Ginger is the world’s most perfect substance. I’m convinced of it.
I’m that person at sushi restaurants – you know the one? – who consumes almost as much pickled ginger as raw fish. At the grocery store, anything with the word ginger on the label requires a first, maybe a second look, and often ends up in my shopping cart…”I’ll just try it.” (My most favorite recent discovery is GT’s “Gingerade” kombucha.) I use fresh ginger in stir fries, in smoothies, to make super gingery carrot-ginger soup, and in tea when my tummy is a little off. Two of my favorite sweet treats are candied ginger – paired with a piece of dark chocolate, it’s absolute HEAVEN – and ginger-molasses cookies, which I’ll choose over chocolate chip cookies every time. (Quick cooking tip for ginger lovers: Peel and chop fresh ginger root into 1-inch or 2-inch pieces. Throw them in the freezer and pull them out to grate into dishes for cooking.)
I’m also a runner, as many of you know from my posts about training for my first half marathon. And I’ve wondered more than once during my four months of training why I’ve had little to no muscle soreness pretty much the whole time. A study published in The Journal of Pain in September might explain it. (Is it kinda funny to anyone else that there is such a journal? I digress…)
Ginger is known in the alternative health community as an anti-inflammatory; so it’s not a huge surprise to those of us who’ve been using “food as medicine” for some time that it reduces exercise-induced inflammation too. The study confirmed just that; namely that eating ginger reduces exercise-induced muscle pain. I do have to wonder if my obsession-level consumption of ginger has anything to do with my relatively pain-free training experience.
What’s your experience with ginger? Does this finding ring true for you too?
