Birch sap is a native Russian product. The fact is that before peasant pagan Russia, birch was a sacred tree and therefore it was not used. Because it was not so easy to take and make holes, so to speak, to spoil the tree.
The medicine
If we talk about medicine, then one thing can be said that leaves, buds, and bark are actively used for medicinal properties, but more on that later. Another thing is the juice, it is actually the living moisture of this tree. It contains the basis of microelements and sugar. Moreover, there is a really huge amount of sugars, this is what the tree eats, especially when it is spring and you need to dissolve the leaves and buds. From a health point of view, it contains micro elements, namely potassium and magnesium. Potassium is a real sodium antagonist, there are many useful things for us: lowering blood pressure, reducing edema. But more importantly, the combination, especially with magnesium, does not allow increased bone destruction.
Let's take three types of juice: of course, birch, apple and orange. In first place in terms of the amount of magnesium in the juice, it is birch that contains approximately 245 milligrams per liter. The remaining juices lag behind but do not differ much from each other. And so in second place is orange juice and it contains 150 milligrams, and apple juice gets third place with its 120 milligrams.
Benefits to the body
Natural birch sap can help us fight cholesterol, since it contains a phytoelement called "sapanin" and it makes it possible for cholesterol not to be absorbed, as a result we get good bones, normal blood pressure, and less cholesterol.
Sodium or salt retains salt in the body, sodium accumulates in the walls of blood vessels, making them edematous and hard. Salt, which is contained in the body, attracts water with great force, so that the water at the first consumption by the body instantly goes to the salt, as a result, the volume of circulating blood increases, the vessels drain, the pressure literally goes up. All people know that if in the evening they ate salty, then in the morning they woke up in edema, all the liquid was delayed. So the potassium contained in birch sap displaces sodium. As a result, sodium is excreted taking water with it. A person has a diuretic effect, the pressure decreases. Therefore, this quality of birch sap is the main one!
How to choose the right juice
One hundred percent better than all this juice straight from the tree into the glass. But if there is no such possibility, it is better to rely only on such basic factors, which I will tell you about now. We choose only a glass bottle, it gives us the best look, the best quality and the best preservation. It must be written on the bottle that the juice is sterilized or pasteurized, this lets you know that all harmful bacteria have been killed, and you can drink the juice without fear. Don't forget the expiration date, it's important.
If the bottle you bought is still sealed, then the juice can be stored at room temperature, right up to the expiration date. If the juice is open, then its storage should not exceed two days, otherwise it will begin to ferment, store after opening only in the refrigerator.
Drink when you want and how much you want. Big or small sips, this is also as you see fit. I do not recommend drinking juice directly from the refrigerator. It is better to pour into a glass and put it on the table, let it stand for 10 - 20 minutes.
Usefulness in addition to medicinal properties in it is exactly as much as in glucose.
This must be done carefully, because the tree suffers from this. If you overdo it, the tree can simply die. It is better to contact a specialist and a class expert in this matter.
Birch is also a symbol of freshness and youth.
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birch tears- so called birch sap in the old days. In Russia in the spring it was the most popular drink. In April, the trees wake up from their winter sleep, and life-giving juice begins to rise from the roots to the branches, giving strength for the leaves to bloom. And he is able to give strength not only to a birch, but to you and me too. Birch is crying sweet as nectar tears. And there are so many benefits in them that after drinking just a couple of glasses in the spring, you can stock up on health until late autumn! Why is this miracle elixir so useful?
About the benefits of birch sap.
Birch sap - a storehouse vitamins(C, group B) and minerals (potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, iron and about ten more!) It contains enzymes, phytoncides, tannins, essential oils and more than 10 useful organic acids! Birch sap has a diuretic, choleretic, tonic and immunostimulating effect, has antiseptic and antitumor properties, improves metabolic processes and removes harmful substances from the body. (salts, trans fats, toxins, carcinogens, radionuclides). The invigorating elixir tones up the body tired during the winter, fights against beriberi, drives away drowsiness, migraine and depression. Birch tears are especially useful:- in diseases of the gastrointestinal tract (ulcers, gastritis, cholecystitis, pancreatitis);
- genitourinary system (urolithiasis, cystitis, urethritis);
- respiratory organs (bronchitis, tracheitis, tonsillitis, pulmonary tuberculosis);
- musculoskeletal system (arthritis, arthrosis).
