Lemon Grass Tea

As usual I always try to plant lemon grass, turmeric and ginger before the fasting month so that by the time Eid arrives, the plants are ready to be plucked. Normally it is difficult to get the supply of these fresh ingredients during festive periods. And if you succeed in getting them, the price is a few times more than usual.


Recently I bought a bunch of lemon grass for RM1.50. There were about 30 stalks tied in 3 plants per bundle. That was cheap. I have planted 15 stalks and keep the rest for use in my cooking.

What was left after planting

Not wanting to waste by throwing the leaves to my compost heap directly, I cut the leaves into about 5cm pieces and boiled in water. The boiling was done for about half an hour, replacing the water as it dried. The resultant tea was obtained by straining the leaves. When cool, the leaves went into my compost.

Lemon grass is extensively used as a culinary ingredient in South East Asia, especially in Malaysia and Thailand. It makes an exquisite flavor to curries and gravies as it helps to remove the fishy smell of fish and meaty smell of meat.

I have tried lemon grass tea before but never tried to make my own.

Lemon grass has a place in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine for its innumerable properties.

Lemon grass tea has gained immense popularity among Westerners for its medicinal properties.

The leaves were cut into strips before placing in a pot of water.

I am told that the tea is naturally caffeine free, has anti- bacterial and anti-fungal properties; calming effect, and provides a remedy for various maladies:

Induces sleep and cures insomnia.

Prevents acne and other skin problems.


Maintains normal cholesterol levels in the body.

Lemon grass promotes digestion of food and gives relief from gastroenteritis. It is also an ideal remedy for those who have flatulence. It allows the muscles in the abdominal region to relax and release gas. Relieves nausea and severe menstrual cramps.


Detoxifies liver, pancreas, kidneys, bladder and the digestive tract. Lemon grass herb contains citral that acts as a diuretic that detoxifies the body by increasing the quantity and frequency of urination. This helps to clean the kidney, liver, pancreas, digestive tract, bladder etc and removes unwanted toxic substances through the urine.


Removal of uric acid and toxic substances from the body and lemon grass helps to lose weight.


Being a detoxifier, lemon grass contains citral that removes excess cholesterol, uric acid, toxins and fats from the body. This stimulates blood circulation throughout the body. Drinking a glass of lemon grass herbal tea everyday helps to reduce blood pressure.




Stimulates blood circulation; enhances immune system against flu, coughs and colds. Relieves fever.


Rich in citral which inhibit the growth of cancer cells.

Eases arthritic pain.

Although I drink the lemon grass tea without sugar, as I do with all my teas; you may like to add sugar as in the following recipes:

How to Make Lemon Grass Tea

Ingredients

• Clumps of lemon grass

• Water, 1 cup

• Milk, if desired

• Sugar or honey, as per taste

• Strainer

Method

• Peel the outer layer of the leaves and discard them. The outer layers will give your tea a bitter taste.

• Boil the water and add the clumps of peeled leaves to it.

• Let the water boil on a slow heat for around twenty minutes. This extracts all the essence of the leaves.

• Add the sweetener and boil it for another 5 minutes. If you want, you can add some milk at this point.

• Remove from the stove, strain it in a cup and drink it hot.

You can also serve iced lemon grass tea. Go along with the suggested lemon grass tea recipe, let it cool and serve it with ice. If you are making it iced lemon grass tea, refrain from adding milk.

Lemongrass Tea Side Effects

You are not advised to drink lemon grass tea in excess continuously. Drink for a few days intermittently. If you have been drinking lemon grass tea for 5 days, skip 5 days before you start drinking again. Consult a health practitioner if you are suffering from any ailment, before you start consuming this herbal tea. In case, you feel any side effect after drinking this tea, stop consuming it IMMEDIATELY. 

Compare the above with Amy Beh's lemon grass tea:

Ingredients


• 10 stalks lemongrass, chopped

• 3 screwpine leaves, knotted

• 1,875ml (or 7½ cups) water

• 200g rock sugar

• 1 lemon, squeezed for juice

Method

Place lemongrass in a food processor. Add 100ml water and blend into a pulpy juice. Combine the blended lemongrass with water and pandan leaves in a pot. Simmer for 15-20 minutes. Strain and add rock sugar, reboil and simmer until sugar dissolves. Add lemon juice.

To serve: Pour lemongrass tea into individual glass, add a slice of lemon and serve either hot or add some ice cubes over.

Britain's Fattest Woman Dies

Obesity has found its victim. Britain's Daily Mail reported on 26th July 2010 that Britain's most obese woman has died of a heart attack.

