Here are some household tips for an effective use of milk. They will come In handy for many purposes.
Milk is an all sufficient nourishing food. It is probably the only food that can offer all that our body needs for sustenance and health. It is essential for children, the pregnant and the feeding mothers. It quickly restores to health those who are emasciated, and those who are convalescing. For the healthy, it is a strengthening tonic. But those who consume great quantities of milk should also carry out adequate amount of physical exercises. Healthy persons taking milk would find it beneficial to take one or two date fruits along with milk.
Milk is no doubt easily digestible. But infants and children would find it heavy to digest pure milk. It is therefore necessary to mix a little water and give milk to them, after boiling it well. Pure buffalo milk is not good for drinking, it may lead to indigestion. Therefore one should add adequate water to this milk and then only use it.
Boil milk for half an hour and then cool it down quickly by placing the vessel in cold water. By this method taste of the milk does not get spoilt. One should drink milk only when it is hot. But drinking milk after a very heavy meal is better avoided; that may lead to constipation. Taking milk after meals foDowing an Interval of three hours is healthy. It is more healthy to drink milk without adding sugar. Eating sour fruits following a drink of milk helps in the latter’s easy digestion.
Mix well half a teaspoonful of fine ground turmeric powder to a cupful of boiled milk and also honey as per taste. Taking this three to four times will quench thirst if it is a sign of a disease.
Ground two almpnd seeds into a fine paste along with milk. Mix this well in two spoonfuls of milk. Take some pieces of bread, soak them in this milk and rub your face with them from top to downwards. Adopt this measure daily twice once in the morning and then another time In the evening for fifteen minutes. This will give you an excellent and unfailing benefit. Pimples on the face will disappear, black spots and freckles will vanish and your facial lustre increases considerably.
Take a cupful of fresh milk at night, boil it well and then add the juice from a freshly cut lemon. After fifteen minutes, apply this milk to palms and soles of the feet. When the wetness of the application disappears lie down and sleep. Wash your face and the paste concerned in hot water next day morning. Adopting this measure for a few days continuously would increase the beauty of your face, soften the skin and add lustre to it. Apply milk over the soles and massaging them well leads to sound sleep. Adding some water to milk and washing your face would prevent crackling of the facial skin that is particularly frequent in winter.
For quietening the common cold and the running nose, a simple measure is to drink hot milk adding pepper powder and sugar candy. Take a piece of dried ginger, grind its tip on a stone along with cow’s milk and breast milk. To smear this paste over the temples would pacify headache.
Add a pinch of salt to four teaspoonfuls of milk and apply this mixture to your face. This will prevent wrinkling of your facial skin. When eyes are burning or they have turned red or they are having a sensation of being pricked with needles as it were, a few drops of pure milk or breast milk on the eyes will prove much beneficial.
Taking a cup of fresh frothy milk from the cow daily in the morning for two or three days will cure sores on the inside of the mouth. Adding half a teaspoonful of pure turmeric powder in a cupful of boiled and cooled milk and then taking it will cure obstructed urination. One should continue this for four to five days twice a day.
Persons having a tendency of bleeding at the nose would find it beneficial to place a few drops of breast milk at frequent intervals at the nostrils. Bleeding will stop.
Take a cup of frothy milk just fresh from the cow. Squeeze a lemon fruit into it and immediately drink this milk. Those who have bleeding piles would find this an efficient cure that would show its effect within a week.
Taking a bath in milk as a cosmetic measure was a historical practice in many countries besides India. This would confer an attractive skin colour, render the skin flower like soft, freckles free and lustrous as the literature says. It is a historical record that the princes of Rome were adopting this practice and it is also presumed that some Holywood beauties do have this practice still. The famous beautiful Egyptian queen Cleopatra had specialised in using donkey’s milk specially for this purpose. They all had a practice of having a tubful of milk and dropping their whole body within it, lie down like that and massage their limbs with milk quite frequently in addition. Coming out of such a tub bath after half an hour and then having a cold water bath would ensure the skin to be free from any diseases, freckles or black spots. It will also make it effulgently lustrous.
Though bathing in milk is an impossibility now a days even for the very wealthy, utilising milk for skin health is quite possible. One can drink as much milk as possible and simultaneously massage the body with milk at intervals. This is a sure and quite a feasible method of skin care and skin beauty.
Apply the cream of milk to face, palm and soles of the feet. Follow this up with a good massaging. This will render the skin, free from infections, smooth, devoid of black spots and freckles and retain it taut and free from wrinkling. This measure continued for nearly a month would prevent black tanning of the skin by the sun. A paste of turmeric mashed well with cream and applied to the sole of the feet, the palms and the lips that have crackled because of the winter cold proves beneficial.