Real birch sap slightly cloudy and slightly sweet in taste. It is very difficult to keep it fresh - it begins to ferment on the second day. But there are still options, I will talk about them later. Fresh juice is sold only 3-4 weeks in April-early May. Naturally, he is the most useful. Sometimes on sale there is a drink based on birch sap with the addition of citric acid and sugar. It is sweeter, more transparent, but there is less benefit in it.
How and when birch sap is collected.
In our republic, the period of active sap flow falls on April - early May. Juice can be collected as long as until the buds open. To do this, a shallow hole is made in the tree. (2-3 cm) a hole at a height of about 1 meter and insert a wooden chip or a special metal groove into it. A jar, a balloon or a plastic bag is attached under it. From one birch you can collect from 1 to 7 liters of juice. In order not to harm the tree, it is better limited to 1-3 liters and harvest only from large mature trees. The wound after collection carefully covered with garden var. Juice should be collected in ecologically clean areas. And if you buy, then not in the market, but in specialized pharmacies.
You can also collect juice from the Ash-leaved Maple (American). But this species does not grow in Bashkiria as massively as birch. He is especially popular in his homeland, in America, where the famous maple syrup is prepared from maple sap.
Useful recipes from birch sap.
- Berezovitsa (birch, birch, birch)- the oldest drink known since the time of the Scythians. Birch sap was poured into wooden barrels and left to ferment naturally. After 2-3 days, a sweetish low-alcohol drink was obtained that retained the beneficial properties of the juice.
- Kvass appeared in Russia only in the X-XI century. To prepare it, you need to add rye crackers or a handful of raisins to birch sap (optional, a little sugar). Vigorous birch kvass will be ready in a couple of days. Okroshka on such kvass - just overeating!
- Syrup can be prepared by simmering birch sap for a long time over low heat until the liquid has evaporated by about 2/3. The syrup will contain fewer useful properties, but it can be stored for a long time.
- lollipops can be made from syrup. Birch sugar - levulose - does not harm children's teeth (Finnish doctors declare this with all responsibility). To do this, a small amount of syrup must be continued to evaporate until it acquires a golden color and thickens.
- Birch ice. Birch sap starts to ferment very quickly, but it can be preserved by freezing directly in plastic bottles. When frozen, it almost does not lose its healing properties and perfectly quenches thirst in the summer heat. And you can freeze birch sap cubes and wipe your face with them - excellent
- Nourishing birch sap mask. Mix 2 tablespoons of birch sap and 1 tablespoon of sour cream (you can add 1 teaspoon of honey). Apply to face for about 10 minutes. Wash off with warm water. The skin will acquire a pleasant matte shade. Also, birch sap good to wash your hair- helps a lot from dandruff.
Birch sap: interesting facts and rules for collecting a healing drink
Birch sap - an elixir of health and youth
At first glance, clear water, which sometimes even has no taste, but in its chemical composition contains a real vitamin "bomb" - birch sap. It is rich in minerals, carbohydrates, vitamins. Contains acids, essential oils, tannins, saponins. Its composition includes calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, glucose. This healing elixir has been used for medicinal purposes from past centuries to the present.
Why is birch sap called a unique drink and what are its health benefits?
Since the juice contains magnesium, potassium, calcium, it is used in the treatment of heart diseases and blood vessels. Thanks to the tannic components, this natural elixir is an antiseptic. Fructose and glucose, which are also contained in it, stimulate the brain.
Birch sap is a diuretic, so it helps reduce swelling. For this purpose, it is recommended to drink it to pregnant and lactating mothers.
The healing drink is used to cleanse the kidneys and blood in case of intoxication, chronic and acute infections, inflammatory, colds and viral diseases. It breaks down stones in the urinary system and kidneys, but in this case it is recommended to drink the drink no more than half a liter per day. Since a significant amount of juice may set the stones in motion and provoke an attack.
During menopause, a birch drink helps women cope with depression, irritability, and normalize blood pressure. To do this, it is enough to drink it one glass a day. Men natural drink can get rid of impotence.
Birch sap removes inflammation in the oral cavity and helps prevent caries.
Stimulates the secretion of enzymes and gastric juice for proper digestion. Improves metabolism and metabolic processes. The healing drink is recommended for arthritis, rheumatism, diseases of the respiratory system. It has antitumor properties, as its regular use helps to slow down the development of the process.
In cosmetology, medicinal juice is used for acne, eczema, boils, neurodermatitis, age spots. To do this, use pure juice, they wipe the damaged areas in the morning and evening. 
