So welcome, everybody. We are here tonight to talk about herbal nutritives, which is a really fun topic and one that I think is very foundational to herbal healing and one that I surprisingly don't have a really good recording of. And so I decided to do a class tonight to sort of open up the series for the year.
We're going to be doing series later on this spring and summer, and I'm happy to answer questions about that towards the end of this class. But For this particular class, we're going to talk about herbs that are nutritious, which just form the backbone of what we as herbalists and herby people tend to include in our day to day routine. And so we'll dive right in.
You probably know me already. I'm Maria Noel Groves. I'm a clinical herbalist. And I want to keep saying that I'm in Allentown, but I'm not in Allentown anymore.
I need to make sure to. slowly update all my promotional materials. So I'm now in Chichester.
We just moved back in December and this is the first class in the live stream classroom of the year. So I do have a couple books. I have Body Into Balance and Grow Your Own Herbal Remedies that are behind me. I also have Herbal Remedies for Sleep that's hiding right over here.
It's like the only copy of the early editions that I have. We'll be placing the order in just the next few weeks to get the orders to fill the... fill the pre-orders and I'll be filling those as soon as the publishers allow me to, which will be in early April. Very exciting. And I'm currently writing book number four, which is on a topic.
I can't tell you what it's about going to be about yet, but we'll be able to release that in no, probably like fall or so at least we'll be able to tell you what it's about in fall. So those are the books that are currently available. If you're not already aware, there is a ton of information on my website. And I'm also curious too, can everybody hear me okay?
I know we had some folks reply to me earlier. So I assume that you can hear me, but is the audio quality good? Should have asked that before I started recording. And on my website, you'll find all sorts of free information as well as, of course, information about my own classes and consultations and my writing and my mailing list too. Which...
probably if you're here means that you are already on my mailing list, but who knows? So let's dive in. So basic things about herbs.
And again, I'm, you know, getting into the groove. I should have brought my clicker with me, although it doesn't always work. So I'll just use my, use my buttons to advance the slides. And so intro to herbs, there are all sorts of really wonderful basic things. We're just going to cover a few of the odds and ends, and then we're going to really dive into the nutritious herbs side of things.
So safety rules. Of course, I am an herbalist. I am not a doctor.
I cannot diagnose or prescribe legally or treat or cure disease and all those other good things that are officially legally part of practicing medicine and something that doctors do. And this class is really just meant for educational purposes only. Even though I do and other herbalists do consultations one-on-one, even that is quite a bit different from being in a class because we don't know in a class situation what all of your health history is and whether or not something may or may not be appropriate for you. So I'm going to share a lot of general info and you can use that to gradually inform your own decisions.
And you can hire an herbalist or naturopathic doctor to guide you in your healing process alongside your doctor. Doctors can help with lots of things and they can diagnose and prescribe, but they don't always know that much about herbs. So sometimes you may want to seek a professional, but I'm going to assume that for most of you, and especially for this topic, which is such a sort of a wonderful gateway topic for health and herbs, because it's often pretty safe for most people. I'm going to assume that most of you are going to be self-treating. And so for that, I recommend following a few basic safety rules as you decide whether or not an herb really is right for you.
And so one is to... Try that herb, sorry, research that herb and at least three different resources with different perspectives. So not like my book, my other book and my class, but, you know, maybe me as one of your sources, but then, you know, maybe Rosalie's book and maybe a sciency website like the Memorial Sloan Kettering website or something like that. I think it's nice to have a little science in there as well, but mostly getting your information. from herbalists who have a lot of experience with the plants and have a lot of training with the plants.
You'll get more nuanced info there, but I do like to know what's going on with the science too for a different. perspective to throw in. And I have lots of information on my website. There's a recommended reading page with my favorite books listed.
And then there's also a links page that has a lot of wonderful websites, both herbalist written and scientific. And so you can check those out. They're all under the learn more tab on my website. Also equally important to the research is listening to your body, listening to your intuition and letting that also help guide you into what plant you turn to, as well as as you start to take that herb, how does it feel in your body. And it's always great to start with a low dose and gradually work your way up.
And listen, you know, key in like, does this agree with me? Does this not agree with me? Maybe I should try it in a couple different formats, different potencies, you know, what, what agrees most with you.
And, you know, no one plant is perfect for everybody. So trying to find those. plants that are your herbal allies is really where it's at. If you're doing any wildcrafting or cultivating, which most of the plants we're going to talk about today are either common weeds or are plants you can easily grow in the garden or a little bit of both, you'll definitely want to check the identity to ensure it 100% before you pick something and you put it in your mouth, or you pick something and make something and put it in your mouth.
Mistakes happen. here in New Hampshire, we're fortunate that we only have a handful of super duper deadly toxic plants, but they're still around. And then there may even be mistakes that just aren't, it's just not the right plant. Like there is a plant called hedge nettle that looks a lot like stinging nettle before it blooms and is a lot more common. And when I was trying to get nettle for my garden, because crazy herbalists plant nettle in their yards, not in my garden, but in my yard.
And it took me four people. before I actually got stinging nettles. I kept getting hedge nettles from people because they thought it was nettle and they didn't want to touch it and they didn't know how to do more plant ID to ensure that it was the right plant.
So mistakes happen. Every year I end up with some plant that I buy or that is given to me that turns out to not be the plant that I was told that it was. So practicing your identification skills, definitely a good idea before you put something in your mouth.
Also, if you're on any pharmaceuticals, it's a great idea to double check herb drug interactions with your pharmacist. An herbalist or naturopathic doctor should also be able to give you guidance on that. And there are whole classes that I teach on herb drug interactions for folks who are a little bit more like advanced level.
But if you're just starting out, I would say the easiest answer for folks who are self treating would be to ask their pharmacist. And they won't know about everything, but they'll probably know about a lot. And then it's always a good idea to keep your doctor in the loop. And also keep in mind that pharmacists are really, really busy these days. They're especially if you're looking at like the pharmacists that are in your bigger drug stores.
So they may or may not have the time in that moment to look something up for you. So just be patient with them and ask them what they're able to do for you. If you're in the smaller, you know, mom and pop kinds of pharmacists, they may be a little bit more helpful.
But most of them have the very least. some really great databases that they can look things up in. And many of them, especially here in the Northeast, actually a really good training on herbs and herb drug interactions, especially the newer pharmacists that have been coming out of like Massachusetts College.
They know quite a bit about that. I teach for them sometimes. You can check out your notes for tips for resources for pregnancy, lactation, kids.
That's really not my specialty. Although many of the herbs we're going to talk about today are actually... pretty safe for most people, including children, elders, and then sometimes in pregnancy and lactation. So I love this. So this is Michael Moore.
He was my primary herb teacher. And he sort of reminds me visually of a little bit like Hagrid from the Harry Potter. And he was just sort of a very colorful and curmudgeon-y in a good way kind of teacher. And he would say in class, frequently that this isn't lab science, this is herbology.
And so that is to say that there is a lot of nuance to herbal medicine, and especially to remedy making. And you'll hear different things from different people. And there certainly is some amount of phytochemistry at play, and some ways that one thing will be more potent or less potent, or whatever it may be more one constituent or another.
But there's a lot of variability and how things can be done. And so you will hear a different things from different people, different methods from different people. And for the most part, it still works.
So that's, that's okay. So nutritive herbs, we have lots of great plants to choose from. And we're going to be looking at mostly herbs that are really high in minerals. at calcium, silica, magnesium, iron, especially the calcium, silica, magnesium, potassium, but some that also have a lot of iron. And then we're also going to consider a little bit the herbs that have water soluble vitamins like vitamin C and the B complex.
And then a little bit also some of those carotenoids, those fat soluble pigments that are in the red to orange, yellow range. And those are... a little bit different as well.
So each one of these kind of categories of nutritive constituents is going to be present in some different kinds of plants, as well as they have different kinds of properties in terms of how stable they are, how they're best extracted, how they're made to be most bioavailable. And we're going to really key on the minerals because that's a group of nutrients that's pretty easy to get from plants, especially easy to get from dried plants. But there are certain ways of remedy making that we'll get into later that will get more out of them. Water-soluble vitamins like vitamin C and the B vitamins, those are more mercurial.
So as things dry, as they hang out in storage, as they get cooked, as they get microwaved, all those things will deplete their content to some extent. And so those are better to get from like fresh things, fresh food, fresh herbs. Um, and so I'm not going to focus as much on those since most of the things that we're going to be talking about as herbal remedies are teas, which are usually made with dry plants and tinctures and things of that nature.
That said, you might be able to get something really good from a jam or syrup. Sometimes that sugar helps protect things a little bit longer, especially if you made it with the fresh plant versus the dry plant. And so sometimes we can get those in storage form from our plants, but more often we're enjoying those nutrients from our food or maybe from like a supplement pill. Fat soluble nutrients, those are going to be best with heat and fat.
You're going to get more of the carotenoids, they're going to be more bioavailable. So like calendula here, which has got, you know, orange and yellow and red carotenoids in it. They're okay from a cup of tea, but if you put them in broth, you'll actually get a little bit more out of them. Or if you cook them into a frittata. you'll get a little bit more out of them because you're getting some heat and you're getting some fat, which will make it more bioavailable.
And I'll know, like, even though we wouldn't think of turmeric as a vitamin or a mineral, the curcumins and curcuminoids that are in turmeric are also fat soluble carotenoids. So there is some similarity for that as well in terms of making it more bioavailable. So you'll often hear calendula called pot marigold. because it was often added to the soup pot, which was actually a really great way of consuming it.
So just take a moment to pause, check to see how we're doing. Looks like we've got about 20 people, including me, on the call. And hopefully you're all good. If you have any questions, feel free to plug them into the chat box.
I will pause periodically to answer questions. And usually if they're in the chat box, that's the easiest way. Although especially towards the end. If folks want to unmute themselves and ask, we could do that as well. And of course, if anything's going wrong tech wise, don't hesitate to unmute yourself and mention something because I might not know in the scheme of things.
I've just kind of have my face and the chat box and the slides in front of me right now. So in your notes, you have some pretty detailed notes that you can refer to in addition to the slides and the webinar. And we have this really lovely chart and there is a chart in body into balance. However, the numbers changed.
