Question of the day.

What tastes good and is good for you?

My answer:

This is of course an extremely subjective question, but I think there are lots of such things. Still, I wouldn’t mind if it was more of a pattern that good things taste good, rather than the other way around as it so often is. So, as for the good-tasting and healthy things, I could mention things like olives and kefir for example, which lots of people hate, but I love. Speaking of olives, I like most fruit and vegs, so that I won’t even be listing them or anything because it would be a lot less time consuming to write just the ones that I do not like. And speaking of kefir, I like pretty much all dairy, though whether all kinds of dairy are healthy seems to be quite a moot thing especially with stuff like milk.

Other than that, I love cocoa and it’s healthy, but of course we’re talking about the actual cocoa, not instant like Sofi prefers, that’s too sweet for me and not so healthy anyway. I like strong cocoa because you can make it taste almost like coffee and now that I can’t really drink coffee as regularly as I used to, it’s a nice alternative. People also say it has stimulant properties due to theobromine and can work like coffee in this respect, but it doesn’t really do it for me or not quite to this extent.

I like most kinds of nuts and almonds and they’re good for your brain. Speaking of nuts, I guess a good quality peanut butter isn’t pure evil either…

Oh and then there is all the spicy stuff – ginger, turmeric, chilli, Cayenne pepper, kalonji etc. – I love them! Also garlic, I love to eat it when I’m sick and feel the heat explosion all over my mouth, but it’s a shame with the smell. If it wasn’t the case, or if I were a true hermit, I’d probably eat garlic even more often than just when sick. Onion is decent too, but I only like it raw, and not quite as much as the other things I mentioned. Ginger seems to be good for all sorts of things, I especially like it fresh as it’s more gingery, although powdered is also good. But what I love about it when it comes to its health properties is that it can alleviate nausea and is an antiemetic, and is all emetophobics’ best friend. I like to suck on ginger root or drink ginger tea. Also, I haven’t tested this enough to say anything conclusive yet, but it seems like sometimes ginger can alleviate my migraines a bit, and it certainly can alleviate the migraine nausea. And as for chillies, I’ve heard that they speed up metabolism, which may not necessarily be something I need particularly badly at the moment but it’s really neat that there are foods with properties like that.

And salt, yay! I think I quite recently also wrote about salt and how I could just eat it on its own and lick it when I was a kid. I no longer do as much as that, but I still really like salt and salty things. It’s no longer like I need to have salt with every single thing that it fits in with, unless it’s something that really is yucky and tasteless without any salt, and I’m also happy to have herbs with some things instead of salt, but I do love salt. You hear everywhere how it’s super bad for your blood pressure and kidneys, and I’m sure it can be, especially if you don’t put much thought into choosing a good kind of salt, (we use Kłodawa salt which my Mum claims is a lot better than your average salt and better for people from our part of the world than Himalayan salt) but it’s still an important thing for people to include in their diet in moderation. I’ve always tended to have pretty low blood pressure, and when I was a child many people suggested that I eat more salt, which I was most happy to do, and my Dad always salted my meals generously, probably to compensate for the fact that he couldn’t do that for himself because his has been too high for a long time now. Although I’m not sure if it’s seriously helped in any substantial way long-term. My Mum has a theory that perhaps my childhood love of licking salt and eating it without anything else and salting everything had to do with that, that my body instinctively knew that I needed it or something. So yeah, while these days I don’t feel the need to use it SO much, and I try not to overdo it because I definitely don’t fancy finding myself on the other end of the blood pressure spectrum – low can be a real pain in the ass in various situations, but doesn’t have quite so many scary complications – I do really love salt!

Honey is another thing that comes to mind. I don’t eat it regularly, but I like it nevertheless.

What are such things for you? 🙂

Question of the day.

Recommend to us a lifestyle change.

My answer:

It’s a little hard, I think, because everyone of us can have a completely different lifestyle, has different needs etc. Something pretty universal would be I guess drinking more of healthy drinks. I have an impressionn that we, people in general, drink too little and if we do, these are often fluids that are paradoxically dehydrating like coffee or other caffeinated drinks or fizzy drinks, different very sugary juices, or alcohol, or other stuff like this. I know not all people like drinking just water, although I love it and think it’s just the best thing to drink, but if we’d at least drink some healthy teas, like green tea, or some natural juices, or other fresh and natural drinks that could really help us stay hydrated, that’d still be cool. My Mum, who as I told you multiple times is a lifestyle and health geek, found out a few months ago that actually the best thing to do is to drink water with a little little bit amount of… salt. You can either melt it in the water and then it’s yucky but you can be satisfied when you drink it that you are a total hero, or you can just put the salt in your mouth and then drink the water so it would be less yucky and will melt sooner. But it needs to be healthy salt, like Himalaian or something like this, it is pointless to drink it with your normal salt that you can get in every shop, you’d rather destroy your kidneys this way, or something else. Anyway, apparently if you get in the water with the right kind of salt you get more natrium this way as well as some other things that help your overall well-being, and, what may be a bit paradoxical for some, you can even drop down your blood pressure if it’s too high. Actually it’s quite logical thing if we’ll think that salt keeps the water in our body, although it doesn’t change the fact that this combination is pretty yucky so I myself rarely managed to drink it. My Mum has heard it works for many types of migraines, because they often happen when your natrium is low, and probably something else, and I have migraines very often and tried it, and it actually helped me. But this migraine can’t be full-blown, ’cause then I don’t think anyone would be able to drink water with salt, you’re already nauseous without it, so you need to do it before it fully develops if you want to see the effects. So that would be my vague recommendation for you guys. I can share more details with you as for that my Mum’s discovery if you’d like to find out more and din’t know about it before.

What would you recommend to me and other of my readers? 🙂