A Hack For Your Rack

Get your mind out of the gutter, today we're talking about spices

Did you know that your spice cabinet is one of **the** healthiest places in your kitchen?

Spices don’t just add flavor to your food. They add vitamins, minerals, and loads of antioxidants.

(Antioxidants are substances that inhibit oxidation, a chemical reaction that produces free radicals. A diet high in antioxidants reduces your chances of getting certain diseases, including brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and some cancers. Antioxidants find and clear free radicals from the body. In doing so they prevent, reduce, or even reverse any damage done by oxidation.)

Why are spices so good for you?

While specific health benefits vary by spice, spices are either dehydrated or fresh plants. And plants contain many nutrients essential to human health.

“The vitamins and minerals, phytochemicals and antioxidants in plants help keep your cells healthy and your body in balance so that your immune system can function at its best,” according to the University of Texas’s MD Anderson Cancer Center.

As herbalist Donnie Yance explains, plants in nature create all kinds of natural defenses to protect themselves from drought, environmental toxins, and diseases, as well as from animals that want to eat them.

These natural defenses often translate into health benefits to humans, especially when we eat wild-grown plants. 

Organic only, stored in glass containers 

In order to get the full benefit from spices, it’s important to purchase ones that were grown without harmful pesticides and herbicides. Buy your organic spices in glass jars only. Plastic containers, especially when heated, will leach harmful chemicals into your food. 

Now let’s take a closer look at the health-giving properties of three of my favorite spices and **then** I’ll tell you the hack for your spice rack. 

Cayenne pepper

A powerful anti-cancer spice, cayenne pepper is high in vitamin C and carotenoids (the same compounds that give carrots their lovely orange color). Cayenne pepper, and other hot peppers, have myriad health benefits.

As Sonya Angelone, R.D., a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, explained to a journalist from Women’s Health, “Peppers with capsaicin have been shown to reduce cholesterol and triglycerides, and help keep cells from sticking together and forming blood clots.”

I add cayenne pepper to soups, homemade bone broth, and salad dressing. I also use it liberally to season baked chicken wings (along with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and a heap of Italian seasoning). 

Since puppies don’t like cayenne, you can mix a few teaspoons with warm water, let it sit overnight, and use this as a spray on anything you don’t want your canine baby to chew. 

We also use cayenne as a natural ant repellant. So every spring when the ants start marching across the window sills to the compost container in the kitchen, we clean the sills and then sprinkle cayenne on them to keep the ants away. 

Fresh garlic

Garlic is one of the most health-giving foods you can eat. You knew that already.

Add as many cloves of garlic as you can to the savory food you make! It’s a wonderful spice for soups and stews. I add at least a clove or two of garlic (unpeeled) to a cup of rice when it’s cooking; and when I remember, I bake a whole head of garlic along with whatever is cooking in the oven.

Baked garlic had a sweet flavor and a soft almost gooey consistency. If you’ve never tried it you’re in for a treat. 

When you’re clearing your body of cancer (as I am right now), you should eat raw and cooked garlic at every meal, or as often as you can. 

Garlic is also a powerful natural antibiotic, antiviral, and anti-fungal, according to a growing body of peer-reviewed scientific studies.

If you have a yeast infection or cancer sores in your mouth, paint the infected area three times a day with raw garlic (this might sting). Do this for 3 days and the infection will be gone. 

If you have a herpes sore on your privates, you can thinly slice raw garlic and put it in your underwear. 

Try giving your sick child a foot massage with organic garlic and olive oil before bed. Then cover their garlicky oily feet with socks. This is a little messy, but it’s also a very sweet to do. The garlic will help fight the infection and nine times out of ten your child will wake up feeling much better. 

Garlic-mullein oil is also a natural and effective treatment for ear infections.

Nutmeg

It smells delicious. It tastes great. When you bake with it in the wintertime, it fills the house with a warm, cozy feeling. And nutmeg has some astonishing health-giving properties. Among other benefits, nutmeg has been found to help with sleep and anxiety, to boost cognitive function, and to clear out toxins from the liver. 

In 2016 I went to Zanzibar to conduct media trainings with rural women who were working as solar engineers. Zanzibar is a country where nutmeg is cultivated. I was told that it is also a powerful and effective aphrodisiac for women. Young women on their wedding night are served a porridge made with nutmeg to help get them in the mood to make love. 

But if you eat too much nutmeg, it will have a different effect. Nutmeg can make you high. In his youth, Malcolm X used nutmeg as a hallucinogen, according to his biographer Manning Marable. 

My favorite way to eat nutmeg is to buy the whole nut and grate it onto warm drinks and baked sweet potatoes, and also to add freshly grated nutmeg to oatmeal, healthy cakes, and homemade granola.

Now for the spice-rack hack

Oregano, paprika, rosemary, turmeric. Virtually every spice on your rack will help you be and stay healthy.

So what’s the hack?

When you buy spices in glass jars they always come with sifter caps, those round plastic lids that prevent you from mistakenly using too much at a time.

Throw that sh*t away, my friends. You don’t need a sifter cap on your spice jars. You shouldn’t be trying to prevent yourself from dumping too much of any given spice into your food.

The opposite!

It’s good to cultivate the habit of using a liberal amount of spices. So if a recipe calls for a teaspoon of oregano, use two to three teaspoons instead (more if you’re using the fresh spice). Turmeric will jazz up your rice, making it a lovely yellow color and adding myriad health benefits. Don’t use it shyly. With 99% of spices more is usually better.

Sifter caps gone, you will likely add more of the spice than you meant to use. And, with spices, that’s exactly what you want to do.

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About the author:

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning science writer, sought-after speaker, and author/editor of eight books.