Native Foods and Healing Ways

Salmon promotes a healthy heart.

The late Howard McKinley, nearly 100 years old when he passed to the spirit world, remembered gathering wild yucca bananas from the hills and digging wild potatoes in Tse Ho Tso (Fort Defiance).

Marie Allen, too, remembered the stories of her grandmother, born in the fall of 1868. She gathered wild foods in spring and early summer - mariposa lilies, parsley, spinach, onion, wolfberries, currants, chokecherries and sumac berries.

Meanwhile in the north, traditional Ojibwe tea has amazed Canadian researchers who say it will slow and reverse the biological aging process. The herbal tea became popular in the mainstream during the 1930s when Renee Caisse, a nurse, used handpicked herbs and administered the tea to terminally ill patients with amazing results.

The herbs used in the brewed tea are burdock root, sheep sorrell, slippery elm bark, Turkish rhubarb, red clover herb, blessed thistle, kelp and watercress.

In a study by the Russian Ministry of Health, Ojibwe tea was found to reduce pain and increase immune cell production in Chernobyl victims suffering from ulcers, chronic Hepatitis B and virus-induced cirrhosis of the liver.

In Washington state, David Wikenheiser, naturopathic doctor who researches aging, said his study showed daily consumption of four ounces of the eight-herb tea formula reduced the biological age of volunteers in a 15-person test group by an average of 5.1 years.

"The combination of herbs in the tea formula produced a powerful anti-oxidative effect," Wikenheiser said. "Controlling oxidation and free radical production within the body is the key to slowing and reversing the biological aging process."

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