The natural drink has a rejuvenating effect and is recommended for making compresses and masks.
Birch sap helps get rid of dandruff and stop hair loss. It is very useful for them to wash their hair, the juice stimulates hair growth, makes them shiny and soft, strengthens the roots, makes hair fluffy and thick.
When to extract medicinal juice
They begin to collect a natural drink from the end of March, after the day of the spring equinox. Active sap flow begins when the buds swell on the tree.
To determine whether the time has come to collect the juice, you need to go into the forest in an ecologically clean area, find a birch in a sunny clearing and make a puncture on the tree with a thin awl. If a little juice comes out, then the juice has already gone. Time to start collecting.
As it gets warmer, you need to go deeper into the forest, where the thicket comes to life later.
The season for extracting birch sap ends with the appearance of the first leaves on the trees, as then the sap becomes cloudy. Approximately healing drink is collected from the twentieth of March to mid-April.
It is better to go for a natural elixir in sunny, warm weather from 12:00 to 18:00. Then the juice will be sweet and flow well. The taste and color of the drink from each birch is different. It may be completely colorless, or it may have a pale pink or light yellow tint. In trees that grow on hillocks in dry places, the drink is richer in color and taste. And the juice from birch trees growing in a swamp or in a lowland has no color and taste.
How to collect a healing elixir?
A tasty and healing drink is extracted from old trees, with a developed crown. The diameter of the birch trunk should be more than 20 cm. During the collection of sap, it is very important to minimize the damage to the tree itself. Therefore, the use of an ax must be abandoned, it is better to make a small hole in the trunk with a drill, with a diameter of 5-10 mm. Then the birch will recover faster, and the drilled hole will grow almost without a trace. It is impossible to collect all the healing juice from a single tree, otherwise it will dry out. It is better to drill holes in several birches and extract one liter of drink per day from each than to collect 5-6 liters from one, dooming it to death.
It is desirable to make a hole at an angle of 2 cm in depth. A plastic or aluminum tube is inserted into the incision. You can use last year's meadow grass after washing and preparing it. We install a bottle under the groove and collect a healing elixir.
If the debit ceased to suit, there is no need to make a hole deeper, it is necessary to change the birch. The tree begins to heal the wound immediately after it has been inflicted, and the debit will be constantly filed. And strengthening the hole or drilling a fresh one will destroy the birch.
After collecting birch sap, the hole made must be closed with moss or treated with garden pitch. It is fashionable to insert a dry branch or stick, but not a rotten one. Then the tree will quickly fill the hole with fresh wood.
It is necessary to store a natural drink in a cool place, as it can ferment quite quickly.
Remember the wonderful taste from childhood - Birch juice? Yes, the shelves of post-Soviet stores were filled with three-liter cans. All children drank birch sap with pleasure, but few people knew that this drink had nothing to do with natural birch sap. And he resembled him only in color. It's all the fault of the hydrochloric acid used in conservation, which turns this drink into absolutely useless.
The birch got its name for its beautiful appearance - a white-trunked slender tree, not to be confused with any other. In Indo-European languages, the words "clear, bright" have the root "ber". The word "birch bark" was also formed from this root. And the "birch tears" themselves are light and transparent in color. By the way, the juice becomes cloudy white when it starts to ferment, so it is recommended to drink it freshly picked. A real Russian beauty, if it grows in a sunny meadow, or on a hill, on the edge of a forest, will delight you with the sweetest, most beneficial juice. It contains such treasures for the body as vitamins, enzymes, salts of iron, potassium and calcium, organic acids, glucose, plant hormones, phytoncides and, of course, from 0.5 to 2% sugar.
Gather Birch juice better from the beginning of March to the end of April, until the leaves appear. It is at this time that its most intensive influx is carried out from the roots along the entire trunk to each branch. Violating all the laws of physics, the law of life awakens the tree after hibernation, and active circulation of nutrients begins, which are sent to future foliage.
Birch juice indispensable for people suffering from diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, liver, diseases of the upper respiratory tract, rheumatism. Gout, arthritis, sciatica, headaches are also treatable with this living substance. Often, birch sap is taken for general strengthening of the body and blood purification, to increase immunity and as a dietary remedy. "Berezovitsa", the so-called sap of the white tree, relieves people even of such diseases as impotence and improves well-being in menopause. Fresh juice should be taken as a remedy (a glass 3 times a day half an hour before meals).
