IN our cooking we use a lot of ginger too and we peel it. But it is
not necessary.
The comments I made were in terms of using it as a medicine and not
as a condiment. There are many herbal preparations in Ayurveda and
Siddha that use ginger ( and other things). Each of these has a way
of cleaning before the substance can be used in medicines. I do not
know the explanation for these and probably the reasons are lost
over the years. In India the first explanation is to get rid of
infective organisms that are there.But the side effects that can be
caused by these medicines can be overcome by putting them thru
certain preparatory processes. Some of these -like boiling
Anacardium for making medicines- can cause serious side effects .
Tradition says that these be soaked in buffalo's milk ( and for more
effectiveness in diluted buggalo dung for a certain amount of time)
and then boil it. Gold, Silver, Mercury and even sulphur have such
cleansing associated with them. This is one of the reasons the same
combination of herbs etc. have different effects made from different
manufacturers. Lots of modern manufacturers of traditional ayurvedic
medicines do not follow the cleansing and preparations correctly.
In fact the herbs grown in land at least 30 miles away from sea is
supposed to be more potent than the one growing near coasts. So
there are guidelines in the preparation of different items for the
sake of using them in medicines. Sometimes over cleansing also
negates the therapeutic effects of medicines. So there are tests to
find out if the cleansing is good or not.
--- In
minutus@yahoogroups.com, "Teresa Kramer"
wrote:
Madagascar where
tiny,
peeling
off a bit
I can
I use a
had to be
of it-when
Behalf Of
epidemicus-