Healing Spices: How to Use 50 Everyday and Exotic Spices to Boost Health and Beat Disease Hardcover – January 4, 2011

The Introduction of this book has led to anticipation of what I will learn from the pages ahead...well done!

This book was in great shape! A good bargain.

This book covers the healing powers of spices from Ajowan and Allspice to Vanilla and Wasabi, from Arthritis to Ulcers. It gives information on 50 different spices. How to buy, how to store them, 50 recipes, useful combinations for cooking and healing and just to keep on hand. I still have a lot of reading to do.

I got this book from the library and then decided to buy it. It has so much information in it that you just need to have it on hand as a reference. Overall, I love it and am grateful to the author for writing it and making all this research accessible to the general public. I agree with someone else here who was annoyed that there are no footnotes, but I decided that given the target audience for the book, that was probably a wise editorial decision. He DOES say, in discussing studies, whether the research was in test tubes, animals, or people, and how big a study it was if it was a human study, so it's not just this vague "has been effective against X condition," which you often see out there. I appreciate that he talks some about the scientific, cell-level dynamics of why something works. And he usually mentions the name of the journal that a study was published in. Each spice's section contains a list of other spices it pairs well with and examples of foods that it goes well with. I don't eat animal products (and there's plenty of medical research supporting THAT health decision, too!) and I wish more of the suggestions and recipes were for vegetarian meals, but I think it's easily enough adapted and even though this is not really a cookbook per se, I do look forward to trying some of the sauces, although I'll be putting them over tempeh or veggies. I think the book would be even more useful if the index were more thorough and the chart at the back where you can look up conditions more detailed. Several times now, I have remembered reading about some spice that's effective against some malady, and I can't remember which spice it was, and no searches in the index or in that chart (which is helpful but not as complete as it could be) have turned it up. So if you actually had a diagnosis of something, you might have to read the whole book all over again looking for that one tidbit you remember seeing! The chart by conditions at the end lists 41 different spices with anti-cancer properties. Most of them have demonstrated effectiveness against one or several different types of cancer. So if you wanted to look up spices you could use to prevent or help fight breast cancer or melanoma, for instance, you'd have to go back through all 41 of those on the list looking for the ones relevant to a particular cancer. So whoever was in charge of making indexing decisions didn't go as good a job on this job as the author did in compiling all this scientific evidence.I appreciate the tips on how to choose and store the spices, too. I wish there were more recommendations about the AMOUNT that you need to consume to achieve these benefits. But since the research is not quite there yet for many of these, he would be over-reaching to have that because in most cases, it would be pure conjecture. He does have recommended amounts when there are relevant clinical trials that have shown results at specific levels.

I am an experienced home cook who uses some combination of spices nearly every day. I thought I had a pretty good handle on their properties, and what to use when, but this book expanded my knowledge more than I ever thought possible....and introduced me to some new ones I'd never heard of or worked with (kokum, amchur powder, black cumin). The chapters are structured thus: an introduction to and description of the spice, a discussion of its healing properties with actual medical evidence from peer reviewed journals and studies, a listing of what other spices and flavors the spice complements, and ends with a recipe including the spice. The recipes range from the simple (tomato-basil sauce) to the complex (By the Bay Fisherman's Chowder, designed to showcase the bay leaf, which has an extensive list of ingredients), but all are wonderfully delicious. Appendices at the back of the book contain several recipes for custom spice mixes and curries. The Madras curry paste, which contains a whopping amount of coriander seeds, is absolutely superb--I make sure to have a tupperware in my fridge ready to go at all times because it's THAT good. I cannot speak to if I've gotten any health benefits out of this book, but it's a joy to cook with and my copy is quickly becoming dog-eared because I use it all the time. My 1YO son gives it a thumbs-up too, as he wolfed down the chili con carne I made a few nights ago (in the Cumin chapter).I appreciate that the author includes notes throughout certain chapters on other names for certain spices, and what to watch out for. For example, black cumin can be elusive because sometimes it's mislabeled in stores or customers confuse it with another spice like true cumin or curcumin, a substance found in turmeric that has no relation to either. So the author includes a helpful note about the various names you might see for black cumin, like nigella or kolonji--I finally found a bag labeled "nigella seeds" which I wouldn't have found otherwise. He also includes a headnote in the Basil chapter, advising on the differences between various types of basil (everyday basil, Thai basil, tulsi, etc), and a heads-up in the Saffron chapter so that you don't find yourself shelling out a lot of money for safflower instead of true saffron.