I'm not really quite sure why they changed. These numbers were calculated from Jim Duke's database. He's got a really great phytochemical database he has since passed on, but his research and his work on that database still lives on. And so I took the parts per million and plugged it into a calculation that I had come up with.
bring it down to how many milligrams of that nutrient were in one ounce of the herb. And I rechecked, you know, I checked all my numbers before body into balance was published. And then maybe a year or two later, after it was published, I was looking something up and I was like, wait a minute, that's not the layout of calcium that I was expecting to see on the database. And so I went back and checked and all the numbers had actually changed a little bit, or many of the numbers have changed a little bit.
So this 2018 chart that's in your notes is more up to date than what is in body into balance to what is at least when I checked it in 2018 on the Jim Duke database. Also, if you're really geeky and you like to dive into the database for yourself, and you want to see how to come up with the calculations of getting a part per million of a compound in a plant to how many milligrams per ounce, I do share a link in your notes to the spreadsheet that I created to help make those calculations. And so you're welcome to check that out if you'd like, or you can just refer to this sort of overview chart of common nutrients that are really beneficial for our health that are present in plants, what some of the benefits in the body are. what the general recommended daily value for adults to get into their bodies is per day, and then approximately how much you might get based off the data that they have for various herbs. And this is approximate because every plant is a little different.
The database clarifies what plant part, but it doesn't clarify whether it's fresh or dry. So, you know, so there's quite a big difference between fresh and dry, but it at least gives you sort of a ballpark of the capacity. And so you'll see that like herbs like dandelion are actually super nutritious. Danny, that was one of the changes between probably 2015 or so when I fact checked before the book went to print to 2018, when we redid those numbers, is that dandelion was not above nettle before, but now it's like actually quite a bit more than nettle. Nettle dropped down a little bit from the data and dandelion jumped up.
Holy basil also got into the mix with having a relatively decent amount of calcium. That said one ounce of holy basil, it's probably a pretty high dose that may not agree with everybody, but dandelion nettle, you know, a lot of the herbs that we're going to talk about today are very food like herbs that you can safely consume in pretty large quantities, assuming that the plant agrees with you, which for most people, that's the case. I did put little asterisks. This chart is also in your notes.
I put little asterisks and in your notes, I made comments about when having a whole ounce of those herbs might actually pose some safety risks. And so especially like the seaweeds, if you were to consume a whole ounce of seaweeds, you would be massively overdosing on iodine, not to mention sodium, but also iodine. And that could actually be problematic for the thyroid in that large of a quantity.
And some plants are higher in alkaloids and some plants are higher in astringent. tannins and other constituents that may not be as appropriate in those large doses. And so for the ones that were the bigger concern, I put those in the notes with a little caution there.
So hopefully you'll have fun geeking out with that chart. All right. So moving on, we have our mineral rich herbs and We have lots of really wonderful mineral-rich herbs. The seaweeds definitely do have a lot of minerals, but because they have so much iodine, usually we're just using like a little sprinkle here or a little sprinkle there in our food.
I don't actually recommend large amounts of seaweed because of iodine. We need a little bit for thyroid health, but it's not hard to get too much and too much can actually be problematic for both hyper and hypothyroid. So little caution there. Um, most of the herbs that I'm going to focus on are the ones in this first column here. So dandelion, nettle, oat straw, horsetail, those are some of the, our favorite herbs that we tend to look to for their mineral content.
And there are many others as well. And here's a picture we took, um, during the photo shoot for grow your own herbal remedies. And we were making a pesto for that book, which was just a fun recipe to make where you just puree up dandelion and other nutritious herbs.
in with your typical pesto ingredients. So with lemon and garlic and Parmesan cheese, or you could substitute in nutritional yeast if you prefer something that is vegan, and olive oil, and maybe a little bit of salt. I use pepita seeds based off of a recipe I got from the kitchen blog.
And it comes out really delicious. And we don't even add, you can add basil, but we're not even adding basil there. It's just dandelion and some violet leaves and really, really good. And you can do that with a lot of different nutritious herbs. Even nettle, however, nettle, depending upon the nettle and how strong your blender is, if you're doing it raw, might actually sting you still.
But if you blanch it first, you'll be good. If you freeze it, it'll be good. And if you have a really strong blender, you might not need to do those things. It might be just totally fine to blend it up.
My blenders, when I've done nettle, like it still stings a little bit. So it tastes good, but it stings a little. And just a couple of the herbs that contain different vitamin and phytochemicals. So water soluble, especially the vitamin C and the bioflavonoids.
You'll find those pretty often in plants that are. blue, purple, red, or sometimes in the white part. So like Hawthorne in the whiter part, or that's a Hawthorne berry or in your citrus peel. And we have that like inner peel that inner rind. Those also have a lot of the bioflavonoid precursors.
So we get them in rose hips, hibiscus, amla fruit, peppers, like bell peppers and hot peppers. Raspberry leaf does have a fair amount of vitamin C, especially when they're fresh. Violet leaves have some vitamin C as well. And then, and whereas the hibiscus has more of the precursor, it's in the pigments and the bioflavonoids that will help the vitamin C work more efficiently.
And butterfly blue pea flower, which has a lot of really beautiful purpley blue pigments, also rich in bioflavonoids, not so much in vitamin C, but rich in bioflavonoids. And then some of our beta carotene carotenoid, we have, of course, our gorgeous calendula, which comes in many colors. turmeric has the curcuminoids and curcumin.
We've got our goji berries, which have like a reddish color and have some of the, you know, the reddish fat soluble. So the carotenoids are going to be more like reddish orange, yellow, and that anthocyanins and the anthocyanidins that are more in the bioflavonoid group, they're usually in the like red to blue purple. So it's like, it's like, even though you can have red in both groups, the... Quality of the red is a little different, whereas the anthocyanins and anthocyanidins that are very bioflavonoid rich are going to be more of that purpley bluish red. And the carotenoids like lycopene are more going to be like a red red or orangey red kind of color like tomatoes and autumn olives are very high in lycopene, which is a type of carotenoid.
Dandelion flower. So, you know, we don't tend to work with dandelion flowers, but they actually are not better. They taste pretty good. And they've got a lot of lovely yellow color. The trick with the dandelion flowers and probably why we don't see too many people working with them beyond maybe making dandelion wine or infusing them in olive oil for a topical is because they turn into little poof balls pretty quickly after you harvest them.
So that might be why. But if you have the fresh ones and you can use them right away, they will give you some of the yellowy carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin. A really, uh, yeah, a Laria seaweed has a, when it's fresh, it has like a mid rim, mid rib that's very yellow.
And so it does also have a fair amount of carotenoids as well. All right. So mineral extraction and bioavailability. So we have, um, all sorts of wonderful ways that we can work with our nutrient rich herbs.
And we're going to focus on the individual herbs more as we go along. But right now we're going to talk about some of the best ways to extract minerals from our herbs, which, you know, I want to state for the record, one of my favorite ways to extract properties in general from plants is as a tincture or an alcohol extract. And for most other things, alcohol does a really good job, but not for minerals.
Tinctures... really alcohol is not a good solvent, nor a good preservative, nor is it really enough of a dose, even if it did pull it out to get the mineral content. So we'll use tinctures for other aspects of the plants, but not so much as a source of getting the nutrition and particularly the mineral content. So where do we get those from?
One is simply from food. So like the pesto that we were just talking about, if you're cooking it, freezing it, pureeing it, powdering it, And then consuming it so that you can get a fairly decent dose. And you're also like getting it in pretty close to its whole plant form. That can be a really wonderful way. And then your digestive system has to like extract the minerals, but hopefully it'll do that because that's what it should be doing with food anyway.
So that can be wonderful. You can throw them into soups. You can throw them into casseroles. You can throw them into stir fries, you know, depending upon what the plant is and how it tastes best and what kind of recipes it picks.
pairs well with, you can just incorporate it into food. You could potentially do capsules because it's just powdered herb, but the dose of a capsule is pretty low. Whereas if you take a powder and you add, say like a scoop full, you know, one, one, one teaspoon of that powder is equal to up to like about 10 pills. So you can get much more bang for your buck if you're adding the powder to a food or honey nut butter balls or.
throwing it into your soup or your eggs or something like that. You can also puree and freeze things. So I'll do that, especially with nettles in the springtime, where we'll harvest up the nettles when they're nice and young and perfect, and then cook them down a little bit and puree them. And then they get as you cook them down, it really makes them nice and concentrated and cooking for minerals.
If anything, it makes the minerals more bioavailable minerals, the more you do to it, the the better you'll have access to the minerals are like rocks embedded in the plants in a way. And so we cook the nettle down, then we puree it, and then we put it in ice cube trays and freeze it. And then once they're frozen, put them in a bag. And then you can just add like ice cube of nettle to a sauce or a soup or a smoothie. I love throwing them in smoothies personally.
And you can do that with other herbs too, but nettle is the one that I most often do that with. You can also do simmered concentrates. And there is a free blog and video that I have out there on my website that you can check out.
But basically, because again, like the more you do to it and the more you concentrate it, the stronger, you know, your, your dose is going to be. And they are very hardy when it comes to doing lots of things to the plant. So you're not going to lose the minerals in the process.
They'll just make them better. And so you can do things like simmering your nettle as a tea. strain it out.
Once you've got like a really good extract, maybe you've been simmering it for 20 minutes or an hour or so to make a really strong, like soupy tea kind of thing. And then once you strain it out, you can put it back in the pot and simmer it over a low temperature with the lid off. And that water content will gradually evaporate out. And you'll end up with this really, really concentrated like fluid at the end. And then that you can freeze in ice cube trays.
It's a bit of work. So You may or may not want to do it on a regular basis, but it does make it easier later on. So you can just take that and throw it, you know, a cube of it into your tea and you'll get like many cups of tea worth of nettle in just this little ice cube or whatever you choose to do it with.
I'll also do that with broth. A lot of times where I'll make a broth, I'll make it with, you know, bones or veggies or whatever you normally make broth with. And then I'll also add herbs to it.
And then once I strain it out and then condense it down, and then you have like instant broth cubes that you can just plunk into hot water and have nutritious herbs and broth. So it's another great way to work with it. You could also simmer it down. I've done this with things like nettle and burdock and dandelion and a little bit of reishi mushroom thrown in there. And once you make your strong extract, strain it out, simmer it down, simmer it down to there was like almost no liquid left.
You just want to make sure that you don't burn it and like simmer off all of your fluid content. And then I mix that with blackstrap molasses, which is going to be rich in minerals as well. And then just take a spoonful of that and add it to your coffee or your tea or just enjoy it as a spoonful. So you can take those concentrates and then turn them into syrups by adding. Molasses is my choice because it also has a lot of minerals, but you could also do honey or sugar.
or even glycerin if you wanted something that was sugar free. Let's see, we have a question. So with fat soluble herbs like turmeric, what is the difference in the net medicinal benefit when fat is taken along with turmeric alcohol tincture versus along with the tablet?
