It's Eric Bakker.
Thanks for coming back.
We're going to look at cinnamon, one of my favorite spices.
I love cinnamon.
Dutch people like me were brought up on cinnamon.
The Dutch East in fact brought cinnamon back from Indonesia.
I think it was back in the golden age when the Dutch had a very powerful armada, a big
fleet of ships that they built up.
The French had a powerful fleet, the English and the Dutch.
We're talking like the 1430's, 1450's, and I think the Dutch East Indies Trading Company
was set up around that time.
So they were one of the first countries in the world to bring back cloves and cinnamon
and these spices from these islands and they brought them back.
So the Dutch have got a history of using these spices and I make up these special cookies,
for example, speculaas.
I've made them up for a long time now and they contain these beautiful strong and high
amounts of clove and cinnamon in them.
Very, very nice tasting.
Cinnamon's a wonderful spice to use, but only recently it's been discovered to have very
powerful effects on the gut.
Excuse me.
There are several effects that we need to talk about.
It's a strong anti-inflammatory and an antioxidant and has a good effect on several cytokines
or white blood cells that stimulate, that can stimulate inflammation in the body.
It actually downplays that inflammation.
It's shown even to affect the brain to stop neurodegeneration of the brain.
So to stop pushing you into, you know, diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
It's all coming out now.
Science is validating all this stuff.
It's amazing.
One of it's most profound effects though is on its effect to reduce insulin sensitivity.
So it can really aid diabetics tremendously.
The dosage can range from a half a teaspoon up to two teaspoons per day and they reckon
you can reduce insulin sensitivity by up to 30% just by taking good amounts in your diet.
So insulin is affected positively.
Insulin resistance is affected positively by the incorporation of cinnamon into your
diet.
So cinnamaldehyde is one of the principal ingredients in cinnamon.
So what this does is it interferes with digestive enzymes and actually stops them from breaking
carbohydrates down so quickly, so it retards or delays the carbohydrate breakdown in the
body so it more slowly drip feeds the carbs into the system.
It also has a nice effect on allowing insulin to more effectively come inside to the cell
when people have got insulin resistance in their body.
So cinnamon is something that people should be using.
If you've got sugar cravings, for example, or if you're a pre-diabetic or diabetic, will
get a lot of benefit from having the regular inclusion of cinnamon into their diet.
There are two different types of cinnamon you can get.
You can get one called cassia bark, which are often big curly sort of pieces and you
can get the true Ceylon cinnamon, which is the one that I like.
It's got a very powerful strong smell about it.
It's difficult to pick the difference.
I know the difference because I'd been using cinnamon now for decades.
I will buy the whole thing.
Even just getting a glass of boiling water and steep one cinnamon quill in that for half
an hour, and have a sip of that.
It's very tasty.
But the ground up spice or the powder, I can smell the difference immediately between cassia
and cinnamon.
It's something that you want to go to a good wholefood shop and ask them for cassia.
Ask if they've got the proper cinnamon and then smell the difference.
The cassia's got more of an earthy kind of a smell about it and also the color is different.
The true cinnamon has got that beautiful kind of a, it's hard to describe the color isn't
it?
Whereas the cassia's got more of a browny kind of color.
So with experience, you'll soon pick up on the difference.
But if you've got gut issues and especially you crave sweet stuff, I'd recommend that
you have cinnamon regularly in your diet.
It's a super antioxidant.
It's in fact ranked higher than garlic.
When they checked about 30 different types of herbs and spices, they found cinnamon to
top them all.
It's in the tumeric realm, so tumeric and cinnamon are two wonderful ingredients that
you really want to put into your diet regularly.Thanks for tuning in.