How I wish medicines were tasty and useful at the same time! Why go far. Recently, scientists have discovered that birch sap, condensed to the consistency of syrup, is an excellent prophylactic against scurvy and caries. It can also be taken by children in the form of sweet candies.
If you want to stock up on birch sap for a long time, then pour it into bottles, add 2 teaspoons of sugar to each and place in a dark, cold place.
Would you like to get something stronger? Then prepare birch balm: put 3 kilograms of sugar, 4 crushed lemons and 2 liters of wine on a bucket of juice. Let the drink ferment in the cellar for two months, then bottle and age for another 3 weeks. Drink, enjoy and be healthy!
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In the forests of the Odintsovo district, it is time to collect birch sap. The correspondent of "Odintsovo-INFO" has already gone to "intelligence" and shares with readers tips on preparing a valuable natural drink.
I realized that the birch sap season had begun a couple of days ago, when I broke a twig on the edge of the city and saw moisture seeping through it. This means that the tree has "awakened", spring sap flow has begun in it. But it is not recommended to harvest the gifts of nature near roads, industrial zones and other sources of pollution, and therefore it was decided to fence a birch tree near Kubinka, during a visit to the dacha.
There is still a lot of snow in the dense forest, but you can walk almost without falling through - the crust helps. Among the age-old fir trees, we are looking for rare white-trunked trees. It is desirable that the donor birch has a trunk with a diameter of 20 cm or more. If the forest beauty praised by Yesenin has a trunk 27-34 cm thick, then two holes can be made, with a diameter of 35-40 cm - three. If there is a tree in front of you more than 40 cm thick, four holes are allowed. The distance between the juicer holes should be at least 20 cm. The holes can be made with a drill - always at an angle so that the juice flows freely. In this case, the optimal diameter is 1 cm and a depth of 2-3 cm. A path for juice can also be cut with a hatchet (you should get a triangle about 2 cm deep). A tube or groove is inserted into the resulting hole, under which the dishes are installed. The simplest way to take juice is to thread a broken branch with a thickness of 3 mm or more into the bottle and fix the resulting “design”.
The speed with which birch liquid enters your container mainly depends on the weather (warm - faster), the location of the tree, its condition and the time of the fence. From ancient times, people noticed that the sap flows fastest from the north side of the tree. According to my own experience, in the second or third week of April in the Odintsovo district, birch trees growing on relatively flat and not thickened areas usually give off the sap the fastest. Fluid from old trees in wetlands is often cloudy.
From one hole per day, you can usually get 2-3 liters of juice, and during the season the average birch gives up to 70 liters of a sweetish refreshing drink. The period of sap flow, or "tipping", in our latitudes usually begins at the end of March - early April and lasts 20-25 days, until the buds swell. In 2009, the Odintsovo spring was a little delayed, so the dates are being shifted.
In order for the "blood loss" for the birch to be painless, after collecting the sap, the holes made by the drill must be hammered with sticks (the so-called "chopics") to the desired diameter. It is advisable to cover the windows cut with an ax with clay, garden pitch or plug with moss.
The first birch trip this year did not bring an impressive result - in five hours, your correspondent managed to collect no more than 0.5 liters of drink from two birches. But this is only the beginning of the season. And do not forget that a walk through the forest is in itself a great value for a city dweller.
REFERENCE "ODINTSOVO-INFO": NATURAL MEDICINE
Birch sap is rich in vitamins C and B, contains fructose, various trace elements - calcium, potassium, iron, magnesium, copper. In folk medicine, it is valued as a means of healing the blood, stimulating metabolism. Birch is useful for oncological diseases, diseases of the gastrointestinal tract associated with low acidity. Useful in the treatment of gastric ulcer and duodenal ulcer, is indicated for people with chronic gastritis. Birch sap is also drunk for gout, arthritis, rheumatism, colds, and tuberculosis. It is also used in many skin diseases, in diseased kidneys, if there is no indication of stones. You can wash your hair with birch sap - it perfectly strengthens hair.
Birch sap tends to ferment and is usually stored fresh for no more than 2-3 days. There are ways to preserve this drink, however, with them many of its useful properties are lost. Refreshing kvass can also be made from juice. For example, my grandmother used to cook it according to this recipe: about 0.5 kg of pure roasted barley is poured into a 20-liter bottle of juice, the bottle is placed in the cellar. After a week and a half, excellent kvass is ready, which can be stored in a dark and cool place for up to six months.