Oh, I don't have specific statistics for the fat. I have a statistic for black pepper, which synergizes it by 2000 times. I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head.
for the fat soluble for adding fat to say like a tincture. I will say the tinctures are quite bioavailable for turmeric. Turmeric is different from a lot of these other things, but for turmeric and curcumins, that is something that does extract okay in a tincture and especially in a higher proof alcohol tincture because of the resonance quality of some of those properties of the turmeric. And so it likely is going to be more bioavailable if you take that tincture with a meal that has a little bit of fat in it. but I don't have the exact number for you.
I know that they have been doing some studies lately looking at turmeric and looking at some of the traditional ways of preparing it. And so heating it with fat and fenugreek was one way of making a more bioavailable. So there are some companies now that are replicating that in the lab and selling turmeric pills that have this special, sexy, new form of turmeric that's supposedly more bioavailable because it's a combination of... fenugreek and a little bit of fat in the process. So in the case of turmeric, which is a little different from most of the other things we're discussing today.
But in the case of turmeric, alcohol is good at extracting it and the constituents of turmeric. And then whatever you do extract in an alcohol extract is highly bioavailable. But that's one of the perks of alcohol is that whatever does get into it ends up being very bioavailable when you take the tincture in the case of turmeric, its constituents are very well soluble in a high proof alcohol in the case of most of our nutritious herbs.
So pretty much everything else we're talking about today. Those particular constituents are not very solid soluble in alcohol. So for those, it wouldn't make a difference really. But for the turmeric, yes. The alcohol does help with the bioavailability even without the fat.
But if you took it with fat, you might actually get a little bit more use out of it. So going back to minerals, you could also do a decoction. So a decoction is when you simmer versus steeping. And that is a really great way to extract your minerals.
You'll get more of your minerals out if you simmer it. versus if you just did like a quick steep or even like a 20 minute simmer of an herb like nettle or dandelion versus doing a 20 minute steep, you'll get vastly more from simmering it because you're just getting more activity to pull that out. And so those are the best ways to get your nutrition, especially minerals from your plants.
However, there are some other methods that are also pretty decent. And so one is to make a strong nourishing infusion. Sometimes that's also called a super infusion. And so for that, you're making an infusion, but you're sort of cheating the system by adding a lot more plant materials. You're getting a lot more quantity.
You know, that's part of the trick of getting good nutrition from your plants is making sure that you're getting an adequate quantity of the plant to provide that nutrition. And then also it's steeping for a longer period of time. And I've got a slide on that. So I'll go into more detail when we get to that slide. But those two things that like long, long, long, long steeping time, plus having a lot, lot, lot of plant material ends up with a pretty decent extract.
I know I'm not aware that anybody has ever actually done a study on the, on a strong nourishing infusion to find out how much you actually get out of it, but we're betting that it's a pretty large amount. And that's probably the way that most herbalists tend to work. with their nutritive herbs, especially in tea form is to make those long, strong nourishing infusions. You could also do an herbal vinegar.
Vinegar is actually very good at extracting minerals, unlike alcohol. However, the downside to vinegar is that it you're probably not going to consume a lot of it. So quantity of dose is usually still pretty small.
And so for that reason, it's not like one of the top ways, but you could make a vinegar infused, you know, herb infused vinegar with mineral rich herbs, and then add that to your soup broth that also has mineral rich herbs. And then the vinegar will help extract more out of the other things in your broth. And, you know, you can really like layer these things.
So having them in a variety of ways in your diet is actually a really wonderful way to incorporate them into your daily routine and get the most bang for your buck. As I mentioned, if you're just doing your typical quicker tea infusion, you'll get a little bit of nutrition out of it, but not that much. And capsules, because the dose is pretty small, what you've got in there, also not that much. And tinctures, pretty much nothing. And sweet remedies, if you're just like infusing nettle or dandelion into honey or glycerin or something like that.
Unless there's some sort of a simmering process with a little bit of water beforehand that mostly gets evaporated out. Usually your sweet remedies are not going to have much, much mineral content either. There are exceptions here and there, but not a whole lot of them. Let's see.
Can you do the decoction with dried plant material? Yes, you can decoct with fresh or dry material. It actually doesn't really make a big difference.
If you are making an infusion, then you're going to usually get them. better, better extraction from dried herbs when you're infusing it or steeping it because dry plants release themselves to the water more readily. And when we dry things, we concentrate them down. So it's easier to get a larger dose in that tea when you're working with dry plants versus fresh.
However, when we're simmering it or decocting it, whether we're making broth or tea, that is still a, that will work really well, whether it's fresh or dry. Cause if it's fresh, that that simmering process is strong enough to start to break that plant down. Whereas if it was just hot water, it was steeping in it. It's not really quite enough to pull it out, or at least not enough to pull a lot out.
You can definitely, that's a great point Rita. So yes, you can definitely put your vinegar in salad. You can put it in whatever dishes you want to make. So it's a nice way to just sort of integrate a little bit more.
Plus you'll in the vinegar. you will get a good dose of whatever other medicinal properties are in the plant that maybe with like lots of heat and cooking, you lost some of in other methods. So if it was nettle in a vinegar, theoretically, you might get some of the anti-allergy support that you would get as like a fresh nettle extract along with some of the mineral content.
And then if you're layering it with other methods of getting nutrition into your diet, then that would be wonderful. So yeah, salad dressing is a great way. to incorporate those herbal vinegars or making sauces and things as well.
Like I do fire cider, which is a vinegar based remedy. And then I'll use that to make like different different, not just salad dressings, but like drizzles that I'll put on a taco or on a stir fry or something like that. And so you could incorporate your vinegars into those recipes as well.
So as I mentioned, teas and broths are one of the best methods, especially those stronger teas and decocting or simmering. The infusions like this one's violet and an infusion, you'll definitely get some, especially if it steeps for a longer period of time. But adding more plant material and or simmering or doing long steeping, those are going to be the best ways. And you can also think about like what else you want to pair it with so that it has a flavor profile that you like, because I think things should taste good.
So this is these are some pictures of other herbs simmering. And then here is actually that concentrated syrup. So the first step I had just simmered a bunch of like nutrient dense and liver tonic herbs in water, simmered that for maybe 20, 30 minutes.
strained it out. And then I take that, put it back in the pot and then simmer it down to a concentrate and then combine that. So once I was done simmering this down, I probably had like maybe that much, you know, so instead of having this much, I probably had like that much water left. And then I mixed that with molasses and it says 15 minutes here, but you can go longer.
I usually do 20 minutes or longer. So broth, there are some cool statistics on broth in terms of more for like bones. That's where more of the research is.
But in that study, so they have done a couple different studies on bone broths to find out what they get and how do you get the most out of them. So they did one on vinegar and pork bones. And in that particular study, they used two thirds of an ounce of vinegar per kilogram, which I think if I remember correctly, was about like a quart of broth. So it was a fairly decent amount of vinegar.
And they simmered it for 12 hours. And they found that the mineral content of calcium went up from 34 milligrams in the broth that was simmered without vinegar to 361 milligrams in the broth that was simmered with vinegar. So almost what's that like 10 times more, 100 times more.
I'm not very good with my math here, but quite a bit more from like a dose that's kind of like math to 361 milligrams of calcium is actually. between like a third to maybe half of your daily needs of calcium, which is pretty impressive. The magnesium also pretty significant. That was about 20 times higher.
And so went from six milligrams, which again, kind of a meth dose to 120 milligrams with when you simmered it with the vinegar. And that's a substantial, that's about half of your half or a little less than half, a little more than half of your daily needs of magnesium. They also showed in some of those bone broth studies that time helped.
And we can assume that a lot of these same concepts apply to herbs. And probably the herbs are going to be even easier to extract than bones. Because if you just think of like the nature of a leaf versus the nature of a bone, a leaf is going to give up the ghost much better to water and simmering than say a bone would. It's going to take a lot more effort.
And so, but in the bone study, they found that a 30 minute simmer. of the broth was only 201 milligrams of calcium or an eight milligrams of magnesium. So the difference here being that it was a shorter simmer time, but you'll see that even though it was a lot shorter, 30 minutes versus 12 hours, the middle content was still pretty substantial.
It wasn't as good as 12 hours, but it was still vastly better than 12 hours without any vinegar at all. So that would be the case for throwing a little bit of vinegar into your simmering. bone broths and herb broths and things of that nature. That said, if you don't like the taste of it, then you can do whatever you want to do. Or if vinegar doesn't agree with your stomach, it's okay to skip that.
You just might not get as much extracted from it. A little note though, if you're using vinegar, you want to use really good quality pots and pans because vinegar will also extract the metals from your pots and pans, especially if they're simmering for a long time. The other thing to keep in mind, and this is down here.
is that any heavy metals that are present in your bones or your herbs, if you're doing all these things that are going to maximize mineral extraction from your foods, you'll also increase the likelihood that heavy metals will get extracted or condensed down. Heavy metals and minerals are kind of the same thing as far as chemistry is concerned. And so if they're present in the foods or the plant material, you're going to get a bigger dose of it when you do all these extra methods.
So this is to say you're going to want to work with... good quality ingredients and companies that are either testing for their herb, or maybe you want to test your soil before you start harvesting lots of things and consuming them in like massive quantities and really concentrated just to be on the safe side. Heavy metals are present in a lot of things, but especially when we concentrate them down, there's a little greater risk. Apple juice is high in lead, you know, rice can be high in, in, um, mercury.
So mercury, mercury, I think it's mercury, but anyway, so just, you know, be aware that there is a potential risk there. So making sure you have clean ingredients. There was another study that they found that, um, doing a, this is again on bones, but they found that if they did a 72 hour simmer, so three days, there was nine times more of this hydroxyproline, which is one of the joint beneficial compounds in it.
versus when it was simmered for 24 hours. So if you felt really like intense about it and you wanted to simmer your herbs for longer and longer, like even days, maybe in a crock pot, you totally could do that. You'd get even more out of them. Again, I don't know that it's necessary to be that intense with plants though, because they are not as tough and impermeable as bones are.
Arsenic, thank you. It's arsenic. I think there's mercury too, but arsenic is the one that is the concern in rice. Thank you, Michael, for that.
