It’s extremely cheap and hugely versatile, and is consumed in various forms by billions of people every day. This humble bean has an impressive nutritional profile, and is relied upon as a major source of protein, fibre and essential minerals across East Asia and beyond.

In the West, most of us probably eat soy more often than we realise, as it has made its way into a vast number of products as an ingredient. It’s a mainstay of vegan and vegetarian diets especially, where it forms the basis of many meat alternatives, which draw upon its ability to replicate meat’s texture, mouth feel and deep, umami savouriness.

So let’s take a closer look at some of the main uses of this wonder-bean….

Decoding Cocoa & Cacao

Cocoa and cacao are ubiquitous in any serious chef’s kitchen cupboard, and humans have been using these wonderful ingredients for many thousands of years, since the time of the Mayans and Aztecs, to make drinks, add flavour and depth to both sweet and savoury dishes, and of course as the pivotal ingredient in yummy chocolate.

Cocoa and cacao are full of flavonoids, powerful anti-inflammatory plant compounds which can protect us against chronic disease. But how are they made? Are you loco for cocoa, or do you prefer cacao, and what’s the difference, anyway? Which one is ‘raw? And what does ‘Dutch press’ mean?

Read on as we dive in and decode the data of this dreamy, delicious delight….

Make Room For Mushrooms!

Mushrooms are wonderful – they’re mysterious, exciting, prolific, and can, depending on the variety, be delicious, deadly, imposing, bizarre or beautiful. They hold the soil together while dissembling dead organisms and redistributing their nutrients. They can grow to a gargantuan size – in fact, the largest living organism in the world is a fungus called armillaria ostoyae in Oregon, which is over 2000 years old, estimated to weigh up to 35,000 tons and covers 2,200 acres! Best of all, mushrooms are superb at providing a deep, umami savouriness to your supper, and all serious chefs should always have a supply of dried mushrooms, whole or powdered, in their store cupboard.

There’s also increasing evidence mushrooms can have monumental benefits for our mental health and physical wellbeing as well as making our taste buds rejoice. The mycologist Dr. Paul Stamets believes mushrooms can save the world and advocates using medicinal mushrooms (such as our excellent Organic 7 Mushroom Blend) daily to improve our brains, mood and temperament. Here at Healthy Supplies we advocate getting hold of some of our lip-smackingly deeply-flavoured Champignon Mushroom Powder, or whipping up a big helping of Creamy Mushroom Pasta!

So let’s have a closer look at eight different mushroom varieties and how to use them….

Should we buy organic?

We all want to do better for the environment, but organic products in the supermarket often cost a sizeable amount more than their non-organic counterparts. It’s common knowledge that pesticides commonly used in commercial farming can contain some incredibly nasty chemicals that gets washed into rivers and decimates biodiversity, but some still argue that these massively boost the volume of food that one field can produce and therefore we should continue to use them.

Early in 2021, the UK government crumbled in the face of pressure from the National Farmers Union and reversed the ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, which are strongly implicated in the decimation of a huge percentage of the planet’s bees as a result of what has become known as Colony Collapse Disorder.

So should we buy organic? Every year, the Environmental Working Group publishes a ‘dirty dozen’ list of fruit & veg with the highest detected pesticide levels – we’ll have a look at five examples of different foods from this list and give you the lowdown….

What are plant polyphenols and how can they improve my health?

We all know we should eat plenty of fruit and vegetables, as they contain gut-healthy fibre and a massive array of vitamins and minerals, which keep the body’s biological processes ticking over and help our immune system fight infection and age-related decline. However, less is commonly known about the essential role played by plant polyphenols when we consume these.

There are many thousands of different types of these plant compounds, and scientific research is uncovering previously unknown health benefits of plant polyphenols all the time. So what are plant polyphenols? Well, it’s an umbrella term used to describe ‘secondary metabolites’ in our plant-based food, and includes phenolic acids, coumarins, flavonoids, stilbenes and lignans. All of these are massively beneficial to human health and can help our bodies in quite staggering ways.

So let’s take a look at six examples of plant polyphenols and see the magic they can do….

Top 10 Vegan Cooking Hacks

It can seem daunting changing to a vegan lifestyle. Whether you’re doing it for health reasons, to reduce your carbon footprint, because you no longer want a part in the cruelty inflicted on the animal kingdom by humans, or all of the above, it requires various lifestyle changes to ensure you are no longer using anything sourced from animals.

Even before you get to the kitchen, you’ll have jettisoned your leather belts and shoes, cleared the cleaning cupboard of beeswax polish and made sure there are no more fish oil capsules in the medicine cabinet. In the kitchen, for new vegans, it quickly becomes apparent just how closely intertwined animal products have become with our modern-day eating habits – there are all kinds of substances sourced from animals in everyday use. There’s isinglass, a type of gelatin made from fish bladders which is commonly used in wine production; there’s gelatin from the bones and hides of pigs and cows, which is often used in puddings, yoghurt and all kinds of confectionery, and then there’s the omnipresent red food colouring carmine, also called cochineal and known by the code E120, which is (rather gruesomely) sourced from a small insect with scales.

With so many familiar products ruled out, the vegan cook has to be canny and have a repository of new skills to navigate their eating regime. But not to worry, there are so many plant-based options that yield similar or in some cases better results than traditional cooking techniques. Whether you’ve gone vegan or would like to cook for a vegan friend or family member, here’s a top ten list of cooking hacks which have proved invaluable for animal-free eating….