Of course, it’s acidity!! Thanks for this post. For years, I was subjected to steroid intervention for adult set asthma. Until I got sick of it and did my own reading and research.

Overall health is almost always related to gut health. I got all my grandmother’s recipes from my mom and sought out a homeopath. He is also a MD and so I was always supported by diagnostics/lab tests. So I knew it was working and it wasn’t a ‘placebo’.

When I was growing up, we had a nanny who was a toothless crone from the villages of the deepest south of India. But when she opened her mouth, she’d only speak in rhyming verses. She was determined to make a poised young lady out of the ragamuffin imp that I was...and she had these tamil folk songs that she’d sing while she cooked. She was illiterate..couldn’t read or write..and that’s how they taught her as a young girl to remember recipes. She knew everything about plants and cooking and strange habits.

Some of the tidbits I remember vaguely:

1. Mothers always wear a piece of turmeric hanging on a thread because it’s always the easiest to reach for as first aid.

2. When babies were born, the umbilical cord was dried and when dessicated..pounded with local herbs and stuffed into a silver locket/pendent that the child wears as a charm. If the child falls ill due to any incurable/undiagnosable disease, the locket was opened and just a pinch of the cord was sufficient to cure any disease. I thought this was magic!

3. She also told me stories about snake women who were raised from girlhood with a little bit of venom added to their diet and they were trained to be spies or security guards for the kings. So there’s that.

4. Dried ginger, black pepper and long pepper can cure almost any ailment because they heal the gut.

5. Using bunches of neem leaves as hand held fans and lining/sewing bed linen with dried neem leaves.

6. Carrying dried amla (indian gooseberry that is high in Vit C) with a little bit of salt while traveling.

7. Walking barefoot.

8. Keeping eyes cooler than the body’s core temperature always. She’d apply castor oil and make kohl at home with castor oil, camphor and burn a lamp over night. She’d collect the soot and use it to line our eyes. I still wear kohl everyday remembering her advice.

9. Garlic everyday. (This was frowned upon in our household and she disapproved the rejection of garlic)

10. Brushing teeth with salt and charcoal. And oil pulling. She’d chew upon neem sticks from a giant neem tree in front of our house and dry them. She’d make little faggots out of them and sell them to city folk. ‘Organic’ tooth brushes.

11. Fasting twice a month on the 11th lunar day of the fortnight. And breaking the fast with a specific diet(it was gluten free and mostly soupy greens and Rice). This was my grandmother’s habit. Children weren’t required to follow this but I adopted this habit when my acid reflux/asthma kicked in after moving stateside.

12. She won’t let me eat till I felt full. She always made me sit cross legged on the floor and bend forward slightly. She also wouldn’t let me have water while eating. Said it dilutes stomach acids and that it will hinder digestion. And that would cause a spike of stomach acids later leading to gut issues. I guess that makes sense.

Everything she said always came back to digestion and gut health.

Having said all of the above, she was always chewing tobacco and ended up dying of mouth/throat cancer. Oh well.