As a young lady, I watched a relation of mine heal quickly from a gunshot injury because she was placed on a fruit and vegetable diet after being discharged from the hospital. I grew up surrounded by plants carefully harvested by a father who spent decades teaching Botany in one of the nation’s most prestigious university. These are the things that gave me a burning passion to let people know the benefits of eating natural diets and the use of herbs to treat ailments.
By putting man in the Garden of Eden after creation, God seemed to be passing a message on the right kind of diet for mankind. However, it is unfortunate that man has always been rebellious by not eating these God-given foods and this is why a lot of people are sick.
Healing with medicinal plants is as old as mankind itself. Awareness of medicinal plants usage is as a result of the many years of struggles against illnesses due to which man learned to pursue drugs in barks, seeds, fruit bodies, and other parts of plants. Man has also learnt from watching many animal species create their own pharmacies from ingredients that commonly occur in nature. All Aboriginal poeples all over the world depended on plants for food, fiber, and medicinal uses. They acquired indigenous knowledge which has persisted till date. Most of the research in the area of Ethnobotany has benefited from the indigenous knowledge of Aboriginal peoples all over the world .These people will remain relevant in the development of knowledge about plants because they are the custodian of the genetic resources of plants . The drugs you use were once in the wild!
l have seen many wonders in nature: women with polycystic ovarian syndrome had their menses induced naturally; I have read stories of people who refused chemotherapy and got healed of their cancers by sticking to natural diets; I was there when a young boy was intoxicated with alcohol and processed locust beans (iru) came to the rescue; I used to have ulcer -I was given loads of antibiotics, but I got no relief until I tried nature!
When I was younger, going to my village for holidays with my siblings was a usual thing. The source of drinking water then was river water. The people drank the water and they were healthy; they had strength to do their farm work, none suffered from a water borne disease! I can remember vividly now that one evening; there were shouts near my maternal grandmother’s house, out of curiosity, we went there and shocked at what we met – a woman had her baby in the house
I had my National Youth Service Corps in Garkawa, Plateau State; there were wells of water without coverings and after each rainfall, the water becomes muddy. That was how they used the water and they were healthy.
The only answer to all these is that these people were eating right. The greatest benefit you can enjoy by eating natural diets is that your immune system will be fighting infections for you. This explains why all the people were so healthy even with the kind of water they drank.
A lot of references have been made to the benefits of eating natural diets: Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, said “leave your drugs in the chemist’s pot if you can heal the patient with food.” He also said “let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food.” Hippocrates favoured the use of food in treating patients. Thomas Edison also said “the doctor of the future will no longer treat the human frame with drugs but rather will cure and prevent diseases with nutrition.”
One good thing about all these natural foods is that they heal our body; in fact, they have the same effect as the drugs we take. No wonder Dr Pfeiffer said “for every drug that benefits a patient, there is a natural substance that can achieve the same effect.” For example, strawberries have the ability to block pain receptors in the body the same way aspirin does.
Concerning the use of herbs to treat ailments, a lot of people think it is fetish. This is a wrong mindset! You can use herbs to treat ailments without chanting incantations! I had great difficulty in convincing a man to be chewing alligator pepper for his low sperm count sometimes ago. Alligator pepper has an ingredient called flavonoids; it is this ingredient that helps in boosting sperm count. The man’s refusal is due to the fact that herbalists do use alligator pepper for fetish purposes.
Another time I was discussing with a friend and she said her pastor once told her that if it not because people would think he is fetish, he would still be bathing with black soap. My judgement that day was, “I don’t care about what people say; it is the motive behind what you do that determines whether it is a sin or not.”
I use black soap (ose dudu). I buy the soap, mix with honey, lime, camwood, aloe vera and other natural things I lay my hands on. I use Shea butter (ori) as my body cream. There is nothing fetish about all these.
Some people have extreme knowledge about herbs; if you are instructed to pluck a herb at a particular time of the day, there is still nothing fetish about it. It may be because the active ingredients of the plants are activated at that particular time.
You are probably on medications for an ailment for a long time now and you have not seen improvements in your health. Why don’t you try eating right? Eat more fruits and vegetables and reduce your intake of processed foods. Remember, there were no cakes, doughnuts, sausages and bottles of coke in the Garden of Eden when God put man there!
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying people should not visit their doctors. After all, we have all done it wrong diet-wise all our lives and a lot of us are sick and even on prescription drugs. All I am saying is that eating right has a profound effect on our generally wellbeing.
On this platform, I shall be discussing fruits, vegetables and their health benefits. I shall be talking about the lifestyle changes we need to make to stay healthy too. After all, health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not the absence of disease or infirmity. Though man was chased out of Eden, I would like you to join me in this quest to create another Eden for ourselves.
Olufunke Faluyi writes on healthy eating, nutrition and herbal medicine
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Thanks for the great revealations about herbs and natural diets,pls how to use agbalumo seeds for treating hernia?