Be sure to see mine……

Keep up the g00d work man!…

I’ve read something about horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) bark (i guess powdered or maybe left in 45% alcohol for 3 weeks) blocking UV. My brother tried it, but i don’t know the results. You can mix it into a bodymilk or crème so it sticks (applying tea probably wouldn’t work for long). You can make it with some moisturising oils, aloë etc. Fine cut carrots heated ‘au bain marie’ in sunflower oil for a couple of hours makes a good moisturising oil. ‘Hypericum perforatum’ flowers left in olive (or another) oil for 3 weeks, then filtered, makes a fine healing oil for the skin (which causes fotosensibility only in huge doses, so you can use it in sunscreen/aftersun). Lanolin (sheep’s wool fat) also makes a fine base for ointments, which can absorb some moisture. Other oils and fats will usually require an emulgator like tefose or liquid soy lecitine to be able to mix with watery liquids, like alcoholic tinctures or watery herb extracts (strong teas).

Pine tar is a good base material in primitive cosmetics, like insect repellents, but only in cold weather, as it doesn’t allow you to sweat.

Eight onces of water/day? Missing a “y”, yes…?

WOW, I totally fucked that up. Apparently, I meant “eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day,” but I just checked Snopes (I know, I know, they have a conservative bias, but this doesn’t really have anything to do with politics) and apparently, that rule of thumb doesn’t make any sense even when I haven’t mangled it.

Um… I’ll be changing the article now. lol

Archangel - a few months ago, I’d never even heard of Kombucha. I heard a woman say she had a kombucha baby on the way, and I thought she’d become pregnant

hah!

i’m not sure what the sudden craze is about- though it’s what caught me. maybe it’s a new manufacturer or two on the block making and selling them? what’s gotten me interested in it is the thumbs up the weston price folks give to it. granted, i have my issues with them (especially with their magazine’s recent article suggesting that the appropriate response to climate change is not reforestation but in fact to expand Salatin-esque dairy farming more or less everywhere), but i like a lot of their suggestions about nutrition.

their contention, based on the good dentist’s work, is that all indigenous diets had fermentation traditions. some of them were liquid ferments (mead in the leather satchel probably being the first), others were vegetable or meat ferments. these foods, much like the dietary vitamins you were discussing with richardfrance above, did the job for us in terms of keeping our intestinal ecology full of beneficial bacteria before ‘probiotic’ supplements were around. (also, eating a diet with fewer starches helped to prevent some of the icky stuff out-competing the good stuff). also, it explains why so many of us like soda: we remember and wants fizzy beverages, and since these fermented ones aren’t common, we drink the sugary carbonated substitutes. in any event, it’s quite tasty and satisfying.

i like it, too, because it’s my first big step into cultivation. i feel like a nursery director separating and propagating my cultivar, and spreading it to others to do the same. everyone gardens after all, in their own way.

so … er… buying the vitamin-stuff and gels and oils. isn’t that off the mark?

Yes–who said anything about buying vitamin supplements or gels? Willem mentioned diet, and we’ve talked about the paleo diet and nutrition quite a bit, but if you need us to repeat it for you, those vitamins should come from your diet, and if you don’t get them there, then you really need to take another look at what you eat.

I thought that the fewer naturally-produced oils you removed from your skin - through excessive face-washing with soaps/showerings/hairwashing etc the more the body retains its natural surface balance.

Not exactly. Yes, you see a lot of Americans especially with that problem because they bathe far too often. But you can go to the opposite extreme and not bathe enough. It doesn’t work as simply as the less you wash the healthier you get. You’ve got to find the right balance.

Oh, and please - can we stop drinking all that water?

Really, we don’t get nearly enough water, and it poses one of the biggest health problems we have. Your body uses water not just as a medium, but as an active nutrient involved in metabolism as well. You need a lot more water each day than most of us get, and mixed into sugary drinks or even teas won’t suffice.

But again, why in the world would you jump straight to bottled water based on that? Yes, bottled water poses a lot of problem, which tells you why no one said anything about drinking bottled water. You need to drink a lot of water, and most of us don’t, but that doesn’t mean you should drink a lot of bottled water. I mean, water does occur in nature from time to time!

but that should come from the fruit and veg that you eat [they DO form the bulk of what you eat every day, right? That is - threequarters of your intake is simple fibrous stuff like beans, grains and green/red/yellow stuff . . .]

That actually wouldn’t make for a very good diet at all. Like I said, we’ve discussed paleo-diet a lot, and while agrarian people have generally eaten like that and suffered from almost constant disease and early death, healthy cultures typically get at least half their food from animals.

I’ll be sure to drink a lot of tea again since you mention that helps.

Well, for that you’d want to apply it to your skin rather than drink it, but hey, drinking green tea doesn’t hurt, either.

Archangel - a few months ago, I’d never even heard of Kombucha. I heard a woman say she had a kombucha baby on the way, and I thought she’d become pregnant. Now I see it everywhere. Whence the sudden craze? As far as primitive options for it, I haven’t the foggiest. I don’t even really know how (or why) to make it in a civilized context.

About green tea: does kombucha count? Does fermenting it hinder its sunblock effectiveness? What about black tea?

On that note, what primitive options are there for kombucha vessels? I guess terracotta or the like would be fine, in lieu of metalworking and glass making. Are any of those really do-able in a feral context? I suppose there’s also the fantastic option of salvage while it lasts if any of our afterculture descendents really wants kombucha.

-Jim

I liked the article, Giuli. More people should know about commercial sunscreen–that it’s probably something dangerous. Nobody I tell believes me on that. I’ll start taking a little more tyrosine and flax oil since I already have some. I just got my first face burn of the year yesterday… It’s funny how you suddenly have something else to worry about after so long. Last summer I managed to get a good tan by exposing myself for like an hour a day at most until the sun didn’t bother me at all (and I’m one of those ghastly types… I can just tan for some reason… maybe it’s the Sicilian influence). Aloe vera helped me out a lot whenever I got a bit burned–it can be the difference between all your skin flaking off and leaving you white and cancerous, and a few uncomfortable days followed by a nice tan.

I’ll be sure to drink a lot of tea again since you mention that helps. I’ve heard that the differences between the types of tea (except maybe roasted…) are less than they’re made out to be, but it might be helpful (and it’s certainly tasteful) to drink some green, some black, or whatever you like. I think it’s really cool that tea bushes/trees can grow in Cornwall. I wonder if you could grow them in the Wilamette Valley or the Vancouver Valley or SE Vancouver Island? Maybe the Chesapeake Bay?