Black sesame is a small black seed also referred to as 'Hei Zhi Ma' in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). It originated in Africa, and its oil was praised in Babylon and Assyria times some four thousand years ago. According to an Assyrian legend, the gods were even drinking sesame-based wine ...

Kimchi (김치 in Korean) is a traditional Korean side dish made from fermented and salted vegetables, scallions and different seasonings such as garlic, chilli powder, ginger, salted seafood (jeotgal). There are hundreds of kimchi varieties with the most popular probably being the napa cabbage and ...

The overconsumption of processed sugar and carbohydrate intake make us look today at alternatives to sugar. Alternatives still have sugar but they are easier for your body to process. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently dropped the recommended daily allowance of sugar from 10% to 5%. ...

You may be wondering - gunpowder tea, really? Well, gunpowder tea is a strain of Chinese green tea which literally translates as “pearl tea” in English. It gets its rather unique sounding name from the way it looks; the tea is rolled up into tight pellets and is often said to resemble the look of ...

Lecithin is usually derived from soy or sunflower, it is rich in choline and is often used as a food additive as an emulsifier, allowing to mix fats with water, making it also very useful for the cosmetic industry. It was first isolated in egg yolks, in 1850 and can also be found in peas and ...

I’m always reading different things on the internet about how to lose fat, and they’re forever contradicting anything you thought you knew. For those who aren’t too clued up but want to get lean, it must be pretty confusing! So I’ve compiled a list of how to eat in order to burn those unwelcome ...

Echinacea (pronounced 'ekin-nay-sia') is an herb that’s becoming very popular across the Western world. It’s not new on the herbal or medicinal scene by any means, in fact, the Native Americans used echinacea for hundreds of years before Europeans arrived on their shores and it’s just as effective ...

Astragalus has been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for a long time and is generally considered as a tonic and reinforce your 'Qi' (pron: 'chi', vital energy in Chinese medicine). It is also called Huang Qi or Milk Vetch. Sounding all Chinese to you so far? Then read on for our Top 5 ...

The natural flavour of peppermint (or ‘mentha piperita’ in its Latin form) is a combination of spearmint and watermint, and is one of Earth’s oldest herbs, with its dried leaves having been found as far afield as the Egyptian pyramids. You can make your own peppermint tea with fresh mint leaves and ...

Have you ever wondered whether you could eat the shells of eggs or reuse them instead of throwing them in the bin? We all undoubtedly know what an eggshell looks like but do we actually know what it's made of? Eggshells mainly consist of calcium carbonate (95%, 40% of which is absorbable by the ...

Dates are the flowered fruit from the Arecaceae family of palm trees. Dates come with a great variety of colours, textures and sweetness to them. The Medjool Date is very popular and known to have higher ratios of vitamins and minerals; they’re soft and chewy with a rich caramel-like taste. This in ...

Oolong (in Chinese: 烏龍) tea originally came from the Chinese name (烏龍茶) which means "black dragon tea" and is a traditional Chinese tea (from the Camellia sinensis species of evergreen shrub). It is obtained from this same plant used to make green tea and black tea but is processed differently. It ...