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I may be wrong. But I don’t see food therapy practiced in America. Most of us simply take herbal supplements. Yet we have no idea what they contain, because our understanding of drugs, herbs, and foods is confused and convoluted.
While pharmacopoeial requirements for drug chemicals can easily be applied to the finished drug products, because chemicals can readily be analyzed. But not herbs; they are complex entities, not just 1 or 2 chemicals in each herb, which cannot arbitrarily be held responsible for the herbs’ actions. All the elaborate pharmacopoeial tests required for a raw herb or plant are fine, and impressive, but they cannot be applied to finished herbal products, because these raw materials have gone through processing and manufacture and are no longer herbs. All the pharmacopoeias in the world can do nothing about the identity and quality of the finished herbal supplements or medicines, because all they describe are raw materials (herbs/plants) in painful details mostly irrelevant for finished product, except powdered botanicals in capsules.
Which is why our ‘modern scientific’ drug-therapy system, no matter how ‘precise’ or ‘evidence-based’ we claim, with in vitro, in vivo, animal testing, and finally the gold standard of tests (clinical trials in humans) that gives us our drug ‘scientific’ approval for us to ingest. Still, we end up with something that needs to go through the same trial-and-error step (some of us scientists call it voodoo) used by our ancestors umpteen years ago when they first discovered their medicines, some of which are now ours. What we have done with our clinical trials is but a grain of sand on a beach when compared to our tried-and-true time-tested traditional medicines, not just curing some cancer in rats.
After the passage of #DSHEA in 1994, besides prescription and OTC drugs, most Americans now also take supplemtnets some of which are untested synthetic chemicals while others are ‘herbal’ supplements, (some without herbs).
Now, back to stiff or painful joints. They can be due to toxic side-effects of the drugs we take or the wrong foods (e.g., junk food) we have eaten over time, weakening our immune system. Increasingly, it can also be due to our taking too many new chemical supplements (some are lieterally new drugs) that have not even been tested on humans (e.g., clinical trials). All thanks to DSHEA.
So, friends and colleagues, please think long term (at least for your geat grandchildren’s sake), because many of the inherently toxic effects of synthetics don’t show up in our lifetime. So, before you continue to take drugs or some new highly-hyped chemical supplements to ease your joint pain or other problems, due to whatevev cause(s), why not try Job’s tears first.
This food has no traces of potentially toxic synthetics. The latter’s inherently toxic nature will continue to degrade our health.
To cook Job’s tears, just boil it in water for an hour or more, then drink the liquid and eat the seeds.
I seldom, if ever, follow receipes. But recently, when some of my friends wanted to know how to cook it, I actually did some measuring and recording. Here is how I usually cook and eat Job’s tears:
1/3 cup Job’s tears
1/3 cup oatmeal (steel cut, not instant)
2 heaping tablespoons of goji berries
3 or 4 strips (~3 x 1 inch) of dried mango
Put all except oatmeal in a 3- or 4-qt pot
Cover with water up to ½ full,
Bring to a boil and lower heat. Watch the boiling/simmering.
After cooking for 30 to 40 minutes, add the oatmeal
Put it in low simmer until it is slightly thickened.
Add boiling water if too thick. Cook for another 30 minutes.
That’s it!
It’s enough breakfast for 3-4 people; when refrigerated, I have 3 or 4 days of breakfast.
Most of the time, I eat grapes and mixed nuts (esp. walnut) with it because both are well-known in TCM as ‘life-prolonging’ tonics, like goji, they have been used in China for around 2,000 years, or more.
For more information, search “Job’s tears” in My Life & Rollercoaster Career (CreateSpace, 2018, pp. 211-212), Encyclopedia of Common Natural Ingredients used in Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics, 2nd Ed. (Wiley 1996, pp. 320-322) and its 3rd Ed., renamed Leung’s Encyclopedia of Common Natural Ingredients…(Wiley, 2010, pp. 384-385). It is also one of the several dozen common Chinese tonics (foods doubling as medicines) described in my Better Health with (Mostly) Chinese Herbs & Food (AYSL Corp., 1955, pp. 49-50), the last now out of print, but I think it is still available in the Czech and Japanese translated versions; among others.
Have fun discovering safe Chinese tonics.