Sharon Mevsimler was only 40 years old, stood at 5 foot tall but she weighed 45 stones. That is 630 pounds or 285.8 kg. If an average person weighs 70 kg, she was carrying the weight of 4 persons.

Sharon Mevsimler  was a junk food addict and in her final days she needed an oxygen mask because her huge body weight had taxed and impaired her heart and lungs.

The final straw came when relatives brought in fish and chips and buckets of fried chicken to satiate her food cravings.

Even though taxpayers money had been used (30,000 pounds sterling ) on a gastric bypass surgery earlier in the year, Sharon's problem was not solved because she was not cured psychologically. Had she succeeded in adopting a better mental understanding of her addiction and changed her ways, she might still be alive today.

More Child Type 2 Diabetics

 Juvenile Diabetes is normally type 1. According to Wikipedia, this is a form of diabetes mellitus that results from autoimmune destruction of insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas.The subsequent lack of insulin leads to increased blood and urine glucose.Type 1 diabetes is fatal unless treated with insulin.Type 1 treatment must be continued indefinitely in all cases.

On the other hand, diabetes mellitus type 2 – formerly non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) or adult-onset diabetes, normally for adults 50 years and above – is a metabolic disorder that is characterized by high blood glucose in the context of insulin resistance and relative insulin deficiency.The onset of this type of diabetes is more often due to obesity which is the result of bad lifestyle habits.It is often initially managed by increasing exercise and dietary modification. As the condition progresses, medications may be needed.

Long term complication from high blood sugar or hyperglycemia, include an increased risk of heart attacks, strokes, amputation, and kidney failure.

Statistics pointed that Malaysia had the fourth highest number of diabetes cases in Asia, with 800,000 in 2007. The number is expected to jump to 1.3 million cases this year.


Doctors say more primary school students have been diagnosed with type 2 Diabetes in the last decade.

The Registry on Diabetes in Children and Adolescents (2006-2007) showed that 56% of the 42 T2D cases involved obese individuals. The doctors found that the young diabetics were usually obese, and their condition could be traced to eating too much unhealthy food and having a sedentary lifestyle.Most obese children spend their time either in front of the television, watching cartoons; or the computer, playing games. In they are not doing the above, they may be reading comics and at the same time munching unhealthy snacks. When they eat, they love fried foods such as nuggets, fried chicken, fries, burgers,and carbonated drinks. These bad sedentary habits leads to a high blood sugar levels from a young age.

In the West, it was reported that 30% and 40% of children are overweight and overweight Malaysian children is also on the rise. The Third National Health and Morbidity Survey, conducted in 2006, showed that in Malaysia, there was a high prevalence of overweight primary school children, and over 20% of them were obese.More amd more young adults from the age of 18 to 29 are also being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

Parents are guilty of teaching their children bad eating habits from young. This maybe due to the belief that it is okay since they are still young and enjoy good metabolism. They fail to appreciate that good metabolism comes only with regular physical workouts! It doesn't help if the child spents his time in front of the television or the computer or doing his loads of school work without running around with his friends.

Due to their own busy lifestyle, parents often eat at irregular hours and do not serve complete balanced meals. They tend to eat out and food that is served is often fried. It is often said that you get your diabetes from your parents due to genetic factors. This could be true only if you get diabetes at age 50, not at age 10. It is more due to the eating habits and lifestyle that has been imbued and practised
in the household that influences one health. It is not surprising that they say, "like father, like son".

More on a serious note, our future is not a promising one if our children are not healthy. Who will succeed us if our children die young or are beset by numerous health complications? This does not include the millions of tax payers money spent on treating them in public hospitals.

More Dieticians/ Nutritionists Please!

Malaysia needs more dieticians to educate society to lead a healthy lifestyle. Actually, I am more at ease with the term nutritionist campared to a dietician. A nutritionist normally has a Science degree and advocates a balanced diet on a sustainable basis. The term dietician could be a misnomer as most people's idea of going on a diet is a short term strategy that is not sustainable. Being on a short term diet means you lose weight fast and put it back on even faster when you return to your bad eating habits. 

A recent Health Ministry survey revealed that more than 43% of Malaysian adults were overweight or obese, twice the figure a decade ago. More amd more people are getting the lifestyle illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

Therefore the nutritionists have an important role to play to get people to change their eating habits and lead a healthy lifestyle. Malaysians love to eat. They eat anytime and anywhere. Eating and feasts are normal pastimes of most people.More often, the menu during feasts are either too sweet, too salty or too fatty. Nevertheless, they are enjoyed by most. It would seem to be preposturous to serve healthy food!

