Spices !!!!

Spices don't just add aroma and flavor to your food- they are also excellent sources of essential nutrients and potential alternative drug store. You may take the bottles of pepper and cinnamon sitting in your kitchen cabinet for granted, but spices have special in history as rare and precious commodities. In ancient time they were used for medicine as much as for flavoring. They also played the role of currency, as they were valuable and quite portable. The spice hunt even led Europe to the East, playing a dramatic role in the development of Western civilization.
Practitioners of alternative medicine have ascribed specific specific studies worldwide. Several spices have been used as remedies for hundreds of years, as they contain many biologically active ingredients, which can be used to treat a variety of conditions.
Spices are different from herbs. In cooking, herbs are stems and leaves of plants, whereas spices are the seeds, roots, barks, and fruits. The immediate health benefit of using spices is that you end up cutting down on salt and fat because their flavor does much to enrich food without increasing calories or cholesterol. But many individual spices work specific health wonders on their own.
Allspice is ground from unripe berries of a tree that grows primarily in Jamaica. It has the strong odor of nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves, which is why it is sometimes mistaken for a mixture of these different spices, hence its name. Allspice is used to season sausages, sauces, stuffings, cakes, and fresh fruit desserts. Called the carribean cure, all spice is thought to aid digestion, and relive flatulence and colic.