Natural stress remedy -herbal teas

We usually start our day with a warm relaxing tea and at the end of the day again a warm cup of tea helps relieve tension and tiredness. A cup of tea (with some herbs) can help you get relief from stress and calm you down.

Herbal teas are healthy drinks you can get from plants and flowers. They are commonly easy to serve and also taste good. Herbal teas help to support our body system by natural healing for some diseases, providing relaxation, soothing nerves, improving circulatory system, cleansing toxins, and so on.

L-theanine in tea helps regains your tranquility. It has the ability to calm you. Studies show that  L-theanine (known as a amino acid) has the ability to cross through the barrier of the blood-brain and is also a remedy for stress and anxiety.                                                                  

There are many types of herbal teas, among the most popular are Chamomile, Ginger, Ginseng, Peppermint, Cinnamon, Jasmine, Chrysanthemum, Lemon, Orange, Rosella and Green tea. These teas can serve as relaxing as well as healthy drink. For health purpose, they are usually taken from the stems, barks, and roots part of plants. You can also mix some variants of teas as to get the combined benefits and taste.

Green Tea:  Green tea is often used to give us the boost we need to get going in the morning. While green tea is often caffeinated, it also possesses several stress reducing properties. The biggest benefits of drinking green tea are that it clears the mind while calming the nerves so you may continue your day with clarity and energy.

Mint Tea: Mint tea is a great way to unwind at the end of a hard day because of its relaxation properties. Not only do the minty leaves have a wonderful aromatic flavor but they also relax and quiet the mind – great for after those long days staring at a computer screen – and also soothe an upset stomach.

Passionflower: Shown in studies, the passionflower extract has the ability to calm you down because it increases the number of the chemical in your brain known as gamma-amino butyric acid or also known as GABA


Chamomile: If you are having trouble falling asleep, consider drinking some chamomile tea just before bed. In addition to settling feelings of nausea, chamomile tea also calms your nerves, thereby allowing you to enter a calm and relaxed state – just what you need when your mind refuses to slow down on its own.

Lavender: Similar to chamomile, lavender is a wonderful natural stress reliever, well known for its soothing abilities. However, lavender packs a bit more of a punch and can reduce everything from tension headaches to anxiety. It is also a great soothing tea for nervous exhaustion which can often be brought about from our busy and often stress ridden lives.

Lemon Verbana: An herbal tea with Lemon Verbena is just the dose you need to an upset stomach and nausea. If you have insomnia problem, you will find it to be just right for your curing this problem. Catnip - This herbal ingredient is well-known for its properties to reduce excitement and palpitations. When stomach is unable to digest properly, it results in digestion-related headaches. At such times, a cup of catnip tea is just the thing you need for relief. It’s very good for quieting the mind.

Linden: This ingredient relaxes muscles and nerves. It’s very good for making the mind calm and reliving headcheese caused by stress. If you are suffering from frequent nervous tensions, include Linden in your daily tea can bring down such problems and keep you calm.

Passiflora incarnate: Drop this ingredient into your herbal teas and see problems like tensions and irritation, vanish just as they came. Passiflora incarnate is well-know for its ability to reduce headaches caused by anxiety and stress. It’s also useful for women with PMS & a menstrual problem as it brings down the irritation and pain experienced during such times.

Skullcap: This ingredient is known for its abilities to relax tense muscles, reduce muscle spasms, calm nerves and reduce headaches. Women will find skullcap tea to be very relieving because it’s also know to bring down irritability associated with Premenstrual Syndrome.


Ginseng: When most people think of ginseng, they think of the miracle supplement that may help your mind stay sharp. While the jury may still be out on whether or not ginseng actually increases brain function, it may help you function better. Ginseng tea is quick to clear up mental exhaustion as well as stress so you are more productive and energetic – or completely relaxed if you so choose.

Tips to get more benefits form your herbal teas:

• Make sure that the water you boil for tea isn’t from a traditional water softener. These types of softeners balance the minerals in your water by using salt which winds up in your tea. There’s already too much sodium in the typical diet so it’s best to avoid it through your drinking water. Using regular tap water or that from an alternative water softener is a much better way to brew your tea. Not only will your tea taste great, but it will have better nutritional value over all.
• Teas are always better to drink while fresh.
• Herbal teas are better to serve wholly, chopping the part of leave or flower will cause the oils and components inside to release
• For long-term health, you can have one before every bedtime, it will promote your body system to relax and so you can sleep well. You may also drink herbal tea after meal or in the morning.
• Tea will not interact with any anxiety medications and is safe to take with any conventional medications. Tea bag may also be added to bath water for an overall relaxing moment.