I did know that, but my brain wasn't remembering it. Also, just of a note with broths in particular, you can start to concentrate the histamine and the glutamine present in the animal bones. This is not as much of a concern with plants only, but if you're doing bone broths, in addition to your herbs, you can increase the likelihood of there being a glutamine or a histamine reaction in the people who are super sensitive to that.
So Most people are fine, but if somebody is sensitive to glutamine or they're sensitive to histamine response, they may find that they react to the broths, not because of the plants, but because of the broths. I actually find using a crock pot really helped. I had a client with histamine issues years ago before I really knew that much about it. And she couldn't do the long infusions because letting something sit in water for a long period of time.
just, it wasn't going to work because the little bit of bacteria that starts to build up in that. And so she would do crock pot in crock pot decoction. So she just put all of her nutritious herbs in a crock pot and let it simmer and simmer and simmer. And she just add more water and add more plants and add more water and add more plants. And every now and then she'd just strain it all off and start fresh.
And that was good for her because it would keep the steady remedy going. And because it was constantly simmering, it didn't have an opportunity for bacteria to grow in it. It would still pose a potential risk for heavy metals if they were present, but for the bacteria, it wasn't an issue. This histamine and glutamine issue for broth is specific to bones, not the plants. I'll say that again.
So super or strong infusions or nourishing infusions. This is, you know, kind of the key way that most herbalists tend to work with their herbs to get the nutrition because it's easy and it works pretty well. although there's very little research on the actual data of how much gets extracted. But it's pretty easy.
It works pretty well. And you can add other herbs to the mix. And it's a little bit more convenient than decocting it, even though you might not get quite as much out of it. And so for this method, you'll take a container. French presses are really popular.
I'll kind of minimize my camera here for the recording. So you can see that there's a French press in there. Most people use these for making coffee.
but you can, they're wonderful for making teas. And so you'll actually put the empty press or a jar on a scale and then dump about one ounce by weight of whatever herbs you want to add to that tea. And then once you've done that, you'll cover it with boiling water.
So get the water, nice and boring, boiled, pour it over it, put your lid on it, and then let it sit for at least four hours or overnight. It's pretty popular. And then so you've got...
tons of plant material and a long infusion. And then once you're ready to drink it, you're going to strain it out. And that's why the French press is handy is because it makes it much easier to really squeeze without having to like do it with your hands and a cloth or something like that. So you push down the top, there's like a little, little thingy on the top that pushes the strainer down, and then you can easily drink off the tea.
And you're usually going to have that within a day or two. are concerns with bacteria with this because plants naturally have some bacteria on them anyway. And when you let them steep for a long time, they do run the risk at room temperature of starting to grow, you know, starting to bloom a little bit and have more microbes.
It's usually not an issue. Most people's immune systems can handle the little bit of bacteria that will grow. But if somebody was immunocompromised or super sensitive, that might be somebody with a histamine intolerance issue. then that might be an issue. And so for that, doing a quicker steep, or you could put it in the refrigerator once it's cooled off a little bit, put it in the fridge, that'll slow that down a little bit, or doing a decoction would be another way around that.
But for most people, it's totally fine. And most people, it's easier to do that infusion style versus simmering it. Plus there are some other herbs that you might wanna add to your tea, like peppermint or something like that, where if you simmered it, you would lose a lot of the aromatics.
but you'll retain that in an infusion. And so you can add some flavorful things more easily to that overnight infusion. So we've already talked about all these other things, but I just have some pictures of, say, that concentrated syrup in the process of being made.
And any other any questions so far? Thank you for the ones you guys have sent so far. Um, some other food forms. So we mentioned pesto. If it's something that's tender, you can eat that as a salad.
So violet leaves, a little bit of dandelion greens, even though they're bitter sorrel is high in nutrition, but it is also high in oxalates, which will bind to those minerals and make them less available. So you'd want to be careful with not having a lot of those spinach is also pretty high in oxalates. Um, a lot of our nutritious herbs are kind of high in oxalates.
So I tend to focus more on the ones that are lower in oxalates, like your violet and dandelion and nettle would be. You can cook them into dishes. So dandelion, nettle, purslane, lamb's quarters, purslane and lamb's quarters do have a fair amount of oxalates, but they also have a lot of other nutrition. So I might incorporate them sometimes, but not all the time. You can also put things into smoothies.
You can put your nutritious herbs into like honey nut butter balls, like mixing the powder in. You can put them in chia pudding. So if you have a powder, you can mix that into the chia pudding or even like rose hips blend pretty well.
If you have the dried rose hips, I learned that from Rosalie de la Forêt. And so she mixes them in with chia pudding and then the moisture of the pudding softens the dry rose hip pieces. And then you can get it that way.
So there are lots of. ways that you can play around with this. Here are some from my kitchen. You've already seen most of these pictures, but here are my nettle ice cubes that I love. So I feel like this slide was not where it was supposed to be, but we're not getting into additional nutritives.
We're getting into the nutritives. What kind of vinegar do I buy? So any kind of vinegar will actually work for this.
It doesn't need to be something special. But I would say most often in the herbal community for when we're looking at vinegar from a nutritious perspective, we'll tend to go for the apple cider vinegar that is raw, that has the mother in it. But any yummy vinegar that you like that fits your budget is good. I also do work a lot with white rice vinegar when I'm making herbal vinegars or making little recipes and things. And there are a lot of studies on the health benefits of vinegar in general without any herbs in it.
And they're on a wide variety. of types of vinegars. I think it's relatively interchangeable what kind of vinegar you have.
It's the acidity of it that is going to help with the extraction of the minerals. And most vinegar is 5% or a little less than 5% acidity, which is good. If it's more than 5%, it's going to start to be a little too acidic for your stomach.
And so most people aren't going to tolerate that. And if you have like issues with ulcers or something of that nature, then you're not going to want to do a vinegar-based remedy because it's just going to be too much acid on your stomach. But you'll know by if you take something with vinegar and it makes your stomach hurt, then it's too much.
Don't do that. And if it feels good or totally is fine, then you're probably good to go. So nettle, we're going to start with nettle because that is like the nutritious herb in the herbal world.
Most of us really love working with nettle. It's very affordable. It's very economical. You can grow it in your garden, although it is a weed and it stings.
So you may want to grow it in an out of the way spot. You can go wildcrafting it, presuming you know the quality of the land and you can correctly identify it. And in certain areas of the country, it's quite prolific in the wild.
This is a plant that really likes rich soil with a fair amount of moisture. that's where it's going to grow best. So here in New Hampshire, if you don't know, it's pretty bad soil here as a general rule of thumb. We have a lot of sandy soil. We have a lot of nutrient depleted soil.
We have a lot of pine forests, which are not usually, it's usually dry, sandy situations. And so we don't have a lot of wild metals here, but you'll find a lot of them in other areas of the country that have richer soil. And also that like damper ecosystem environment.
So sometimes you'll find them, for example, like near just outside of the riverbanks. When I was out in the Southwest in herb school, we would go into like a canyon and then just outside of the riverbank. And that would be where you'd find a lot of nettle in that riparian zone outside on like the edge where things are nice and green around the river.
I hear that the Southeast has tons of stinging nettle. My husband has stories about hiking the Appalachian trail and like hating it because he'd just be hiking along and it'd be growing along the trail. But he didn't know like one green thing from another green thing.
So he would just notice because his hands would start stinging and be like, like, what's my hand stinging? And so then he learned that you could put jewelweed on it and it would stop the sting pretty quickly. But he is not a fan of nettles because of his memories of being stung so much. Here in New Hampshire, when we do see it, it's usually where there's been a compost pile for a while or an old farmland. um, that has a lot of rich soil from cows grazing or manure being put down on the soil.
And that's usually where you will find nettle in this area. It might spontaneously arrive like that happened for us. I planted it in one part of my yard and then whether it was from that or just, it was out nature or whatever.
Um, suddenly it was growing around my compost pile and, uh, which was good and bad because then it seeded into the compost. And then as I planted things elsewhere, I ended up with little baby nettle seedlings all over the place. So whoever has my property now, my former property now will probably not be super happy until they learn how amazing nettle is.
So nettle, super duper nutritious, particularly high in calcium. And one of the other perks is that it's very bioavailable calcium. Calcium is not an easy mineral to absorb.
There are a lot of different things that inhibit your ability to absorb calcium. The oxalic acid and oxalates that I mentioned before, which are present in a lot of the leafy green sources of calcium are rich in oxalic acid. And so you might not absorb much.
So for example, with spinach, spinach is pretty high in calcium, but it's also quite high in oxalic acid. And so according to some of the studies that have been done on food sources, they found that only 5% of the calcium in spinach was actually available to the body because oxalate. The rest of it was bound up with the oxalates. Whereas nettle generally doesn't have oxalates. It's relatively, it has some cannons, but it's relatively low in them.
It doesn't really contain phytic acid, which is the thing that's on a lot of our seeds and grains that impairs our ability to absorb the calcium from those sources. Most of our dairy is only like 30% bioavailable calcium because even though it's got a lot of it, it is... all the antacid components and some of the protein and some of the sodium and other ingredients in dairy inhibit the bioavailability in it.
So nettle is one of our most bioavailable calcium sources, and it's also chock full of it, which is pretty awesome. And it also has vitamin K, specifically K1, which is going to help you with the absorption of calcium. It has a wide array of other minerals, but like potassium, it's also good.
chlorophyll. It's got a little bit of magnesium. So it's a really nice sort of nutrition in a cup and it tastes okay. It's kind of spinachy, vegetable-y.
If you're new to herb flavors, you might find the flavor of nettle kind of offensive. It's kind of like drinking like a swampy vegetable tea. But a lot of times people find that they adapt.
And especially if you add other flavors like peppermint or chai spices to it, cinnamon, ginger, that It is pretty easy to cover up in a blend, especially in a lighter infusion. Those strong infusions, that might be kind of hard to get used to. Maybe I'll do like a strong infusion of nettle. And then I will also do like a super strong chai blend. And then I'll combine them to make them a little bit more palatable.
But if you're just starting off, I would just start with the infusions, get your taste buds to adapt, and then gradually do like more content or throw them into recipes. of these as well. How many ounces of nettle per cup? So if we're doing the strong infusion, then we're doing one ounce of nettle per quart.
So that's a half ounce, sorry, a quarter ounce of nettle per cup, approximately of dry nettle is what that equates to. And if you're just starting out, sometimes doing smaller batches is good. So you don't get a big batch and then go, oh, that tastes gross. I don't want to have that. And then, you know, you throw it out.
