Pushing the frontiers in Natural Botanicals exploration

Nature really has some prized secrets, which, given enough time and appetite we will continue to unravel. That all Earthly inhabitants are able to live off food which is found on land, sea or air is a minor miracle of mutual collaboration, we upset that balance at our peril.

Nature has gifted us foods of different smells, sights, sounds and tastes. They come, often conveniently, in handy packaging and in all sizes, colours and textures too. Some, like honey, can still be fresh’ after 100 years, yet others start to go off and spoil after a few days or less – such as milk left out in the burning mid-day sun. But food as medicine, well, that’s hardly a new concept. So much of medicines has been based on plant based ingredients. Often, we need to go back to the future, to learn in part, what we have likely forgotten in our striving for convenience and ‘fast’. After all, any food that comes in ‘fast’ through our car window, may in fact accelerate us that little bit quicker to an earlier grave.

Many a past civilisation first offered food as anointed gifts to ‘those who must be appeased’ to those who would otherwise visit a plague upon us and on generations to come. Food has occupied a place of reverence for millennia and has rightly gained its’ respected position with an ability to kill or cure.

Nature teaches us to that there are food sources and natural botanical cycles that are best obeyed if we are to reap the greatest benefits from her bounty. And far, far, beyond a chocolate coconut bar.

From nuts and seeds we are provided with the natural fats that keep our cells firing on all cylinders, while with Natures’ plants we encounter gentle aids to healthy digestion. From her fruits we get bitter and sweet to keep the whole system tempted with flavours and in balance, throughout. In the Fungi Kingdom, as well as being completely separate from plants and animals, there is something beyond romance with names such as Porcini, Red-capped, Reishi, Chanterelle and Shitake. But what name can beat the Albatrellus Confluens. Indeed, from Albatrellus comes Grifolin an anti-cancer and anti-tumour molecule.

But Nature doesn’t find fault or favour, it matters little what climate you live in or under. In regions as cold as can be, peoples’ such as the Inuit thrive on their adaptation to a diet of salmon and walrus. As for others in hotter climates choosing to eat healthy fats, nothing seems to beat extra virgin olive oil. While, for a between meal snack nothing beats the ever abundant, not so humble, anti-oxidant capable, apple. Nature is truly amazing, and in Natural Botanicals we have another frontier awaiting our greater exploration. Our Centre aims to look under that bush, bulb and tree with gusto.