Related: naturalstressremedies.com and www.ahealthy.us

* Stress relieving foods

* News at 'BBC' Black tea 'soothes away stress'

Menopausal Symptoms and Natural Remedies

More and more women, every day, are turning to natural alternative treatments to treat the symptoms they experience during menopause. Natural treatment options can provide options for menopausal women so they can reduce menopausal symptoms such as weight gain, hot flashes/flushes, night sweats, decreased libido and mood swings. The use of natural alternatives or complementary therapies is a popular choice for the management of menopausal symptoms.
Complementary and alternative therapies for menopause are medical treatments that are considered nontraditional. They include dietary and herbal supplements, acupuncture, chiropractic, and massage therapy, biofeedback, homeopathy, and eating certain foods that are thought to prevent disease or heal. Alternative treatments are often used alone, while complementary treatments are alternative treatments that are used in combination with traditional treatments, such as drug treatments or surgery. While menopause is a completely natural process, it can be quite distressing at the time for some women.


The reduction in estrogen, testosterone and progesterone hormones that occurs is responsible for the unpleasant symptoms commonly associated with menopause and although the process can last anywhere from 7-10 years on average, there are ways to ensure that they can be controlled and not result in total misery. Natural therapies for the management of menopausal symptoms such as weight gain, hot flashes, night sweats, decreased libido are proven effective.


Few alternative and Natural therapies: 
Phytoestrogens: Phytoestrogens are plant compounds that are similar in chemical makeup to the female sex hormone oestrogen, but much lower in strength. They act at the oestrogen receptor sites in a woman’s body, which may reduce menopausal symptoms in some women. Isoflavones, is a type of phytoestrogen found in soybeans, has received special attention for its ability to lessen the severity of hot flashes and night sweats.
One study found that symptoms were alleviated by approximately 50%, and supplementation with isoflavones improved symptoms in menopausal women experiencing hot flashes. Guggelsterones, green tea and bioperine: These key ingredients have been shown to maximize weight reduction and maintain weight loss on a long-term basis. Herbal remedies: Many all natural ingredients have been shown to decrease the intensity and frequency of hot flashes. The benefits of black cohosh reduce hot flashes and night sweats due to its estrogenic effects.
Other herbal remedies for hot flashes include licorice root, chaste berry, dong quai, motherwort, and red clover extract. 


Vitamin and mineral supplements: Vitamins and minerals can help replenish substances that become depleted as a result of hot flashes, and can help women manage the most common symptom of menopause. Taking B vitamins, magnesium, potassium, and vitamin C is important to replace lost nutrients, while vitamin E supplementation is linked with an overall reduction in hot flashes. 
Calcium and Vitamin D: These are key vitamins and minerals that have been proven effective in preventing and treating bone loss and osteoporosis in post menopausal women. They are essential in decreasing the risk of primary fractures. 
Related: www.consumerhealthanswers.com
Remember: It is important to understand that with any therapy, natural or pharmaceutical, careful review of potential side effects should
 be undertaken together with your health practitioner before use.


First published at 'factoidz'



Useful links:
* Natural Menopause 8 Natural Alternatives to Reduce the Symptoms of Menopause

Why use herbal and home remedies to cure and how to use these remedies effectively?

Using herbal or home remedies might be due to these reasons:

High cost of prescription medication, not having health insurance or severe side effects. Whatever reason may be, there are alternative and herbal options for almost any ailment you may have. Still you need to learn more about the effective use of herbal or home remedies. This article offers useful tips and ideas to use herbal and home remedies to get cure and better results.

Not all herbal remedies work the same for everyone though. Sometimes this is just due to differences in body chemistry. Just as you can be allergic to some types of food and prescription medications while others are not, you can have or not have a response to herbs that others do not.

Often though, the primary problem encountered when using medicinal herbs for health problems, is wrong uses. Many people for instance, will buy herbs and supplements based on savvy product packaging, advertising and marketing. Many hard pill tablets for instance, will have some herbs in them, but that's not all. Those pills often have many other miscellaneous ingredients in them which can counter-effect the herbs. And in many cases, the pills only have a small amount of actual herb in them: Too small an amount to be of any use.

