Especially here in Asia, it’s common to hear how smoking is good for stress. Men, particularly, face stress in their lives which needs a remedy. Tobacco, though not intrinsically healthy, at least helps to assuage that greater health threat; stress. Or so the logic goes.   Well, smoking does greatly reduce stress, if you are a nicotine addict overdue a nicotine fix. If one of the significant sources of your stress is chemical withdrawal then, yes, a cigarette will greatly alleviate that.    But if you are a never-smoker who has...

Alcohol makes you mellow and unconstrained. And then it makes you boisterous and shouty. Caffeine banishes fatigue from the limbs and the brow, then makes you arrogant and shouty. Such are the devils we know.   There’s a huge variety of delivery methods to these legal, reality distorters; some fast, some slow, some calorific, some less so. And it’s the flavours and occasions which influence how we choose to take them; chocolate or yerba matte, sake or champagne.  Urban legend suggests that lining up licquors in the right order may prevent...

By coincidence, I was recently drinking Yunnan Green tea anyway. My favourite market-stall had been selling some. Yeah, it was cheap. And, despite the unpromising smell and ashen grey appearance, I was curious. I had not bought any of this stuff while in Yunnan itself. I remember seeing it piled high in the market there, dusty, no effort towards preservation. “That’s not the way to treat green tea”, I thought. Moreover, the Yunnan sellers themselves told us not to buy it! Buy the pu er, they said; this can only by...

They call it “herbal medicine”. And in this house, this week, it’s everywhere. I call it “horrible medicine”. But I actually quite like it.  It smells of fragrant-soil and it tastes like fragrant-soil-with-brown-sugar.   Apparently, it has an English name; Isatis Tinctoria. But, like the names for all those things popular only in China, that’s not really an English name.  The brew hasn’t caught on elsewhere; what Americans call root-beer is a completely different thing. But here it’s enormous. As I write, your local pharmacy is selling fast out. There’s no scientific evidence that...