3 ms·
When I was young I was always told not to eat too much otherwise I'd get sick. I always thought it was some old folklore or old wives tale. I asked my dad tonig
by fma 10y ago
When I was young I was always told not to eat too much otherwise I'd get sick. I always thought it was some old folklore or old wives tale. I asked my dad tonight what he knows about eating too much lychee in regards of getting sick. Off that bat he told me it messed up your sugar level and you can die.
He said he knew it when he was young. I was amazed that my dad, as an impoverished and uneducated boy in China would know this. A lot of people easily discount Traditional Chinese Medicine as anecdote, but somethings should be investigated scientifically (I'm not going to get in an argument here about TCM, but those are my thoughts).
He also mentioned if you soak lychee in salt water you can eat more of it - I would be curious what the scientific backing is, if there is any at all.
- woliveirajr 10y agoAnd that's another good discussion, on how old knowledge attracts attention from pharma companies and some try to earn patents and all sort of protections from those "new products". I read sometime ago about India (?) releasing lots of ancient documentation about old medicines, as a knowledge base, exactly to protect the population from those kind of problems.
- fma 10y agoHere is a recent one: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/chinese-herbal-therapy-malaria-wins-part-nobel-prize-medicine/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/chinese-herbal-therapy-m... "Tu was appointed director of Project 523 in 1969, and rather than sift through modern chemicals for a treatment, she scanned ancient Chinese texts for possible herbal remedies for malaria. The earliest description for the parasitic blood disorder comes from Chinese medical texts dating to 2,700 BCE. She found one promising candidate in a 2,000-year-old document that described how sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) could heal malaria."