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Natural remedies for bug bites and insect stings

My 5-year old daughter enjoyed an outdoor symphony performance on the grass the other night and came home with several enormous itchy welts on her ankles. Luckily, I know several remedies to help ease the itching and calm the inflammation that I feel safe using on such a sensitive little one.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001GCU204?tag=lizoneandmore-20&camp=213381&creative=390973&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=B001GCU204&adid=1CNE4TC759WGAJFKRAZ1&

1. First, I gave her some homeopathic Apis Mellifica underneath her tongue. This is the same homeopathic remedy I suggested using when a friend was stung by a bee recently.  I recommended she take a dose immediately, then a second thirty minutes later, and if needed for discomfort, a third two hours after that. My daughter’s fierce mosquito or spider bites required one pastille of Apis that night and a second the next morning before breakfast.

2. For topical relief, I rubbed in some homopathic Florasone, a remedy helpful for skin irritations in general. If I could have located it in my house, I would have applied some homeopathic SssstingStop gel, but the Florasone worked quite well, as it usually does.

3. For bee stings and spider bites, it’s helpful to place a drying masque over the area to draw out the poison. Mud works great and is easily available, as does tooth paste (not gel). A clay facial masque will do the trick, too.

4. Finally, disolving about 2 cups of Epsom Salts into a warm bath for a soak will help reduce swelling and relieve itching.

Clif C Bar – A whole foods energy bar

An unexpected bonus of hosting the Land of Nutrition at this year’s Walk MS events was discovering a new product from Clif Bar Energy bars: The Clif C Bar.

The Clif C Bar is a different sort of portable food sporting a double layer of fruit and nuts and made from a handful of recognizable ingredients – basically fruit, nuts and sea salt. The bars are lightly baked and then sprinkled with nuts and a hint of sea salt to make the flavors dance.

Let me repeat my criteria for choosing a healthy granola/power/energy-type bar:

1. I want all ingredients to recognizably come from nature. The less processed these are, the better. I want to be able to pronounce and identify everything listed.

2. The fewer ingredients, the better. Don’t junk up my snack bars with a lot of extra stuff. Don’t add MSG or gluten fillers to my granola bars. Don’t add protein where it doesn’t occur naturally. And, please, don’t give me “artificial flavors,” because synthetic flavors are a huge turn-off to my taste buds.

These C-Bars are bursting with flavor– real flavors, not “natural or artificial flavors” concocted in a laboratory tube. They’re not so dense that they sit heavily in your stomach like so many other power bars.

Here’s an example of the ingredients in the apple Clif C-bar: Organic Dates, Almonds, Organic Apples, Macadamia Nuts, Organic Apple Juice Concentrate, Organic Lemon Juice Concentrate, Organic Cinnamon, Sea Salt (Real Salt®), Natural Vitamin E (Antioxidant).

Mmmmm… look at all of those yummy real foods!

Best of all, perhaps, is how friendly the C-Bars are to those with food allergies and/or food sensitivities. You won’t find any wheat, gluten, corn, eggs, dairy, etc., etc., etc. in these beauties.

My only problem with these bars is that they are soft and can get smooshed beyond recognition when tossed into a crowded purse during an outing. Then you basically have to lick the bar off of the wrapper to eat it, not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it can get sticky.

Be sure to try all the flavors of Clif C-Bars: apple, blueberry, rasperry, cherry pomegranate (our favorite!). Thanks to Alex over at Clif Bars for the free samples he gave out at the MS Walks!

Shady Strategies from the Toxic Chemical Lobby

The Safer Chemicals Healthy Families consumer advocacy group “leaked” this graphic video galvanize public support for Congressional action to make sure the products we reach for, sleep on, and eat from every day aren’t loaded with toxic chemicals.

The characters you meet in this quick video are cartoons, but the plot is ripped straight from the headlines. It’s appalling to realize how the Toxic Chemicals Lobby twists and distorts information to keep their profits rolling in at the expense of our collective health.

Whole Foods Raises Organic Skin Care Bar

I love it when a company goes out of its way to right deceptive practices, especially when profits up against consumer health.

Whole Foods Marketplace Inc. announced that it is raising the bar on organic skin care products, meaning that it will only carry items claiming to be organic that are actually organic and contain organic ingredients.

Back in January, I posted about so-called organic cheater brands and how deceptive labeling is allowed on skin care products because they are not regulated. Thanks to the watchdog group the Organic Consumers Association for bringing this to our attention.

According to the statement, starting next June, Whole Foods will require that its suppliers of personal-care products making organic claims meet the same U.S. Department of Agriculture standards as food does. That means products labeled as “organic” must be made with more than 95% organic ingredients. If the label says the product is made with organic ingredients, it actually must contain at least 70% organic ingredients.

While I wish that the USDA would require “organic” to mean 100% organic, I’m quite pleased that Whole Foods will make it easier for me to trust more of the products on its shelves. Right now, quite frankly, I’ve frequently questioned their personal care product selection after carefully reading the labels and wondered if I were in a Walgreens rather than a health food market.

Maybe Whole Foods will become more like Vitamin Cottage, a smaller health food grocer chain that adheres to much stricter organic standards, and where I always feel much more comfortable when selecting new skin care products.

I count this as a win in the war to reclaim the guarantee that the products we eat and use on our bodies are safe.

Too hot to cook? Use a Toaster Oven!

Reader question: What do you do during the summer months when it’s too hot to use the oven?

One of my favorite summertime cooking solutions is to use a toaster oven!

Seriously, I have a large toaster oven that fits a 2-quart Dutch oven easily, holds my 3-quart round oven beautifully, and even squeezes  in my 3 1/2-quart oval-shaped Dutch oven without hitting any sides.

Europro Toaster Oven

On warm evenings when I would rather not heat up my house, I simply plug the toaster oven into the outdoor socket on my back deck and let the heat stay outside. On rainy days I move it to my covered front porch.  🙂

Although I originally purchased this particular toaster oven so that I could prepare Glorious One-Pot Meals when I held cooking classes in locations other than a kitchen, I soon realized that a toaster oven has a number of advantages over a regular oven.

First, as I mentioned, you can pick it up and move it outside so that you don’t have to heat up your house in order to enjoy a meal. In the summer I use my outdoor toaster oven to bake pizzas, home fries, fish,… you name it. As well as Glorious One-Pot Meals, of course!

Second, it takes less energy to heat a smaller space like that inside a toaster oven than it does to heat and maintain the heat in the large space of a typical home oven. So I get to feel a little greener when I use it.

And, third, my toaster oven preheats much more quickly than my regular oven, probably for the same reason as #2 above.

When I picked out my toaster oven, I went to the largest selection of small kitchen appliances I knew of with my trusty 2-quart Dutch oven in hand. I proceeded to open each one and try to slide my pot inside. When I found the one that fit, I knew I had found a new tool for creating easy and delicious meals all year round.

Whenever I’m using the toaster oven to bake rather than toast, I always place an oven thermometer inside to validate the temperature just as I do with my gas oven inside. Just to be sure the temp is where I want it to be.