An umeboshi a day…

Umeboshi is commonly described as pickled sour "plum" although it is actually a type of apricot. It is similar to what the Chinese call sng buay. It is salty and sour.

This pickled plum – pickled in salt and usually with a medicinal herb called shiso – has important medicinal qualities. It is particularly helpful for:

• Discharge problems - anything coming out from the body, such as runny nose, diarrhoea, vomiting as well as excessive urination, perspiration, period, etc.
  
  
• Digestive problems - indigestion, lack of appetite, vomiting, diarrhoea, flatulence, etc
  
  
• Infections - including bacterial and viral infections.

In terms of chemistry, the explanation is that umeboshi makes the body system alkaline. It is, in fact, one of the strongest alkalinizing foods. The blood and other body fluids (eg saliva) of a healthy person are supposed to be slightly alkaline and sickness usually occurs when the body condition becomes acidic.

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Umeboshi can be taken:

• on its own
• mixed with water, tea and other drinks
• in soups
• made into a sauce
• and so on

Click here to learn how to use umeboshi in ume-sho-kuzu, a popular marcrobiotic home remedy.

Alternatively, if you do not have kuzu, you can make ume-sho-bancha.

This is basically bancha tea – a tea made from tea twigs rather than tea leaves – mixed with a pickled ume plus a few drops of shoyu or natural soy sauce.

And if you can't get bancha, just use hot water. Other types of herbal teas may not work as well as bancha because bancha, being made from tea twigs, is again more contracting in energy.

Herbal teas from flowers, in contrast, have strong expanding energy so adding an umeboshi would balance the energy somewhat. But it may not give you that strong contracting energy if you need to counteract an expanding condition.

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Medically, it is known that drinking alcohol attracts mosquitoes.

The macrobiotic explanation is that alcohol is very yin / expanding and it attracts mosquitoes, which are very yang / compact insects.

Umeboshi, being yang / contracting, would therefore NOT attract mosquitoes.

These generally nourish the middle organs, such as stomach, pancreas and spleen.

Macrobiotic teacher Adelbert Nelissen, of the Kushi Institute of Northern Europe, once recounted how, when he visited Affrica, the ceiling of his room would be black with mosquitoes if he opened the windows.

Since he did not like to sleep with air-conditioning, he slept with the windows open and with a pickled ume in his mouth. And he said he did not get bitten all night long!

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Asthma

Mymost memorabe personal experience with umeboshi was with asthma. This is an expanding condition – the lung tissues get swollen, making the air passages narrow.

Also, the lungs do not have enough contracting power to push the air out. Asthma is actually a condition whereby a person cannot breathe OUT and so, correspondingly, cannot then breathe in.

Normally, I am not asthmatic but on two occasions I had mild asthma attacks.

The first time was shortly after I became interested in natural health and was eating plenty of fruits, fruit juices and salads at that time. One cold, rainy night, after taking a salad for dinner, I woke up with asthma.

That was an important lesson for me about cooked vs raw foods but it still took me a long while to accept that raw foods may not always be good for health.

Instinctively, my wife at that time did some "energy healing" – although we did not know it as energy healing at that time – to calm me down and I was soon ok.

The second asthma attack came when I was holidaying in Europe. I had just spent a week in Italy and had been eating their wonderful gelato or ice-cream everyday. Then when I was in England, I had an asthma attack.

This time I had umeboshi with me. I popped one into my mouth and, in about 10 or 15 minutes, was breathing normally. Less than half an hour later, I was sound asleep.