Mrs. Hong is my grandmother’s friend and she is 98 years young. Reportedly her own doctor told her to stop coming by so often because she had zero health problems. Zero. And she’s a delight to talk with to boot. So it would behoove anyone to heed health advice from such a lady and Mrs. Hong’s number one tip is “I eat lots of fungus.” Point taken. Uh, second tip? “My mother would make me chicken ginger soup every time after I gave birth.” And that’s seven times, by the way.
There’s a lot of literature out there on the health benefits of ginger touting it as a cure for everything from digestion problems, to repressing herpes outbreaks, to staving off fever, to alleviating arthritis, to lowering cholesterol…the list goes on. Unfortunately, so does the offerings of various (usually expensive) ginger snake oils. But according to Mrs. Hong, you only need to eat it. Fresh ginger is considered “heaty,” or the yang to your yin (or if you want to be boring and Western, sort of balancing acid (heaty) with alkaline (cooling)) and it helps with warming the body via things like blood circulation. If you want to alleviate motion sickness, try eating it or just cutting a slice and putting it under your tongue. If you want to help alleviate arthritis, cook with ginger. And if you want to restore your health and strength after a physical disturbance, such as giving birth, make chicken ginger soup. If you are in doubt of how seriously the Chinese take ginger, treat yourself to a trip to a Chinese general store and observe how they’ve got barrels of different gingers separated by price-point (it’s sort of delightfully odd to walk past two barrels o’ ginger, one at .99 a root and its neighbor at $65 a root, followed by the barrel o’ shark fins at $400 a pop, and then a bin of dried cuttlefish at $1 per pound. It’s sort of like the capitalist spirit combined with the communist dream–a hierarchy of value but everything is presented as equal). Now who are you gonna believe? The marketing team at GNC or the tao of Mrs. Hong? Personally, I’d go with the one who’s been around longer.
Filed under: Clean Food Daily, ginger, health, other, postpartum, soup