Hard pill tablets don't dissolve well in water or our bodies, so they're not able to be mixed up into tea, poultice or salve form. And if they're too hard to mix into these forms, they're not likely to be dissolved well inside our bodies either, thus they won't do us much good when taking them. If the pills also have very little actual herbal content in them, they're also of little use for medicinal means.

So the first step in learning to use medicinal herbs for yourself or your family, is to learn to buy true 100% herbs. The best kind are those which come in gelatin capsules, and have the ground herb inside them. These can be opened up and the herb powder poured out, or simply dropped into a mixture and after a few minutes the gelcap will dissolve, leaving just the powdered herb.

Part of learning how to buy herbs involves becoming adept at reading the labels. There are many products on the market today which appear to be one thing, when closely looking at the label tells you there's more to the picture.

Reading the labels will also help you understand dosage needs too. Since herbs are sold as food supplements only in the United States, there are no medicinal related dosage instructions on them. Part of learning to use medicinal herbs for medical purposes involves learning which dosages work best for which problems.

Herbs can come in many different dosage amounts too. If you're constipated and decide to take some Alfalfa or Chlorophyll to relieve the problem, you'll have drastically different results if you're taking 60mg instead of 600mg. 600mg is very likely to move your bowels within an hour or two of taking it, whereas 60mg or even 100-250mg might not do the trick.

This same example applies when you're taking herbs to relieve a headache, or kill an ear infection. White Willow for instance, often comes in capsules of 300mg. So taking two of these might work for a headache, but that's not the same dosage as regular Tylenol is. So you may find you actually need three white willow pills if your headache is fairly bad.

The opposite can happen in this respect too though. It's not uncommon to find Cayenne pills which are much stronger than they need to be for taking as a daily supplement. And since they're so strong, they can often make your stomach burn if you take them without food.

Another common problem people have when trying to use herbs as medicine, is a lack of knowledge, or mis-understanding of either the herbs they're using, or the symptoms they're having. This problem is not restricted to herbs and alternative remedies though, we see it happen often with over the counter medications too.

Many women for instance, who have never had a vaginal yeast infection, will go to the drugstore and buy anti-fungal ointment to treat it when they think they have one. This often causes the side effect of making them more susceptible to getting a yeast infection, because the bacteria in their body has had the opportunity to become resistant to the anti-fungal medication she used.

Now to the best of my knowledge, there is no resistance build up effect by bacteria and germs against herbal remedies, but there are plenty of times someone takes the wrong herbs for the problems they're having.

A common example actually, is the use of Echinacea. This herb has become quite popular in the last five to ten years, but many people think it's supposed to keep you from getting sick with a cold or the flu. And when it doesn't, they think using herbal medicine is a bunch of bull. The problem though, is that Echinacea doesn't actually keep you from getting sick. It can help keep you from getting AS sick as you normally would. And it can help you to shorten the amount of time you're sick. But it doesn't normally keep you from getting sick completely.

And again, if you're buying the trendy products which "contain Echinacea" instead of buying actual herbs, you're not going to see much - if any - success from these products.

An example of how some people use the wrong things for treatment, is kidney stones. Most kidney stones are calcium based, and these can be dissolved fairly easily with simple lemon juice. There are several other types of kidney stones however, and if you have one of those kinds, the lemon juice remedy may not work for you.

It's also important to reiterate the importance of being fully aware of what you're using too. If you go to the store and buy powdered lemonade, it's not likely going to have much - if any - real lemon juice in it. In fact, many things called "lemonade" in the store, are actually just lemon flavored sugar drinks. And these will not help with any kind of kidney stones. You must buy and use real lemon juice, or better yet: Real lemons to get fresh squeezed juice from.

There's another very important trend you should know about where herbal remedies are concerned, because we've seen it far to often in recent years and it really causes a lot of confusion for many people.

Garlic is an herb you will see mentioned for use in many remedies. This is because garlic is quite powerful. It is a natural antibiotic, antiseptic, and anti-fungal herb.

The primary healing compound in Garlic is called Allicin. One milligram of allicin has the same potency as 15 standard units of Penicillin. Allicin however, is also the source of the strong smell Garlic has. And unfortunately, it has become popular these days to buy "odor free" Garlic tablets, capsules, pills and liquids. What people don't realize though, is that without the odor, the garlic is almost powerless. Because it's primary healing ingredient has been removed along with the odor. This is unfortunately another marketing and sales tactic. Many people don't want to have "garlic breath" all day long, so the idea of getting all the healing benefits without the smell is quite appealing. It's a waste of time and money though, because again: It will not work if it's odorless. A better option is to eat some fresh parsley or take any other herb which is also high in Chlorophyll, to neutralize the garlic smell.

