By Christina Major | 30 August 2024
One of the primary ingredients in Dit Da Jow, fennel seeds are healthy and have massive health benefits that can help prepare you for a fight, may prevent bruising, and keep you healthy enough to keep you in the ring.
Dit Da Jow had huge fans, like Bruce Lee, and use this formula regularly. In this video, Bruce Lee was interviewed by Leo Rodriguez. This formula is one of the foundations of Wing Chun, being able to condition the body to avoid bruising.
What Is Fennel Seed?
Fennel seed is the seed of the fennel plant, a highly nutritious vegetable with a slightly peppery taste. Fennel finds a prominent place in Middle Eastern cooking for it's highly nutritious benefits.
The seeds are rich in manganese, magnesium, calcium, and potassium. It contains the antioxidants rosmarinic acid, chlorogenic acid, quercetin, apigenin, limoline, methyl chavicol, fenchone, and anethole.
Many of the antioxidants help the body prevent disease, reduce inflammation, and helps metabolism.
How To Use Fennel Seed
Fennel seeds are rich in flavor. You can add whole or coarsely cracked fennel seeds to meat and stew. Fennel helps as a digestive aid, helping to break down fats easier. Fennel is a common herb used with lamb because of how fatty it is.
A tea made from ground fennel seeds is delicious as an after-meal digestive. A combination of peppermint and fennel has tremendous flavor and health benefits.
You can also replace anise or peppercorns with fennel to add depth of flavor to various dishes.
What Does Fennel Seed Do For Our Body?
For people with digestive issues, fennel is a go-to herb. It helps calm things down and relaxes your digestive system. Let's take a look at more uses of fennel seed.
1. Combats Bad Breath
Chewing on fennel seeds helps increase saliva and combats the proliferation of bacteria that cause bad breath. Sipping fennel seed tea after a meal heavy and onion and garlic can help neutralize the allicin that may return on your breath.
2. Improves Digestive Health
Funnel seeds are one of the top digestive herbs, helping to reduce gut inflammation and may soothe the gallbladder. Fennel can help stimulate bile production, helping to reduce the inflammation around the bile ducts and allowing bile and other fluids to flow freely from the liver, gallbladder, and spleen.
3. Helps To Regulate Blood Pressure
Rich in potassium, fennel seeds can help regulate blood pressure and heart rate. Fennel seeds help increase the level of nitrites in saliva, and nitrites are a natural check on blood pressure.
4. May Help Reduce Asthma
Because of the aromatic compounds within fennel seed and its anti-inflammatory properties, strong fennel tea can help reduce bronchial inflammation. In addition, when consumed regularly, it may be able to help reduce asthma attacks.
5. Promotes Lactation
Although this is a smaller concern for martial artists, women in the martial arts tend to have reduced estrogen and prolactin, hormones necessary for producing breast milk. Fennel seeds help stimulate the production of estrogen and lactation.
6. Improves Skin Appearance
Being rich in zinc, selenium, and potassium, fennel can help reduce oxidative damage to your skin, and may even be useful against acne, rashes, and dryness. In addition, the benefit of fennel might help with the oxygen and nitrite balance in the blood, which can improve the look of your skin.
7. Helps Reduce Blood Infections
Although research is lacking for this one, one of the historical uses for fennel seed is as a blood purifier. Traditionally, it was used to flush out toxins and bad humors.
8. May Ward Off Cancer
Of course, reducing toxins in the blood may have to do with the way many of the antioxidants and components of fennel seed have been researched to reduce cancer. Anethole shows promise to help suppress cell growth and induce cell death in breast cancer. Other animal studies show fennel seed extract may protect against liver cancer.
9. Benefits Eye Accuity
Fennel contains retinoids, some of the precursors to vitamin A that can directly benefit your eyes. Some early studies showed fennel seed extract helps reduce inflammation in the eye and may be useful for glaucoma.
10. May Help Weight Control
Drinking fennel seed tea might reduce appetite. And a small study, women who drink 8.5 oz of fennel tea before eating, ate less and felt less hungry. However, the extract did not prove to have the same result. Although more studies are needed, it may be a property of the tea that helps produce the effect, which is yet undiscovered.
11. Promotes Heart Health
Many of the nutrients and antioxidants within fennel have been shown individually to help reduce heart disease. Plus, fennel is packed with lots of dietary fiber that affects heart condition. With some of the nutrients in fennel helping to reduce blood pressure and inflammation, regularly consuming penalty or fennel seeds can positively impact your heart.
12. Reduces Inflammation
We talked several times now about fennel seed’s impact on inflammation. Most of these polyphenol antioxidants in fennel seeds are proven anti-inflammatory agents. In addition, they're showing in various studies to help with different conditions directly related to inflammation.
Fennel seed, being one part of Dit Da Jow, helps many conditions. As Master Ong Ming Thong a Southern Shaolin Kungfu master, said in a 2016 interview that he respects Dit Da Jow, but using it on open wounds may cause increased infections.
We recommend using fennel seed as a tea to take internally or as food to get the benefits and use Dit Da Jow sparingly. Here are a few options to consider:
