Month: January 2016

Cold weather means that runny noses, coughs, the flu, and flu-like syndromes are going around. Traditional kaadha (काढा ), an Indian/Ayurvedic herbal tea can help us stay warm. There are literally hundreds of different recipes for kaadha; some simple and some elaborate. I like mine on the spicy side, as I will show you in this short film by Supriya Pandit. You can make the same tea in a much milder version, by going easy on the ginger, cloves, and pepper.

Kaadha is wonderful for keeping us hydrated. It helps us with those pesky symptoms of mild viral upper respiratory illnesses such as cough, sore throat, and sinus congestion. It is not meant to cure any of these conditions, but it can provide us some support and symptomatic relief.

In my clinical practice, I first make sure that the patient’s cold or cough symptoms are not due to a bacterial cause. For those patients, I treat them with a course of antibiotics. But the vast majority of patients have viral infections that get better with time. For them, I often recommend the proverbial “rest and plenty of fluids”. This is one of those fluids! Kaadha is an enticing, fragrant, delicious, and soothing brew. My patients who find plain water “boring” during a cold often tell me that they are much better with keeping up their hydration levels when they have something comforting like kaadha to drink.

Best of all, you don’t have to be sick to enjoy the taste of kaadha and benefit from its whole herbs and spices Try it out! It’s easy to make.

Recently, I had a chance to speak with our local news station about how spices and herbs can be beneficial supplements to our daily diet, when used carefully and in moderation. Ayurveda teaches us that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; especially when it comes to food. When we choose to eat whole plants rather than extracts or isolates, we are recognizing the inherent intelligence of nature expressing herself through the plant. When we cherry-pick only those molecules of an herb currently touted by the latest research, then repackage them in a quick and convenient form, such as in a pill, we are defying the wisdom of Prakruti, or Nature. When we chemically dissect a plant in the laboratory, encapsulate and bottle what we want, and discard the rest of the plant as chaff, we are doing ourselves a grave disservice; we are insulting the cellular intelligence of our bodies and that of the plant.