Chapter 11 – Where’s the Juice?

‘………..One of the most important liver cleansers is JUICING. And if I had all the knowledge and information I have now back then, I would have been a lot healthier, but then I wouldn’t have such a story to tell. Instead, I drank hot chocolate and ate millionaires’ shortbread on a daily basis to cheer myself up. This in turn fed my digestive issues, and created more eczema. It wasn’t until I was referred by my GP to the hospital for an allergy test, that I discovered I had intolerance to dairy and artificial colours.

I stopped eating all dairy, and in those days this was quite difficult, as dairy alternatives were not readily available. No almond, rice or hazelnut milk, and no soya margarines in supermarkets. The only substitute was something called ‘Granose’ that you could get only from health food shops. The soya milk tasted musty and the margarine was very bland. I didn’t eat dairy for months and my skin improved, but I had developed IBS. Well, in those days if you had it, you didn’t know what it was, and Doctors didn’t really have a solution for it, other than giving you a delightful product called Fibre Gel. It was a client who recommended that I see her herbalist. Expensive, unusual, and I had to travel to find her.

She used iridology to help diagnose what was wrong, and gave me some quite disgusting tonic to drink. The most powerful information I came away with was:

1 Brew your tea:

I I used to drink what I called ‘quick tea’ made by having the first cup from the pot before it had chance to brew. I was drinking it black due to lack of dairy and allowing the tea to brew made it way too strong. It was explained to me that tannin is released first when the boiling water hits the tea and this is acidic. It then takes 5 minutes for the caffeine to be released. The caffeine then neutralises the acid.

With the advent of one cup tea bags the brewing of tea has become a thing of the past. A quick dunk for most people to get a decent colour, and usually drunk first thing in the morning as we are British and like our tea, all you are doing was drinking acid. Lovely.

Obviously this isn’t the same for herbal teas but even those should be brewed to ensure all the nutrients are released. Take your TIME. The best way to have black tea is to brew it correctly with more water than normal if it’s just for you or, add hot water to your cup when everyone else is adding their milk. Use a tea pot. That’s why they were invented.

2 White bread and Jam is a very bad combination.

I used to eat a lot of white bread, especially at the time of the month when I couldn’t eat chocolate due to my intolerance to dairy – this was before the introduction of Green and Blacks, and way before Raw Chocolate was even heard of. To sweeten this, I used to cover it in raspberry jam. Delicious! It certainly sorted out my craving for sweet things. What it ‘gave’ me in return was Candida. A continual monthly cycle followed every period, and I was plagued for years. All the GP could offer was Canesten and I had this on a continual repeat prescription. No advice at all. Just something to help the symptoms.

It was this brilliant herbalist who told me the sugar in the jam was combining with the yeast in the bread even before my saliva could work on it, and yeast was forming in excess. This was causing an explosion of Candida in my gut every month. And there I was thinking I was being really ‘good’ staying away from dairy and chocolate. What an eye opener this was. So logical and even so my GP had no interest in this at all.

I stopped this cycle and cured my Candida, and also in turn cured my eczema which had got quite out of control on my forehead, neck and wrists. Such a roundabout way, and quite a journey to get there, but what now seems so simple, was actually difficult to grasp in those days.

Many years have passed since then and we I can now tolerate a little dairy, so a well made ice cream, not one filled with additives, or a lovely hot chocolate on the mountain while skiing does not cause my eczema to flare. I do however find these foods quite rich now and prefer to make smoothies with almond milk, and I rarely have ice cream……’