So start with small quantities, get used to it, see how you like it. And then you can kind of play with it and start to increase the quantity that you're making from there. And if you find that you make it and you don't really like it, see about putting it in a broth.
Like if you're already making a soup or a stew, you could throw that into that with a lot of other strong flavors that are going to help cover it up. I did that with mushrooms years ago. I made a week-long, super strong. decoction with a bunch of different mushrooms for immune health. And by the time I was done, it was like black color because it was so concentrated and it did not taste good.
It was really bitter. And so I froze it in smaller quantities and then I would just add it to a jambalaya or a chili or some other dish that was really strong and flavorful and would just add a little bit at a time. And that way I was able to work it in and get the nutrition without really having to taste it. So where there's a will, there's a way.
But if you're new... So a strong infusion of nettle is going to taste probably kind of gross until you learn how to adapt your taste buds and play around with the recipe and what else you throw in it to make it taste good. Let's see, what else do I want to say about nettle?
So some of the studies that they have done on it. So this first part is not a study. So one cup of infusion theoretically has 300 to 500 milligrams of calcium per cup based off of. the amount of plant material going in.
It may not be that high. We don't actually have good data. The only study I've seen that looked at nettle tea, they did only a little bit of dried nettle and steeped it for like four minutes. And so it came out very poor for the amount of minerals that you got in it, but it was such a subpar tea recipe. that it wasn't really a good measurement of how much you could get out.
So if somebody has the capacity to run a good quality like analysis on strong nettle teas, I would love to see that data. There was a study where they tested the calcium content of one cup of blanched fresh nettles. So this was looking at indigenous food ways. And they found that in one cup of that there was almost 500 milligrams of calcium, a little more than 50 milligrams of magnesium, a little bit of iron.
and a fair amount of vitamin K1. So the statistics are on the slide if you want those exact numbers. Some other benefits of nettle besides the fact that it's nutritious is that it supports bone strength. It's a really great herb to consider in your routine if you're thinking about bone support, because not only does it have a fair amount of calcium and vitamin K1, but it also likely has other benefits beyond that that also help in...
encourage the regeneration of bones. There's only been a tiny bit of research as a whole category, nutritious herbs and bones for bone support herbs is like not an area where there's much research at all. So there are not very many studies. There are a few studies out there, like this, these ones on nettle, just looking at what is the nutrition content of them.
But there are very few like human trials on, you know, how beneficial these are. or anything like that. It's just not an area that anybody's researching, probably because there's not a lot of money in it. And, and so there have been a few studies that have so far been predominantly animal studies.
But in those studies, they did show that there was an increase in bone formation after breaking the bone, and an increase of the osteoblasts and the osteoclasts that were supporting the regeneration of the bone as well. And it's also very alkalizing. Anytime you're eating foods that are leafy green vegetables, plants, you're going to get more alkalizing effects in the body, which our body maintains a pretty narrow range of pH, but we have a lot of disease processes and foods that are going to be a little bit more acidic.
And so having more alkaline things like plant foods and leafy greens and nutritious green herbs will help kind of counteract that a little bit so that your body doesn't have to be constantly working really hard to shift the pH away from being more acidic. to being more alkaline. And one of the ways in which your body makes, you know, helps counteract acidity is by pulling calcium from the bones to get the blood to be more alkaline again, because when calcium is in its ion form, it is going to help create a more alkaline pH. And so that's one of the reasons why if we're eating like lots of meat and lots of inflammatory foods, we do tend to see that we have poorer bone density.
And it's probably because our body is trying to counteract the acidic effects of those foods with pulling the calcium from the bones to provide it. Now, there is a flip side that folks who are vegetarian and vegan, who are eating very little protein can have and also have tend to have a lighter body weight can also have a high risk of poor bone density. But usually by increasing the protein content and doing bone strengthening, like activities, you can counteract that. Nettle is diuretic, so it makes you pee. So that is something to keep in mind as you're starting to consume it, especially when you first start doing nettle, you'll find that it's more diuretic.
And so, um, so just know that you're probably going to need to pee a little bit more often. And if you find that problematic, you might want to turn to some of the other herbs that we'll talk about that are a little less diuretic. Is there a moistening herb that mixes well with nettle imbalances? Yes, we're going to talk a little bit about that. But I would say some of my favorites include violet, which is nutritious and mucilaginous.
Marshmallow, which is not super nutritious, but it is a lovely mucilaginous herb. So I love adding marshmallow leaf or root to teas to help enhance the moistening quality. And linden leaf, it depends on your source of linden leaf.
But Some sources of linden leaf and flower are a little bit more mucilaginous and a little relaxing. So that can be another way of adding some moistening quality. And all those ingredients also lighten up the flavor of that sort of swampy green vegetal nettle as well. So they're quite pleasant in a tea to brighten those flavors.
Also, oat straw, which we'll get to in a moment, is less diuretic and less drying and also a little brighter flavor. So that's it. It's not moistening per se, at least not the oat straw, but it is less drying. So you could incorporate more of that into a tea blend as well if you wanted to counteract that. A few other perks of nettle.
One is that it is an allergy support remedy. It has some natural antihistamine properties, but for those, the fresh nettle is even more potent. So while you will get some benefit from dry nettle and strong teas, I have some clients who've seen some benefits for that for mast cell activation issues, but the fresh is going to be a lot stronger. And so usually that is one of the situations where we will do a tincture where we'll tincture the fresh leaves and then take that for allergies. It's not going to provide a lot of minerals, but it is good for allergies.
Vinegar theoretically in a fresh, you know, nettle extract. would actually be one way to get a little bit of both. Also, if you're making your pureed pestos and your ice cubes and those things would theoretically provide a lot of those benefits as well.
So there's that. There are also other properties in the roots. The roots are good for helping with hormone balance, especially for folks who are dealing with benign prostatic hyperplasia. and issues around testosterone converting into DHT, also bladder tone.
So very different, different benefits for working with the roots and the leaves are definitely more common. When you're consuming nettle, you're usually going to want to work with the spring green. So these ones are like at a pretty good stage. They're not flowering yet.
They are a little bit irritating to the kidneys once they start to flower. So you want to harvest them earlier in the year. They also taste better and are more tender and easier to work with in the early springtime. So they're a great one to look for, you know, in March, April, May, depending upon where you're living and to harvest those when they're just starting to come up. As long as you know that they're nettle, you may need to wait a year, watch them bloom, and then you can go back out the next season to go harvest them.
Some herbalists will harvest the later flush that comes up. fall. I can't speak to whether or not that's quote unquote, like safe from the kidney irritant perspective. But you do usually get like an extra flush of young green nettles that pop up after it dies back in the later summer. This is what it looks like when it's in flower, it has both pistillate and staminate flowers.
So one plant will have one gender, one plant will have another and then they'll cross pollinate. And ultimately, you can end up with seeds, the seeds are nutritious. and a little energizing and actually kidney tonic, kidney restorative, which is pretty cool. Different, you know, it's interesting that once it flowers and goes to seed, the seeds are good for the kidneys, but the leaves are not anymore because the leaves once it flowers can contain some compounds that are kind of irritating to the kidneys.
But this is a good time to identify it because those little seedy flowers are much more distinctive compared to these, like this is the Hedge Nettle. that a lot of times people think is nettle before it grows. But then once it blooms, you see these lovely lipped pink, yellow, or purple flowers that are common in those mint family, quote unquote, nettles that aren't really nettles. There is also a wood nettle that's closely related to stinging nettle.
And that does have pretty similar uses. It has similar looking seedy flowers. It also does sting.
The leaves look really similar. They're just a little bigger. It's a little more tender of a plant. And one of the interesting things about the wood nettle is that I can't remember which side is which, but some of the leaves are opposite. And then some of the leaves are alternate.
So like it's different when you're at the top of the plant versus the bottom of the plant, which is kind of neat with the wood nettle. Whereas with stinging nettle, it's usually going to be opposite. always opposite leaves. And the stem almost looks like a mid family plant because it's kind of square ish. Jim McDonald talks about it looking like two of those like cocktail straws stuck together.
When you look at it, you can kind of see that, that image here. And then these are the trichomes and that's what contains the stinging part. So especially these little syringes right here that are pretty intense.
And so those contain formic acid, which is what's in a fire ant bite, as well as serotonin. histamine and acetylcholine and other things that elicit like that rash hives response on the skin, but also will send out the immune system response to suppress that inflammation. So often, after you get that initial response, your body sends out compounds to reduce inflammation and allergies and reactivity.
But urtica is the genus and urticaria is the name for hives. And I don't know which came which, but the stinging of the nettle is what will give you hives. So, and it is a weed, so it will grow by underground root runners and it will also self seed. So if you plant it in your yard, just be mindful that it might take over and it might show up in new places. So are there any questions or stories or favorite ways that you all like to work with nettle before we move on to the next plant?
We'll see if anything else comes in. And I think that that was pretty much what I wanted to say about metal. Oh, I can throw in one other thing. So it is also relatively high in selenium, especially if it's being grown in selenium rich soils. And little side note, New Hampshire has very selenium deficient soils.
Selenium is a very important nutrient for thyroid health. It's probably even more important than iodine, although they're both important, but we often need more selenium. then we need iodine.
And one, this is an herb that Sage of Pop Mom, as well as Rosalie de La Forêt talk about working with when they're looking at supporting thyroid health. It's not a like over like boosting the thyroid kind of herb. What it's probably doing is enhancing the nutrition.
And we know that when the thyroid has adequate nutrition, including selenium and just a variety of vitamins and minerals, it works better. the thyroid functions better. And there may also be some immunomodulatory, anti-inflammatory and other aspects that may also address some of the things that are going on with thyroid conditions, especially around autoimmune thyroid conditions.
So we don't really know exactly why we're just theorizing here, but both Seija and Rosalie talk about finding benefits from doing those strong nourishing infusions on a regular basis and seeing folks improve in their thyroid status just from that. And it's generally pretty well tolerated plant for most people. That said, there are sometimes people for whom like nettle just isn't their plant.
You know, if you're somebody who gets massive diarrhea from kale or leafy greens, you might not agree with the super vegetal quality of the stinging nettle. If you know, and I've just met people who've had their own sort of idiosyncratic responses, like one client who tried it for their migraines, hoping it would help. But in her case, it actually made the migraines worse, even though for other people it might help. I've met a few people who get some digestive upset from stinging nettle. But even those, I wouldn't say they're common side effects.
