How Does This Ayurvedic Food Improve Wellness?

CLINICAL AYURVEDIC REVIEW

With the cool winds of autumn beginning to blow through many regions, you may find your body feeling cold and congested, longing for warmth and comfort. Battling the cold may seem like a necessary evil as fall deepens into winter. Yet, a simple remedy for cold hands and feet may be as close as your everyday spice rack. Long relied upon for its stimulating effect on the circulation, cinnamon warms your blood and your body into coziness with its sweet taste and powerful punch. The warmth it brings to cold hands and feet has also been used for conditions like Raynauld's Syndrome.

Expectorant for Your Lungs

Cinnamon not only helps your hands and feet, it stimulates circulation especially in the lungs and joints. It's pungent spiciness warms up the lungs and liquefies mucus congestion. You may have noticed that when you make tea with cinnamon, a thick, gooey substance settles to the bottom of your cup. This gooey property is called demulcent among herbalists and helps you expecorate any thick, kapha like mucus adhered to the bronchial tubes. Cinnamon's demulcency also coats the throat, soothing it. For best results, gargle with cinnamon, or squeeze a wedge of lemon into an herbal tea with 1/4tsp cinnamon.

Regulate Blood Sugar Levels

Cinnamon is a popular garnish atop many desserts. While many of us choose cinnamon in desserts for its unique taste, this choice also reflects the body's innate wisdom. Cinnamon regulates blood sugar and its stimulating pungency makes it perfect for heavy, sweet foods. Cinnamon also regulates metabolism of fats and sugars, helping with type II diabetes and insulin resistance.

Freshen Your Breath

Cinnamon's taste freshens the breath and is used in many commercial products. Natural anti-microbial properties in cinnamon cleanse the mouth, addressing the root cause of bad breath. Its stimulating fresh taste can also be used to quell nausea and stop vomiting. As an analgesic cinnamon is useful for toothache. Just take a pinch of the powder and apply directly onto the tooth.

Reproductive Tonic

The warming, stimulating and sweet qualities of cinnamon make it a powerful aphrodisiac. Just sprinkle cinnamon on your favorite dark chocolate to kindle amorous feelings. Cinnamon also stimulates oxytocin, the tend and befriend hormone. Oxytocin increases breast milk production and stimulates uterine contractions, useful during labor. The warming and stimulating qualities of cinnamon flush uterine congestion, relieving painful menstrual cramps and restoring normal, natural flow of the menses. Paradoxically, cinnamon's heat stimulates blood flow, while its dryness & astringency acts as a hemostatic (stops blood flow). That makes cinnamon useful for both light and heavy periods. Oxytocic herbs can stimulate miscarriages and should not be used during pregnancy.

Digestive Health

Like most pungent spices, cinnamon rekindles digestion. It is a favorite additive to counteract the mucus provoking qualities of dairy. Cinnamon's anti-microbial qualities also reduce gas and fermentation in the GI. Cinnamon's mild astringency is also useful in infant diarrhea and diarrhea from cold digestion. To increase astringency combine cinnamon with chalk or activated charcoal.

A Personal Experience of Cinnamon from Joseph's Journal January 16, 2010

The best way to experience an herb is on an empty stomach, early in the morning. Then sit on a comfortable pillow with eyes closed and examine its effects on the body. Each person will have a unique and different experience to share when sampling an herb. Here is an entry from John Immel's Journal after drinking a strong tea of cinnamon:

I experienced a rough palate and tension in the throat (evidence of astringency), pain in the back of head (high Vata due to astringency), throbbing of blood vessels in the temporal lobe (evidence of circulatory stimulant), opening of air passages, pressure in the lungs, increased heart rate, decreased sensitivity of the skin (analgesic effect), cooling of the eyes (alterative effect), expectoration which cleared my sinuses, and within a half hour, hunger. Initially I experienced the stimulating and upward moving qualities of cinnamon. Then as the heat warmed my Vata I became tired and fell asleep for several hours. Visually, cinnamon reminds me of the dry, cracked red mud of the desert

About Cinnamon

Cinnamon is a small evergreen tree in the Lauraceae family native to Sri Lanka. Other members of this family include sassafras, avocado, camphor, and spicebush. Trees of the laurel family, including cinnamon, predominate in the world's laurel forests. Many members of the family are used medicinally all over the world. Cinnamon grows best in almost pure sand, sheltered, with constant rain. It prefers heat with little temperature variation. When bruised the leaves smell spicy and have a hot taste.

The term laurel itself means an emblem of distinction of victory as in "To rest on one's laurels." Cinnamon is thus a plant of distinction and royalty. In the ancient world cinnamon was more precious than gold, a gift for monarchs and gods. The emperor Nero burned a year's supply of Rome's cinnamon to grieve the loss of his wife (whom he murdered).

Even the Bible is rich with references to cinnamon, further attesting to its importance in ancient times. Moses used sweet cinnamon and cassia to make oils for anointing. In proverbs a lover's bed is perfumed with myrrh, aloe, and cinnamon. In the Song of Solomon, the beauty of the beloved is described, "Cinnamon scents her garments like the smell of Lebanon." In ancient Egypt, cinnamon was included among several spices to embalm and preserve mummies.

Buying & Preparation

Commercial cinnamon is the dried inner bark from the shoots of coppiced trees. The bark is shaved into famous "quills" or tubes of shaved cinnamon bark. Making the quills is an art form to this day in Sri Lanka.