Elizabeth Yarnell's Blog, page 17

Natural Help for Bleeding Ears of Cats and Dogs

As our cat has aged, it seems her ears are becoming more prone to cracks and bleeding. Just last night I awoke to feeling drops of liquid hitting my arms and realized the cat was shaking her head and spraying me with blood from the crack on the tip of her ear. Yuck. Luckily, I [...]

Gluten-free Bread Option: Try Pancakes

One of the most frustrating aspects about going wheat-free or gluten-free is the loss of bread. For more than 5,000 years, bread in some form has been a staple food for human civilization, and it can be hard to find substitutes for those familiar, bread-centric food items. Like a sandwich. Let’s face it: there are [...]

Playing In the Grass Makes Me Itchy: Natural Relief for Itching, Rashes

Last night, after an hour or so of rolling around and playing games in the park across the street from our house, my daughter came into dinner and began complaining that her arms, legs, and face were itching. I could see her skin was looking irritated. I sent her directly into the shower and held [...]

Fruit Smoothies Are Easy and Healthy

I love getting freshly blended fruit and vegetable juices when I travel to tropical locales: maracuja juice at the Jugo bars in northeastern Brazil and papaya juice in Costa Rica stand out in my memory. And now I can add to that the fresh watermelon-mint juice smoothie I enjoyed at the Israeli markets last week. [...]

Tart Cherries Combat Jet Lag

Jet lag doesn’t have to be an unavoidable byproduct of traveling if you eat some dried tart cherries. My family recently returned from a fantastic family reunion on the other side of the world. It was a short vacation – only 10 days – without a lot of time to spare recovering from jet lag [...]

Diet Can Help Heal Chronic Anal Fissures

File this one under: There’s not much that a change in diet can’t help heal… NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Apr 29 – Along with medical treatment, a diet that curbs food hypersensitivity might help chronic anal fissures to heal, Italian researchers suggest. Roughly a fifth of patients whose fissures healed with this combined approach had [...]

Be a Smart Label Reader at the Grocery Store

Naturally Savvy published a new e-book: Label Lessons, Your Guide to a Healthy Shopping Cart. Filled with a ton of interesting information, it teaches you how to properly read product labels, and is their gift to you. I really like the way this e-book is laid out with the familiar product on one page, like [...]

8 Herbs for a Kitchen Garden

Not much compares to the culinary joy of picking fresh herbs to add to your kitchen creations. Wherever I land, there are a few staple herbs I like to grow in garden plots or pots every summer. Here’s my list of staple herbs to grow for culinary creativity. 1. Parsley. Parsley is great to grow [...]

3 Ways to Improve Your Mood Naturally

Depression affects a huge number of people in our country and prescriptions of anti-depressants are so common that I’ll bet you can name at least two people off the top of your head who take something to feel happier. That’s to say nothing of all the people you know who haven’t told you that they [...]

Recycle Your Underwear!

We compost, recycle papers and plastics, and limit our water usage, but one way to help the earth that never occurred to me was to recycle old underwear. Rodale.com offers five surprising ways to recycle underwear, including cutting it up and adding it to your compost bin (only if the underwear is 100% cotton, of [...]