They're just like it can do weird things for some people that it just doesn't agree with them. So try a little bit first and see if it agrees with you. But most people do really, really well with stinging nettle.
And especially the people who really benefit from they often find that they love and crave the flavor. Let's see. We've got some comments here.
So we have someone in the chat saying, I love nettle and got very comfortable and happy while crafting it. It's easy to avoid stings if picked from the top, pushing downwards. I'm in Maine.
It grows happily there. Ooh, that does remind me. So I'd usually harvest it with the scissors and then just use the scissors to like put it in my basket.
But there is benefit to being stung. As I mentioned, if you get stung, the body will send out anti-inflammatory compounds and Chanchal Cabrera has a great story about her husband who had really bad rheumatoid arthritis going out to harvest nettles for her and not realizing that he might want to protect himself from the sting. So he got stung all over and of course was covered in hives.
But then later, took a couple hours for it to go away. And he said, wow, my arthritis is nowhere near as bad. And so then he just started using that as one of his therapies.
He would go out and harvest. the nettles for his wife barehanded as a way to reduce his inflammatory response to the rheumatoid arthritis. And he was able to almost completely manage his arthritis symptoms with regular nettle stings. And there are studies and there is quite a bit of history of that, like nettle flagellation, cell flagellation as a way of reducing inflammation, but do a little bit first because it is alarming whenever I pass around stinging nettle in class for people to sting themselves. There's always at least one student who like really freaks out after their stung because it stings.
It's like a bunch of little like fire ant bites or bee stings. And so fortunately, there are a variety of things that we can rub on it and get rid of the sting. Most notably, a little bit of fresh jewelweed does a nice job getting rid of it. Also, a little bit of nettle juice, interestingly, can help get rid of the sting. Plantain leaf.
um, comfrey leaf. There are a lot of things that will help get rid of the sting. If you find it really annoying. Let's see. We have another person who says nettle infusion infusion daily has helped my hair grow and look healthier.
And my nails are growing stronger. I love nettle. Yes.
It also has a fair amount of silica, which is also very good for hair, skin, and nails. Um, goes on to say intentional intentionally stinging and arthritic area helps my hand pain a lot. Awesome.
And then somebody else says, I don't mind the stings. I have post-treatment Lyme. So I work with my immune system strength a lot.
So awesome. And then jewelweed leaf or flower to ease the sting. So it's just like the juicy part of it.
So all the above, usually I just kind of take a handful of it and mash it up. It doesn't need to be in flower, but it is easier to identify jewelweed when it's in flower because the flowers are so distinctive. And jewelweed does tend to grow in similar areas as the nettle, which is handy. Great stories, folks.
Thank you. With any of these plants, in addition to asking questions, if you have your own personal stories or favorite ways to work with them, feel free to put that in the chat. I love getting people's personal takes on things.
So oat straw, this is our next in line, our other really popular nutritious herb. And it's a great one to combine with nettle or as an alternative to nettle. If you're just like not a fan of nettle, if you drink nettle tea and you're like, oh, like this.
swamp. Nope. Thank you very much. Or if you drink the nettle and you just feel like all of your vitality is going out in the toilet because you're peeing so much, you might find that you like oat straw a little bit more. So this is the same plant that we get oatmeal from, and you can get the seeds as a cover crop.
It's a pretty economical plant to grow. You're usually not going to find it in your herb seed places unless it's a specialty shop like Strictly Medicinal Seeds. But you can easily get, you know, maybe a five pound bag of the oat seeds to grow a cover crop and then sprinkle it on an area with some good soil.
With all these plants, the richer your soil is, the more nutrition is going to be in the plants themselves because they're pulling it out of the ground. So the status of the nutrition in the ground will to some extent decide what the nutrition in the plant will be. And I thought I saw something in the chat, but I don't see it now. So the part that we're going to be working with for nutrition is really like all those above ground parts, but especially the straw, the grassy part and harvesting it when it's in a green happy state, which is like it is here. And once it's dry, it's usually a light green or yellowish green color.
Sometimes it's kind of brownish. Usually that's a sign that it's not been handled well, or it was a little bit older than it should be. You can also make milky oat seed extract from it, which when you squeeze the the immature oat grain tops at a very specific time for a couple of days, they'll exude a little white milky substance.
And that's really lovely for the nervous system. But for today's class, we're really focused on the mineral content and that's particularly prevalent in the grassy tops, but you will get a little bit in the dry oat tops as well. And so oat straw also really rich in nutrition, not quite as much as the nettle has. However, it's got a for calcium, but it's got a bigger array of some of the other minerals. So there's more magnesium in oat straw than there is in nettle.
And so it ends up being a really nice array, really great balance of various. types of minerals. And you can combine it with nettle to get even a little bit more of a mix of things from that. And so the straw has about three times more mineral content than the oatmeal.
And it really varies some things. It's like two times more, sometimes it's eight times more, depending upon the exact nutrient question. The other thing besides magnesium that oat straw really does well with is it has a fair amount of silica.
And so if we think of it, silica is that like shiny coat. that you'll see on the outside of seeds sometimes. And it's also what goes into our hair, our skin, our nails. It's a really important mineral for our connective tissue vitality. It's not oddly considered an essential nutrient.
I don't fully understand why actually move my camera back here, which doesn't affect you guys tonight, but it will affect the recording. So, you know, it's, it's got a pretty good mineral content, but particularly those other ones. So this also is really fantastic for bone health because silica is going to help make things more flexible, more resilient, um, more able to bend.
You know, if you think of just having that strong, but flexible versus calcium is really just strong, but it's not, it's not bendy. It doesn't handle impact very well. Calcium carbonate is chalk. Um, so think about how easy it is.
If you put too much pressure on chalk in the right, the wrong way, it's really easy to snap it. Whereas with the silica that will go into that matrix along with collagen and magnesium and other odds and ends to help make it a more vital and flexible and resilient and just like a cushier, cushier tissue. But also we use silica in really every type of connective tissue, elastin and, um, oh, I can't even think.
but collagen is another tissue that has a lot of connective tissue that has a lot of silica in it. And so even though it's not considered essential, it's still a lovely one to enhance in the diet. And there aren't too many food sources. We'll get it in whole grains, you know, the outer coat of a whole grain, we'll get some there.
Oat straw, bamboo shoots, but how many people eat bamboo shoots? And our horsetail, which we're going to get to has quite a bit, but oat straw is a really safe plant. It has a lot of nutrition, including a fair amount of that.
So it's a great hair, skin, nail, bone strength herb. And especially the milky tops are really wonderful nervous system restorative. You won't get as much of that in the straw or the dry tops, but there's still a little bit of that kind of like soothing, nourishing nervous system support quality from the oat. And so you can incorporate a little bit of that in your tea as well.
The only real downside in my mind to oat straw is that if you're allergic to oats, oatmeal, then you're probably going to be allergic to oat straw as well. There is a potential for gluten contamination. That's the biggest risk with oatmeal.
But some suppliers of oat straw may also have growers that mix, you know, use the same equipment for gluten containing grains and oats. Most of our big herb suppliers don't, but some do. So you can contact the supplier if you're concerned about gluten contamination to see if it's present in that sources.
Oat straw. There is no gluten in oat. However, there is another protein called avenin coming from the name Avena in this plant. And so if you are going to be working with it and you know that you might be sensitive to oats, you might just want to tread carefully, but you're probably not going to tolerate it. If you have a reaction to Avenin and some people who react to gluten also react to Avenin, but most people don't.
So if you have a gluten sensitivity and you can tolerate gluten-free oats, you should be totally fine with oatmeal, sorry, oat straw, as long as it also is not contaminated. And like I said, it's really nice. The flavor of this one, like the color comes out kind of a lighter, clear yellowy kind of color.
It tastes very much like sweet hay. And in fact, what they give animals for hay often is oat straw. And so, and they give it to animals because it's super nutritious and the animals like it because it's kind of sweet.
And so we get similar benefits from our teas. We can't like eat oat straw the same way we could eat like nettle and dandelion because it's a grass. And so if it was a powder, you could probably get away with it. And, but for most other recipes, you'll want to strain it out because otherwise it just doesn't help with our stomachs.
Um, we don't have the multiple stomachs that cows do to help them digest grasses. And so we're going to need to either powder it to take it internally or make some kind of an extract and then strain the grass out. Um, also if you've ever tried to like eat grass, it just wouldn't, just doesn't really feel good to have pieces of grass in there.
So dandelion, I mean, this is a classic, but the downside to dandelion is that it's bitter, but there are actually health benefits to it being bitter. And some people grow to really like the flavor. I don't personally put dandelion leaf in tea and it's the leaf that has the most nutrition. There is nutrition in the root, but not quite as much.
But it is super high in calcium and some people really do fall in love with it as a tea. So it's certainly worth trying, even though it just hasn't. quite been my thing.
I like adding it to food. So I like sauteing dandelion greens that I grow in the yard or that I wildcraft in the yard and cooking them. I love making pesto with them. And you could certainly add them to soup broths and things of that nature as well. Or you could just make them into capsules or powdered blends or vinegars do really nicely with dandelion as well.
And there are a lot of different ways you can work with it. So it's one of our highest sources of calcium. It has up to about 1200 milligrams per ounce, which is more than nettle has. And it's very bioavailable. Like nettle, it does not really have a whole lot of constituents in it that might inhibit the absorption or bind to the absorption.
And it's also bitter and bitter flavors enhance digestion. And when we have more stomach acid, that actually enhances our ability to absorb calcium as well as pretty much all of the nutrients. And so bitters just on their own. would be a great thing to incorporate if you don't have good digestion, or if you just want to give a boost to your ability to digest your food.
It's also I suspect, one of the reasons why we're seeing more and more like malnourishment in spite of eating so much food as a culture is that our stomach acid is not really what it could be. And particularly for all the folks taking proton pump inhibitors, this is one of the side effects is you're going to end up in the long term. being very nutrient deficient, because we need stomach acid to absorb calcium, magnesium, potassium, B vitamins, iron, so many things are dependent upon health, having healthy stomach acid. And if we've suppressed our stomach acid, then we're not going to absorb as much of our nutrients, it's not going to be as bioavailable. Now, if you're on proton pump inhibitors, that's a whole nother story.
