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Health Benefits of Ginger

Ginger has long been known as a very healthy food. It has anti-cancer properties and is recognised as healthy by both modern and ancient systems of medicine. Have a read to see why you should start eating more ginger.

Meeting Ginger Health in India

I travel to India on an annual basis and on my first trip there I became seriously ill with the dreaded “Delhi Belly”. Within a space of one week I lost close to 10 kilograms (not pounds, kilograms!) of weight from loss of fluid, etc. Luckily, however, I was staying next to a buddhist monastery and as soon as the monks found out I was sick I was inundated with traditional Chinese and Tibetan medicines as well as every home remedy that one could think of.

I got better pretty quickly but the main item of interest for me was a drink that the Indian’s drink everyday called a ‘Lemon, Ginger and Honey Tea’. Now, it is not a tea but a hot drink that is drunk like a tea. It is amazing tasting and after talking to the locals about it I realised that many see it as a form of medicine - one my local friends even claiming he has never had a cold in his life because he drinks one a day without ever missing it.

The way to make this very tasty drink is to boil the kettle, slice a two or three inch piece of ginger into thin strips with no bark left on them and add them to a cup along with a big teaspoon of honey and a good squeeze of lemon. Stir and enjoy. It is very relaxing.

Ancient Indian Medicine and Ginger

India’s form of ancient medicine, otherwise known as Ayurvedic medicine, lists ginger as one of the best foods you can eat, especially when you have a cold.

Ayurvedic medicine works on a system of balancing the body’s internal energies by looking at the different heats and colds that go on inside us. For example, one gets a cold when the energies run cool and this manifests with a running nose, etc. Each food is listed in a category of hot, cold and so on and the lemon, ginger and honey tea meets all the requirements for a healthy drink.

Lemon and Honey Health Benefits

This is a topic for a later post but I wanted to briefly mention that lemon and honey are also excellent health foods in their own right. Honey has been used for thousands of years - the Ancient Romans using it as an antibiotic.

The special honey native to New Zealand, Manuka Honey, is known as the worlds strongest form of honey antibiotic. It has been known to cure many skin and flesh infections when applied to the wound. However, I would rather my readers went to the hospital if they have a flesh wound! Let’s just focus on what it can do for your insides!

I will focus more on lemon and honey’s health benefits in a later post.

Ginger and Car Sickness

My mom always used to give me ginger tablets when I was a young kid getting sick in the back of the car. Turns out she was right - science has shown that ginger is effective in relieving nausea. And not only car sickness nausea, but most forms of the upset tummy.

This relates back to what the monks told me in India - ginger is very good for settling and healing your stomach. With all the damage our stomachs get these days from drinking, coffee, processed foods and stress a little bit of ginger is exactly what we need.

Other Health Benefits of Ginger

Ginger has also been shown to clean and thin the blood thus positively affecting the heart and almost every other organ in the body.

Chinese medicine also shows that when the stomach is health, the internal energies are healthy and are able to flow about the body much more freely. This will impact on everything you do.

Conclusion
Although ginger may not be able to fix all of your health problem I put a lot of faith in its excellent health benefits. I would hope that some women start to add ginger to more meals simply for its potential to do good.

Does anyone know of any other benefits that ginger may have?

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