Health/Natural: Ways To Beat the Summer’s Heat

Here in the south, where I live, we used to know how to cope with the heat and humidity that are always a part of our summer weather. Until relatively recently, our homemakers knew what foods to prepare to help keep family members cool under blistering temperatures. Those were the days before central air, when every afternoon the adults would sit outside on the porch where it was cool, reading the afternoon paper or making small talk, while the children ran around half-naked in the yard, spraying each other with the garden hose. Those were our ways of coping with summer. These days we spend most of the summer inside, making friends with our air conditioners while eating hamburgers and french fries.

If you still live without air conditioning, or if you just have to be out in the heat, there are many ways to make hot summer days more tolerable. One way is through the foods we eat.

For thousands of years, the Chinese have classified foods and herbs (and nearly everything else) as either “hot” or “cold,” according to their effects on the human body. In the west, Hippocrates classified foods into hot, cold, dry and damp categories around 420 BCE. To our ancestors, this became folk knowledge that was commonly known and used. In The Complete Medicinal Herbal, Penelope Ody talks about the medieval housewife’s understanding of the heating and cooling effects of foodstuffs. “...she would have been quite appalled at the thought of serving strawberries in the middle of winter, as we are able to do now: this cold fruit would inevitably lead to stomach chills if eaten at such a time. Today we have lost sight of this sense of balance, eating foods regardless of climate.”

Boyce Drew Freeman, an herbalist who operates a natural foods store in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, agrees with this sentiment. “The people knew that you just need to look at the harvest times,” she explains. “The fruits and vegetables that are bountiful during the summer months are generally cooling. The warming foods, the root vegetables and so forth, come-in during the fall and early spring.”

Some of this folk wisdom has managed to remain with us. For example, all of us in the south grew up eating watermelon as a treat to take the edge off a sweltering summer afternoon. As it turns out, this is exactly what the doctor ordered.

“Watermelon is the best,” Freeman says. “It’s extremely cooling.”

In the summer, our diets should focus on the likes of fruits and salad greens. The juicy fruits and berries are better, since sweeter fruits like bananas can have a mildly warming effect Cucumbers, plentiful this time of year, are also highly cooling and have the added benefit of being a mild sedative, so they relax the mind and body as well. Heavy, salted foods are warming, as are root vegetables like potatoes and carrots. Grains are neutral, although many people tend to eat more grains during the winter.

Freeman says that during hot summer weather we should cut back on eating meat, since meats tend to be extremely warming. “Vegetarians stay much cooler in hot weather than meat eaters,” she explains. According to some Chinese, if you must eat meat, pork is cooling while beef and chicken are warming. Maybe that explains why pork barbecue is so popular during the summer in my part of the country.

For a quick cool-down, Freeman offers a recipe for a “smoothie” that combines apple juice, apricots, plums and ice. Put these ingredients into a blender until it’s thick like a daiquiri, she says, for a refreshing and cooling drink. She also recommends a tea made from nettle leaf, raspberry leaf, peppermint, hibiscus and lemon. “It’s very good and will cool you down.”

Eating and drinking cooling foods and herbs is not the only remedy for the heat. Mataji Saraswati is an aromatherapist who also lives (without air conditioning) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She says that aromatherapy offers solutions for the heat and humidity.

“One of the things I like to do on hot days,” she says, “is to wear as few clothes as possible and mist myself using a little spray pump filled with water and a couple of drops of peppermint oil.” Peppermint oil is not only a cooling aroma, it’s good for the respiratory system as well, which helps in areas where high humidity puts a strain on the lungs.

Saraswati says that there are other cooling oils that you can use to spray yourself with as well. “Chamomile is good for the nerves,” she points-out. “Clary sage is refreshing and euphoric. Sometimes I mix it with lavender.” Lavender calms the mind, body and spirit, much like amethyst is said to do, and mixes well with other aromas.

She suggests being creative and having fun to aid the aromatherapy experience. “If there are other people in your home, you can spray each other,” she says, “or you can spray over a window fan to spread the mist throughout the house.” Many people find that a few drops of oil in a bath also helps them to stay cool.

Aromatherapy works through the breath, which is fitting because another method used to stay cool is through the use of “good conscious breathing.” Many healers, in both the east and the west, have noted that most of us rarely pay attention to our breath. We breathe shallowly, from the top of our lungs, which agitates us and keeps us from harmonizing with our environment, whether hot or cold.

Although there have been various breathing techniques developed over the centuries in Asia, most healers and teachers would start by simply having you take a few minutes everyday to pay attention to your breath. Breathe through the nose, pulling the air in by expanding the navel, not the chest. At the top of the breath, just release it and let it go without using force.

If you concentrate on doing this for a few minutes several times a day, it will calm and cool you while giving you the energy to be active and still beat the heat. In the winter, the same technique will keep you warm. You can do this while involved with another task, like washing the dishes or sitting at a desk at work

Working with the diet and eating in accordance with the season is the key to beating the summer’s heat. But you can also appeal to the senses with aromatherapy, Feng Shui and soothing music. Good breathing habits will then bring this cooling energy down into every cell in your body. By taking these steps, you are helping alleviate the mind/body split, making you more able to live in harmony with your environment.

(NOTE: Boyce Drew Freeman passed away a short time after this article was written. She is much missed by all of us here at AlternativeApproaches.com, and we pray for her family members, as they continue to recover from the loss of this special soul. We hope that this article pays tribute to the lasting influence that she will have over many of us.)

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