And I do have a whole free webinar out there in the ethers. Feel free to email me if you don't already know about it, but I'll put it in the chat box is you just go to my website. It's not, I don't think it's super obvious in public because I did it for the American herbalist guild. So I couldn't like share it as easily as I would have liked, but I did end up having it in the blog.
So anyway, if you go to wintergreenbotanicals.com backslash G E R D. um, for GERD, that will give you access to at the very least, I know that the slides and the audio, I think for the video, you might need to be an AHG member to get the video webinar of that. But that was all about acid reflux and support.
And it did include tips for folks who are working with their doctors to go off of proton pump inhibitors, but you don't want to ignore or worsen acid reflux because it is damaging to the esophagus and increases cancer risk. So that's a little aside. However, for most people, if you're not on a PPI and you don't have acid reflux, and even some people who do have acid reflux respond really well to bitters and it will enhance your ability to digest your nutrients. So dandelion bitter enhances digestion, and it's also a powerhouse of nutrition, particularly in the leaf. You also get benefits for detoxification support, which I forgot to mention is something that metal does as well.
Nettle in particular is really good at helping to support detoxification through the kidneys, including helping to clear uric acid, which can help with gout for some people. The dandelion also works on the kidneys. So the leaf is pretty diuretic, especially if you have it as a tea or a tincture.
And so that can be beneficial for things like high blood pressure or just to help drain if people have too much fluid retention and it's not for like a dangerous reason, they just tend to retain fluid. But, but it could also be troublesome for some. The French name, I'm terrible with French pronunciations, but the French name of dandelion is pisselon.
Here it is. P-I-S-S-E-N-L-I-T. It means pee the bed or piss the bed. Dandelion leaf is known to like increase the likelihood of bedwetting because it's so diuretic.
So that would be something to keep in mind. Personally find that it's as diuretic if you're incorporating it into food like pasta or you're sauteing it with greens or throwing it into your pasta dish or something like that. But as a tea or a tincture, it is actually quite diuretic. So that's something to be aware of.
The roots are not quite as diuretic, but the roots are also not quite as nutrient rich either. Let's see what else. The root is more liver detox support, although you do get a little liver and kidney detox support from both of them.
So that can be nice. And the roots also are rich in inulin, which will help feed your beneficial bacteria. It's a specific type of fiber. So it's good for building a microbiome. But if you're not used to inulin and you're not used to starch, you haven't already been consuming it, it can ferment and cause a lot of gas and bloating and maybe even diarrhea.
So if you're going to be working in the roots, do it slowly. So you have a chance for your microbiome to adjust. It's kind of like if you change a dog's food real quick and you don't give them a chance to like slowly work in the new food, they can end up with like really bad diarrhea or even something more serious like bloat.
It's the same way with people. So slowly add in, especially when it comes to fiber sources, slowly add in new sources. There are some folks with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth that just might really not tolerate the dandelion well at all. But I suspect that in most cases, those folks just have to go even slower. But SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth is kind of a whole another animal all of its own and a little bit more than we can get into in tonight's class.
There are other odds and ends benefits, but I'd say those are some of the big ones. Does anybody have any questions or stories about dandelion? All right, we'll keep going. So those were the three biggies.
Those I think are the biggies that we tend to think of that are like our super duper nutrient dense plants. They're the wonderful ones to really start off with. However. we do have a lot of other really good ones too, that I want to mention at least a few of them.
So one is violet. I have come to really, really love violet. I, I always knew about violet, my herbal studies. I know that was mentioned throughout it. And then I saw a blog from Jim McDonald and that kind of renewed my interest in it.
In my old home, we did have lots of violets that were growing wild in the lawn. And so I started working with that and it is so lovely as a tea. It is. become one of my favorite nutritive herbs to put into tea because it tastes really good.
It's got this bright sort of like green, but like sweet and vibrant and just really bright green flavor. Not as much like, like nettle being very vegetal and swampy sometimes. And you have your dandelion being kind of bitter. Violet is a really pleasant.
flavor and it does have a hint of sweetness. It contains a little bit of methyl salicylate, which is what gives wintergreen that wintergreeny flavor, but it just has a tiny bit of it. And so it ends up giving just sort of a bright, sweet flavor, kind of sweet and crisp, like a watermelon or cucumber. And I'm saying this in terms of like herbalist flavor profile, the way that somebody might say that dandelion root tastes like chocolate or coffee. And then you as a person who drinks chocolate or coffee.
has dandelion root and says, what is that crazy person talking about? Like it doesn't taste like that at all. Um, it's, it's a subtle association of flavors, but it is a really lovely flavor and it's a moistening herb. It's mucilaginous and, but only a little bit.
So you end up with this lovely, just kind of slightly velvety mouthfeel. And if you're somebody who is really dry or you get really dried out, especially from herbs like, like nettle, that is a little astringent. and also very diuretic, you might find that you like violet a little bit better.
Violet also does have some vitamin C and beta carotene, especially if it's been freshly harvested because those ingredients, those constituents do dissipate pretty quickly in the drying and storing process. It does have minerals. It's not the powerhouse of minerals that you get from the nettle and the dandelion and oat straw, but it's still pretty good.
And it's also a lymphatic herb. So it's going to help move the lymph system, which is one of our systems of detoxification. And a lot of times when people are dealing with like chronic immune health, post-infectious things, a little bit of extra lymphatic support might be helpful. Or if they just have, you're one of those people who just kind of has all the weird stuff like fibromyalgia and long haul COVID and chronic Lyme and, you know, those kinds of things, this is not going to cure them.
But you might find that having lymphatic herbs are very supportive and violet is one that tastes good and it's nutritious. And it also gently moves the lymphatic system at the same time, which is nice. The types of violets that we work with, there are so many of them.
Basically, we're going to go for the common violets that are blue or white flowered. It is literally called the common. So this Viola sororia is the common one. If you happen to have the odorata, that one can also be enjoyed. However, you would want to cultivate it most likely.
Here in New Hampshire, I believe the odorata is considered a threatened plant. So you wouldn't... I've not even seen it in a while, but if you did, you would want to be protecting it.
So, but you can grow it and cultivate it and work with it that way. The common one is the one that like spreads across your lawn. So that's the one that I tend to work with. Also, you can include the flowers in addition to the leaves and the heart-eased pansy or viola tricolor.
It's also called Johnny jump ups. That's another really nice one too. So this is a mix.
I have the white common violet. The blue common violet, as well as most of these flowers are the hardy's pansy. The hardy's pansy makes lots of flowers, but the leaves are kind of small.
So you can incorporate them, but it's mostly the flowers. And they're just really lovely. So I highly recommend the trick with violet is it's really hard to find in commerce. So you kind of have to harvest your own or go find somebody who has some to harvest and get it from them because not many...
Farms sell it. You can find it from some of the big suppliers, but a lot of times that violet leaf tends to be more brown and not as tasty. I think sometimes these weedier plants, especially a delicate one like violet, just doesn't hold up that well in the international herb market.
Nettle and oat straw, fine. Fandelion, probably okay. Violet, you'll still get the minerals, but it doesn't have that bright, green, happy flavor to it that you would get from your own.
homegrown or direct from a farm. I am still on the lookout for farms that sell dried violet to the public. Right now, the only one that I know of offhand is Terra Basics that is right in Chichester. And so it's a small scale, so she doesn't have tons of it.
And she doesn't advertise her herbs on her website beyond the culinary. But if you email her, that is Terra Basics. I'm going to write that in the chat.
So Terra Basics in Chichester, New Hampshire. does have really gorgeous quality herbs and they do have violet. And if anybody is cultivating and selling violets, let me know.
Or if you know of a supplier, I know most of the other farms that I tend to work with, like Oshala and Foster Farm, don't typically sell violets, which is kind of a bummer. I wish they would, but it's a tedious crop to harvest. I think that's one of the main reasons why they don't. But you probably can get it in your yard. Um, and you can throw it into pestos and things like that too.
It is a little slimy. So, you know, I'd mix it with other greens and a pesto. So it's not too slimy. And then a tea, it's, it's a pleasant slime. It's not unpleasant.
Alfalfa is another one. I kind of threw this slide in there, which is why it doesn't have all the little boxes. I used to work with alfalfa a lot when I first started off as an herbalist. And as time went on, I kind of ended up favoring nettle more often.
From a nutrient standpoint, they're kind of sort of similar. I'd say nettle maybe has a little bit more bang for its buck. The alfalfa leaf, we're working with mostly the leaves here. They are very nutritious, very high minerals, and they do have a little brighter of a flavor than the nettle has. It gets a lot of calcium.
It's another crop that they feed to animals. That's one of the main reasons why we see alfalfa being grown is for animals to forage on or to incorporate and feed them as an addition to their food. to provide some nutrition.
It is also alkalizing. Another unique thing about it is that it is a phytoestrogenic plant. So it will have a sort of estrogen modulating effect.
If somebody has low estrogen, the impact might kind of boost the estrogen effect of the body a little bit. And if they had high estrogen, the phytoestrogens might bump that out to some extent and reduce the estrogen effect of the body. It's kind of typical for our plant estrogens.
It's in the legume family, which you can kind of tell. I'm going to move my chat box so I can see it. So you can kind of tell by these little funky flowers are very legume, very, very legume like with their banner keel and wings is how that like botanical.
So this is a head of a bunch of different little flowers and clovers and alfalfa are all in that legume family. And we often see plant estrogens or phytoestrogens in the. in the legume family. So soybeans, but not just soybeans, also alfalfa, red clover. There are some potential concerns around alfalfa.
One is that sometimes, well, the phytoestrogens are usually okay for most people, but occasionally they might not be appropriate. And there have been some reports that people who have autoimmune disease, particularly rheumatoid arthritis and lupus might experience flares with alfalfa. I have not witnessed it, but I also don't tend to work with alfalfa very often at all. So, um, so that's when I can't really speak intelligently or personally on, but I just know that it's out there as a warning in the literature. Also more recently.
alfalfa became one of the popular GMO crops because they could grow it for forage for plant for animals and then spray the heck out of it with Roundup and it would get everything else to die and keep the it's Roundup ready so it can still thrive while poison was being dumped on it and so I definitely wouldn't go for alfalfa that is not organic if it is organic then it shouldn't be genetically modified But there is this thing about drift. And so it is possible for pollen and genetics to drift. And so there is a possibility that there might be some genetic modification that just sort of in the environment ends up drifting into our organic supply, which is kind of a bummer.
But all that being said, it is a nutritious and tasty tea. So we have a few more plants. Definitely, if you have questions, throw them in the chat or stories. Um, horsetail is another great plant to consider.