Taking butter lessens the aggravations of pitta. It will remove fatigue, quench thirst, mitigate cough and breathlessness and will also augment virility. Persons with a complaint of piles would find this salutary. Butter is a good hair dresser. Keep using it so and you will thereby prevent premature greying and also increase the lustre of the hair. Mixing butter in the ointments meant for dressing of the wounds would render them more quickly effective. Applying colyrium prepared from butter to the eyes that are paining would quieten down the pain. If the palms have become rough because of such hard labours like splitting fuel wood or farm work, applying butter and following this up with a good massaging would rectify.
Wounds get healed quickly by an application of a paste prepared by a fine grinding of turmeric, sweet neem leaves, black sesame and pure ghee. Mix a teaspoonful of pure ghee, with equal quantities of the juice of white onion and honey. Add egg’s yolk. Taking this daily in the morning is an effective aphrodisiac, promotes excellent memory and removes all nervous debility. This is advisable for a continuous intake till the cure is effected by patients of hysteria, insanity and sleeplessness- or insomnia.
Massaging palms and’ soles with cow’s ghee will calm down their burning. But persons having the complaints of high blood pressure, diabetes and jaundice should better completely give up taking ghee.
Curds constitute a good tonic. It cools the body, quenches thirst and tones up well. It is an excellent energiser to the emasciated and the weak. It is curative of dysentery, bleeding dysentery, constipation, burning at the nose, ordinary fever and urinary disorders. Curd proves very effective in curing intestinal disorders. It is a nourishing as well as a medicative material even for infants who are just fifty days old. This is a beneficial food for persons suffering from excessive urination due to travel, dysentery and common cold. Adding a little water and salt while taking curd is a healthy practice.
For patients of jaundice, eating par boiled rice mixed with curd is a curative diet. Persons suffering from piles would find it mitigative to drink a cupful of sour butter milk from which the butter has been removed. Taking curds and jaggery along with rice is an advised curative diet for them.
If one consumes curds rice mixed with cow’s curds daily in the morning before sun rise, one can get rid of one sided head-ache.
Diabetic patients would find it advantageous to take curds rice mixed with jaggery and pepper powder. This particularly mitigates the severe burnings at the regions of urination and the anus. Anal itching, pains and burnings can be cured by taking curds rice after squeezing lemon juice in it. Results can be seen within two to three days.
Persons suffering from gastric ulcers would find it safe to drink butter milk in great quantity. If the disease is in its initial stage, this itself will act as a curative measure.
For patients of dysentery, tastelessness in food, indigestion, too much of obesity, piles, excessive thirst, vomiting, lose motion, obstructed urine, jaundice, burning urination and the like, butter milk is an excellently useful drink. Butter should have been completely skimmed out here.
When you eat a pomegranate fruit, you are likely to discard its central pith as well as the outer rind. Do not throw them. Instead add a teaspoonful of cumin seeds as well as eight to ten grains of pepper to them, fry in ghee and store. Add a little quantity of coconut flesh, salt to taste and grind the entire mixture to the consistency of a smooth, paste. This is to be mixed with butter milk and taken. This is almost a first aid measure for diarrhoea.
If you use cucumber seeds instead of pomegranate skin here, the butter milk is an excellent drug for urinary. disorders. If you use dried powders of amalaka fruit, the butter milk would serve for retnovirig the aggravations of pitta. Made out of garlic mixing, the buttermilk is an antidote to indigestion. Adding soaked methi seeds would make it capable of removing back pain. By mixing dry ginger powder, the buttermilk would calm down common cold and cough.
Add the powder of the three pungents (black pepper, peepal and dry ginger) and also the powder of saindhav salt, and mustard in curd. Eating this in autumn and winter (hemanth and shishir) removes vata and kapha, stimulates digestive ability, strengthens the body, and gives lustre to the eyes. This is an excellently wholesome diet.
The cream of curd is sweet, heavy, promotive of virility but increases phlegm.
Bleeding at the piles will stop if curd or buttermilk is regularly taken.
If nutmeg is taken in a little heavy dose it leads to intoxicatedness. This can be overcome by eating curd mixed with sugar.
Externally applying water of the curd calms down the burning sensations.
Diarrhoea stops by licking up creamy curd mixed with honey.
Curd rice is beneficial” in dysentery.
Drinking buttermilk mixed with saindhav salt and cumin powder proves beneficial in bleeding piles.
Dip a piece of cloth of cow’S buttermilk and rub all over the body. This will cool down burning sensations.
Some persons become csttstrpated by eating ground-nuts. This is best cured by a drink of buttermilk. This holds good for constipation due to ghee and oil.
Even chronic constipation can be cured in a few days by drinking buttermilk added with ajwain and black salt.
One-sided headache gets cured !.vithiri 2-3 days by eating curd mixed cooked rice to which sugar candy is added. This is to be eaten before sunrise.
Loose motion gets rectified by drinking iresh buttermilk in which white cumin seeds are fried, ground, strained with, cloth and then mixed.
Dysentery stops by drinking one pav of buttermilk in which one tola of honey is added.