And last but not least for this part of our series, you need to be aware that some herbs can have side effects, and interactions with other medications - herbal or prescription.

There are herbs which will cause problems if too much is taken for instance. The cayenne example we gave earlier is a common one, if you take a large dose of cayenne in pill form without eating, you will get a burning sensation in your stomach. This hurts for some people.

Other herbs have more severe consequences though. If an insulin dependent diabetic takes too much golden seal for instance, they could go into shock because golden seal is a natural source of insulin. The same applies to hypoglycemics, too much golden seal can drop their blood sugar levels too low.

A popular herb used for hot flashes during menopause is Black Cohosh, and this herb can cause headaches if too much is taken. Other herbs can cause spikes in blood pressure, and there are even some which will cause a pregnant woman to have a miscarriage.

So it's very important to learn everything you can about all the effects an herb has. Often herbs will become popular for just one reason, and no one has any idea the same herb can be used for a variety of other things, or may cause a variety of other problems.

And be sure you learn how to read labels, to make sure you're getting the proper potency of herbs you buy, and to be sure you're not adding misc other chemicals into your system that could be potentially harmful.

Statements made in this article may not be approved by the FDA, and should not be taken as professional medical advice.


Source: 'HerbalRemedies.info'

* More articles on 'Herbal remedies'

Natural remedies for pain relief and cure in osteoarthritis

As we age, many of us have to suffer some kind of age related diseases. Arthritis is one of the aging diseased which turns into osteoarthritis a painful condition called "wear and tear". Symptoms of osteoarthritis include joint pain and stiffness. Osteoarthritis may affect any joint, including the hand, wrist, neck, back, knee, and hip. Osteoarthritis treatment depends on the joint but often includes medication and exercise.

Treatment of osteoarthritis with regular drugs and side effects:

The first drug generally used in the treatment of osteoarthritis is aspirin. It is often quite effective in relieving both the pain and inflammation. One side effect of aspirin and other (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs)NSAIDs that is often not mentioned is their inhibition of cartilage repair and acceleration of cartilage destruction. Since osteoarthritis is caused by a degeneration of cartilage it appears that while NSAIDs are fairly effective in suppressing the symptoms, they possibly worsen the condition by inhibiting cartilage formation and accelerating cartilage destruction. This has been upheld in studies which have shown that NSAIDs use is associated with acceleration of osteoarthritis and increased joint destruction. Simply stated, aspirin and other NSAIDs appear to suppress the symptoms by accelerate the progression of osteoarthritis. Their use should be avoided.

Five natural remedies for pain relief in osteoarthritis:

1) Avocado/Soybean Unsaponifiables: Avocado/soybean unsaponifiables, an extract made from avocado and soybean oils, can improve the pain and stiffness of knee and hip osteoarthritis and reduce the need for non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).

2) Glucosamine and Chondroitin Sulfate: A naturally occurring substance found in high concentrations in joint structures appears to be nature's best remedy for osteoarthritis. This compound is glucosamine. Glucosamine is responsible for stimulating the manufacture of substances necessary for joint repair.

Numerous double-blind studies have shown glucosamine sulfate to yield as good as or even better results compared to NSAIDs in relieving the pain and inflammation of osteoarthritis. Glucosamine sulfate not only improves the symptoms including pain, it also helps the body repair damaged joints.

(Glucosamine, also called chitosamine, is a natural substance that is found in the covering of shellfish)
You can get this natural remedy with the name of 'glucosamine chondroitin' at many stores around your area.

3) Acupuncture: The World Health Organization has identified more than 40 conditions that acupuncture can treat, including osteoarthritis.

4) Yoga: It is safe and effective for people with osteoarthritis. Yoga's gentle movements can keep build strength, flexibility, and balance and reduce arthritis pain and stiffness.

5) Massage Therapy: Massage can help to relieve muscle tension associated with osteoarthritis. Joint pain can cause surrounding muscles to become tense. Massage boosts circulation to the affected joint, which decreases joint stiffness and promotes cartilage repair.

Note: If you are allergic to shellfish, do not take glucosamine unless you have discussed it with your doctor. Some glucosamine is made from shellfish covering.

Useful links:
* 'Osteoarthritis Pain Relief Remedies'

* A very useful article about 'Natural treatment for osteoarthritis' at 'Ayurvedic cure.com'