Health & Wellness Investigations

Whew! I've been super busy lately with an insane amount of yardwork (and training people at work, where I usually do these things), so things have been a little slow on the medical-research front. However, since my jalapeno plant is currently producing an insane number of jalapenos, I did take a break to make some absolutely delightful salsa, which I will share the recipe for! Ingredients: ~4 small-medium, fully ripe tomatoes, sliced (large slices fine) 3 jalapeno peppers, with seeds, cut in large chunks*. 1/2 medium sweet onion**, diced (large chunks fine) Cilantro - I used about 2/3 of a bunch from the grocery store, but use to taste Salt & Pepper to taste - I added about 1/2 tsp salt and 1 tsp pepper but do to your own taste!! *I left the seeds in to create medium-spice salsa. You can remove the seeds for a more mild version, or use a hotter pepper - like an habanero - for a hot version. **you can use Vidalia onions instead, but don't use red, yellow, or cooki

Today at work, in my daily scroll through health-related news articles, I came across this article in Time magazine, which claimed that they had found a cure for peanut allergies. This is huge. I can’t imagine life without peanut butter and I’ve often joked that if I ever had a kid with a deadly peanut allergy I’d have to give up the kid. Okay, that’s a joke. I would never give up my kid for anything short of chocolate (okay, okay, I’ll stop). But peanut allergies suck, and they are becoming increasingly common ...as are other allergies. According the magazine article, a group of Australian researchers found great success in administering a probiotic supplement to kids with peanut allergies, that contained tiny amounts of peanuts. Four years later, 67% of the children treated with the probiotic + peanuts were able to eat peanuts comfortably. Time magazine is usually pretty good about reporting objectively on science studies, and author is conscientious about cautionin

In the spirit of the recent posts about eggs, I thought I’d share some things that you can do with the egg shells . My mom always kept a container in her kitchen for used eggshells, and now I do the same thing. Saving the shells takes about two seconds, and it doesn’t cost anything - win win. In my house, the shells have two main uses… Plant Food: This is my most common use for the shells. I crush them and put them in the soil of my houseplants and herbs - the shells contain a lot of calcium which is good for the soil. My mom always swore by them for tomatoes especially - a lot of the time blossom end rot is caused by a lack of calcium in the soil, and eggshells can help with that. I don’t have tomato plants (yet), but I figure the shells can’t hurt my soil! People Food: When I make stock, I’ll sometimes grind up a few shells in my coffee grinder until they make a fine powder and add them to the stock. This extra calcium is important in my diet because I don’t get a lot of d