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I want to give you a health tip on how you can get more healthy fats and nutrients in
your diet by using an ancient food that many people don't know about. This food is called
ghee or clarified butter. In the practice of Ayurvedic healing the milk of cows is considered
to possess the essence or sap of all plants. And since ghee is the essence of milk, consuming
ghee is concentrating the nutritional and healing properties of plants. In Ayurveda,
ingesting ghee is like offering the finest of fuels to the fires of digestion. In other
words, it's thought to improve digestion, one of our most pressing needs of our population.
It's also known to destroy the aging process, in other words, increases longevity. It's
used to improve immunity and is thought to increase intelligence and memory. It also
has properties that aid in detoxification. In Ayurvedic medicine it is used for many
ailments and for some conditions is applied topically for wounds, infections and inflammatory
conditions. Ghee is different from butter in that the
moisture, proteins and sugars are removed through the clarification process. This makes
ghee a pure fat, which doesn't need to be refrigerated. It's made by boiling butter
for an hour and a half, or longer, to remove the moisture and cause the precipitation of
the proteins and sugars contained in butter. The advantage of ghee over butter is that
it has a much higher smoke point, so it has much more versatility in cooking. It also
contains more medium chain triglycerides than butter, which have been shown to have metabolism
benefits. Ghee would also be better for anyone with an allergy to milk or lactose intolerance
because the casein and lactose are removed. Ghee contains preformed vitamin A, vitamin
K2 and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). The average person doesn't get enough of these
important nutrients in their diet, so ghee is a great food to add to the diet. K2 is
important for our arteries and bones. CLA improves our metabolism and helps with weight
loss and preventing diabetes. Vitamin A is a powerful antioxidant and is critical for
many physiologic functions in the body, including our vision. Studies have shown that a large
portion of our population has a genetic change that greatly slows their conversion of the
plant forms of vitamin A (the carotenes) into the active form of vitamin A. So let's take
advantage of the wisdom of the Indian people in letting the cow doing this for us. So having
preformed vitamin A in the diet is very important for certain people, in fact, up to half of
the population can have these genetic polymorphisms. The problem today with many of the foods that
we consume is the industrialization of the food supply, and this certainly applies to
the processing of dairy products. I prefer my ghee to be made from raw milk and from
cows eating grass. If milk is pasteurized and homogenized, it's not the same as natural
milk. I recommend that the butter, from which ghee is made, is churned in a traditional
fashion. The problem is most butter today, even organic butter, is made with an extrusion
processes instead of churning. So the ideal way of getting ghee is to make it yourself
from raw milk. The Indian people believe that cooking butter to make ghee is actually a
health promoting activity in and of itself.