This is indeed a challenging task for Malaysia's current 500 dieticians. Even though the six public universities and one private university produce about 180 dietetic graduates a year, this is not enough to cater for the 26m+ population.

It was reported that 288 posts of dieticians were at the Health Ministry, 100 in the private sector, 50 in the universities and the rest on the food and sports industry.

Of the 288 posts of dieticians in the Ministry, only 226 were presently filled, and 65 of 137 government hospitals and special medical institutions had no dieticians.
In our hospitals, the current ratio is approximately one dietician to 115 beds, but the ratio for the more developed countries is one dietician to 50 beds.
The Health Ministry is filling up dieticians posts in the Health Clinics to promote and educate on dietary care and maybe stall the increase in the number of patients with diabetes, cardiovascular disease and hypertension in the future. The dieticians are expected to give patients the proper nutritional assessment, diet prescription, dietary advice and follow up to prevent  a lot of them from ending up with diabetic complications.

Need for more healthy Malaysians

Recently, ads on TV try to bring home the point that health is an important component of wealth generation in the country. Well, it was reported that the financial burden of the Malaysian Government to treat various non communicable diseases or NCDs for short, ran into hundreds of millions of ringgit per illness every year. The World Health Organisation definition of NCDs include cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes.NCDs are the biggest cause of death in Southeast Asia. Basically you can say NCDs are lifestyle illnesses. It is not infectious, that is it is not spread by virus nor bacteria. But bad lifestyle habits like unhealthy diets, sedentary living, and smoking are the primary cause of one third of these illnesses.Obesity alone leads to many expensive, chronic conditions (NCDs) that include high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer.

The Star online on Wednesday reported that the 2006 National Health and Morbidity Survey showed that Malaysians with diabetes had increased from 8.3% in 1998 to 14.9% now, overweight adults from 16% to 29.1%, and those who are obese from 4% to 14%.


The Health Ministry are coming up with suggestions that the promotion of good lifestyle habits be incorporated into housing development schemes.The public and private sectors are thus encouraged to promote awareness to fight NCDs.

Allocating space in homes specifically for exercise and increasing police presence in parks to keep the public safe while they work out are among proposals in a Cabinet paper to reduce the number of Malaysians with diseases like diabetes, hypertension and obesity.

There could be a change in housing policies where there are more health-friendly spaces set for exercise or having police personnel at parks so people will be more encouraged to jog because they will be assured of their safety,” said Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai.

The Minister may be too paranoid in suggesting that we have policemen manning the parks while we exercise. The police have so many things on their plate; snatch thieves, robbers and  traffic offenders, followed by white collar criminals, illegal immigants and foreign workers as well as political offenders.Now they have to take care of people who want to get a bit of fresh air! I don't think our crime rate at parks is so scary that we have to have the men in blue doing their rounds. Maybe park wardens monitoring activities at the parks while we jog and play with our children would be sufficient. We keep the police out until there are really bad hats doing harm at the parks.

Maybe there are other ways to make the people more health conscious. Giving monetary incentives is one.

To promote good health habits which leads to healthy citizens, which in turn leads to reduced health costs to the nation, the government could provide:

tax rebates for employers to provide sports and gymnasium facilities at the workplace.
tax rebates for taxpayers who enroll in private funded sports clubs and gymnasiums.
tax rebates for resident associations and private social clubs who provide the same facilities.
tax rebates for individual taxpayers to purchase exercise and sports equipment or home gymnasium equipment to play and exercise at home.

The above proposals are similar to the tax rebates already given to purchase personal computers, and books and reading materials.

The Ministry of Health has spent millions of Ringgit on health education campaigns which do not make good the amount spent compared to the effect the campaigns has on society.Perhaps giving monetary incentives will give better results.

Fish in Batter

Recently, I wanted to prepare some fish and chips but found out that I had run out of cornflour and rice flour.Although the normal recipe only uses normal wheat flour, I discovered that combining the three types of flour makes a better and crispier batter. Since I had already thawed the fish, I had no choice but to make some batter. Hence the following batter was made:

Ingredients:

(enough for 3 pieces of fish)

3 tablespoons wheat flour

1 tablespoon custard powder

1 tablespoon cooking oil

1 egg

water or milk, enough to make a smooth batter.

Mix all the ingredients, adding the water or milk last. Make sure the fish is dry before dipping in the batter. Fry in a medium hot cooking oil till golden. Mine was more than golden but it was crispy not tough, just nice. Ummmmph!Best eaten with chilli sauce added with a squeeze of lemon. You may add mayonnaise if you like.

P.S:

You need to fry the chips first before you fry the fish.