Ginger

Ginger is incredible stuff

On Ginger

During my degree, I was taught that all viruses originated in the jungles of east Asia and all human parasites in Africa (bar bankers, I think they were from Europe).

I jest, however, Thai cuisine has a very holistic edge to it when done in house, at the regional level as it were. The verdant growth lends itself well to people having their own herb and spice gardens and as such, dried spices are rarely used. High quality, fresh herbs and spices picked straight off the plant and still warm from the sun is common even to the “peasantry”. As such, despite high levels of poverty, there are a lot of healthy, able and very elderly individuals in this part of the world.

As industrialisation has hit and high fat and sugar, low cost processed foods become more widespread, the health of the nation is suffering and as a result, their dependence on the state and the pharmaceutical industry increases https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/131/9/2417S/4687487

The evolutionary arms races between host and virus/parasite/pathogen are well documented. These arms races were happening in the jungles of the far east long before we are thought to have left Africa. Viruses are fairly simple things relatively speaking. Defences in plants evolved over millions of years in the planet’s leading viral hotspot seem likely to have transferrable applications to viruses not evolved to infect the plant.

Sir Alexander Fleming stumbled upon similar circumstance with the discovery of penicillin. Though, as I say, this is merely postulating a theory rather than stating known fact. Mightn’t the most potent anti viral plant compounds have resulted in the species that evolved in the spot with the greatest viral density on earth? One of those plants from this area is ginger. (Again, interesting conjecture, NOT science).

Ginger has a load of health boosting and cancer fighting properties https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3665023/

In addition to this, fresh ginger has been found to inhibit plaque formation in some viral infections https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23123794

This could reduce the amount of fluid produced by the lungs during infection.

A simple ginger beer recipe