So horsetail equazitum arvense is a common weed, and this is what it looks like in the springtime. And so just starting to come up and this, I, it was cool that I even caught this picture because the, the equazitum arvense, first it puts up the, the stalks that are going to put out the spores. This is a spore bearing, not a flowering plant. It's a very ancient type of plant.
And so first it puts up these, then they die back and then the greens go up. So it was pretty cool that I caught this photo when both parts were visual. Often you miss that first part because it's so early in spring and the color of it like looks like the ground. So it's really easy to not even realize that it's there until the greens come up. But it is one of the key identifying features to know that you have the right species because there are a couple of different species of this, of the Equisetum group of genus.
So likes to grow near water. It's one of our best sources of silica. So it's really, really concentrated.
And if you really want to be working on connective tissues, hair, skin, and nails, you might think of throwing this into your strong infusions, your decoctions, your light teas. You could also have it powdered and added to things. That said, if you are powdering it, you never want to be inhaling a lot of dust.
It's never really good to inhale dust. because horsetail has so much silica in it, which is kind of like glass, you know, glass is made of silica as well. Um, if you are powdering it and you inhale it, it could actually be really damaging to the lungs. So if you're powdering your own horsetail, make sure to wear a mask, do it in a well-ventilated area with a fan or something like that.
Um, or you can buy it already powdered and then work with it that way. And again, be careful working with it, that you're not inhaling a lot of the dust. Most people just take it as a dry herb and put it into their teas. It's actually really fun to process. Like if you harvest it and dry it, the little joints of it, you can't quite see that much on this, but there's little joints and they come apart really easily.
And so you just kind of by hand can be like, boop, boop, boop, boop, and like break it up into little pieces. You don't need to use scissors or anything like that. It is one of our richest sources of silica that we could possibly have in the diet besides rice. shoots, but not that many people are eating the shoots of rice.
And so that's going to be helpful for collagen, bones, joints, elastin, skin, hair, nails, you know, all the, all the things keratin. And it's going to help with that strength, the flexibility, the resilience, and horsetail is the primary source of silica that you tend to see on the market. There are other forms as well.
It has benefits topically and internally for wound healing and also helping with pain. So wound healing, being vulnerary. There are even some interesting studies on internal extracts being helpful for modulating autoimmune disease, decreasing inflammation and allergic response, early studies.
But one of the studies they found that adding a horsetail extract to popular rheumatoid arthritis drugs made them bump up from being 17% effective to 80% effective, which was pretty cool. However, it was just one study and there was no control group and there was no herb only group, which would have been nice to see. Most often we're going to work with the dry.
So horsetail is one of these plants that's toxic to foraging animals for a couple different reasons. One is that if you have it fresh, it contains an enzyme that breaks down thiamine or B1. And so for a foraging animal that's, you know, getting all their food from eating and they're getting it fresh, that can actually end up with a significantly toxic, deadly B1 deficiency.
The way that we work with horsetail is very unlikely for that to happen because the quantities are smaller and we're almost always going to be drying it to make something or cooking it. Or if you tincture it and you tincture it fresh, the alcohol is going to denature that enzyme. You're not going to get the minerals, but it's also very good for some of its healing properties as an alcohol extract for other reasons. And so it's very rare that we would have to worry about the thiaminase that's breaking down the thiamin or B1.
However, it's still something to keep in mind. And then also the other thing is that horsetail can bioaccumulate nitrogenous compounds and other toxins from the soil. It likes to grow in damp areas.
And so whatever's happening in that watershed, you know, if it's downstream from agribusiness, if it's right next to even a compost pile, which is going to have a lot of nitrogen in it. But especially if it's downstream from a farm that's spraying a lot of things or chemical plant, you could end up with some nasty toxins that end up accumulating in horsetail. And so you want to make sure that it's being harvested from clean watersheds, clean soil, clean water that's going into it.
But if that's all good and fine, then you'll probably be good. Usually we just use a smaller quantity of nettle, a smaller quantity. of horsetail compared to the other herbs we've discussed. And you might use it for a little while and then take a break and then a little while and then take a break. Let's see.
Is the bottom of the slide for the RA study. So a lot of these will link to different things. So here's a link to that when you have the PDF of the slides open, there will be a link to one of the topical studies.
There's a really great article from Jim McDonald this year, Jiang with the backslash RA. That is the one that they did on this rheumatoid arthritis study. So you can click that and it should open up the link, assuming all the links are still working.
So yeah, there are all sorts of links throughout the slides for extra resources. Sometimes, you know, if I'm while I'm writing the notes, if I have it handy, I'll throw it in there. But then there are a lot of things that are just kind of in my repertoire and I don't always end up throwing the annotation of the science links in. So a few more plants and then we'll call it good for the night.
We'll answer questions and do my shameless plugs. But we've got red clover. So red clover, like alfalfa, is another phytoestrogen.
It's generally pretty safe and well tolerated by most people. And it's pretty tasty. You know, this is a plant that we're using. We're working with the flower tops. So generally, you're going to harvest just underneath that flower head.
And you'll get the flower head and then the few leaves that are under it. And it's got a... fair amount of minerals, a nice like buzz of like calcium and magnesium and all that. And it's also a phytoestrogen and it's also lymphatic.
So we're, we're tying in a couple actions that we've seen in different plants that we've talked about already. And so red clover, we tend to think about the most often in folks who are looking for bone strength or perimenopause support and postmenopause support because of its phytoestrogenic activity. Soy has a ton of research on it and bones. It's the only really well-researched plant for bone strength because soy is a huge industrial crop and they funded a lot of research.
Also, you know, we do see a lot of research coming out of Asia around soy, but even there too, it's also a big industrial food crop. Red clover does not have as much funding behind it, but is the second most well-studied herb when it comes to bone strength. And It seems to be pretty helpful. It's not as strong as soy based off of kind of extrapolating from the studies, but it does seem to help prevent the bones from losing as much density.
It's not as helpful as some other things for rebuilding the bones, but it does seem to help slow down that bone loss that occurs when we're seeing especially that wobble and perimenopause and then the drop off of estrogen in post menopause. So it's a good one to consider. It's important to keep in mind that with bones, that's going to be a slow area to see benefits because it takes a while, you know, with nutrients in general, it takes a while for those nutrients to gradually like go into the cells and get used to help make new things. And so it will take a couple months to start to see benefits and things like hair, skin, and nails. It will take a year or more to start to see the benefits in the bones.
So you really have to stick with it for a while, but you'll probably notice that you're... teeth are better, that your hair is better, that your nails are better, and that your skin is better when it comes to the nutrient content of these things. And especially when it comes to bone strength, we tend to like build and lose bone.
first in our teeth. So that can be a really good barometer for how things are going throughout the rest of our body. And, uh, and assuming that you're not consuming lots of like acidic sweet drinks that are also going to kind of rot away your teeth with time. So the flowers, mild phytoestrogenic, so may also help with things like hot flashes, night sweats, um, and other various like peri postmenopausal symptoms. It is a fair source of phytoestrogens.
Although you might think like, well, if I'm a guy or I was born with testes, like, do I want phytoestrogens? And probably it's fine. Um, most likely it seems like the phytoestrogens also help protect from things like prostate cancer. And because they have a bit of a modulating effect on estrogen, it's different from say, like taking estrogen in estrogen form.
It's, it's the plants are much gentler. So most likely, no matter what your gender is, red clover would be okay. We don't know if it's safe in estrogen dependent cancers. It does seem to have anti-cancer activity in general.
The research is super preliminary. It does have a long history of use as a cancer remedy. And there's a little bit of like early lab studies that suggest that it might have some anti-cancer properties.
However, there are some studies that suggest that with estrogen dependent cancers, some studies suggest it might help. Some studies suggest it might actually activate it a little bit more. And all of the studies are very, very preliminary, like mostly lab and animal studies that we don't even know if they're clinically relevant in humans in like normal doses.
And so with all that being said, I would say you're going to want to make your own decision, but I would be cautious until we know more about working with red clover specifically in estrogen dependent cancer, like ovarian or uterine or breast cancer. Um, so, but it does seem in general for other types of cancer, probably helpful as a, one of our like semi anti-cancer type remedies, not a cure, but something supportive. It also is a really great lymphatic herb, which might be part of the reason why it's helpful in some types of cancers, because certainly supporting detoxification and the lymphatic system does seem to have some benefits for our body's ability, ability to be resilient against cancer. Some of the studies that are in here talk about more about the premenopause support.
So reduction in hot flashes over the course of 12 weeks. Interesting thing about phytoestrogens is, you know, they're mostly in legume plants and having a healthy microbiome that has been eating a lot of plant foods and legumes, you'll have bacteria in your gut that will help you better utilize the estrogen that is in those plants. And so folks who are... vegetarian, vegan, Asian, or have eaten those ways for a really long time are usually going to be able to get even more benefit from eating things like soy or red clover when it comes to those phytoestrogenic benefits. The mineral content, I don't think it matters too much, but for those phytoestrogenic benefits, yes.
You can certainly wildcraft. It's great to harvest earlier in the day that they'll be happier at that time. And then I like to dry them in the dehydrator, or you could work with them fresh. Like I said, they taste pretty good. They're nice and fluffy.
Good red clover will have kind of like a purpley pinky color when it's dry. If it's brown, it's not good quality. So if you're in the herb shop and you see a lot of brown red clover tops, move to a new herb shop that has better quality red clover. It's a great barometer for telling how good a quality an herb supplier has for their herbs. What else do I want to say?
It does have some concerns with a lot of the legume. things like clovers and whatnot. If you allow them to wilt while they're drying, they can form coumarins, which could be a little bit on the liver toxic side, bigger concern for animals that are being fed hay bales of it, but still like not ideal. So that's why I like to harvest them and then put them right in the dehydrator so that they get nice and dry and crisp and they don't have a chance to wilt. And there are some toxic fungal things that can grow on them.
You can look up pictures online. They look like they have fungus growing on them. So if your red clover flowers don't look good, don't harvest them.
Let's see. Oh, I didn't answer the second part of this question about horsetail. Is there any dosage info on fresh versus dried versus powdered horsetail for connective tissue health and immune benefits?
I am not aware. There's not a whole lot of research. There are a handful of studies, but not a ton. So, um, I don't really have any, although that said, usually we're going to work with dried or simmers or something like that. We don't usually consume fresh grass tail.
for a variety of reasons. It's also not easy to digest if you were just like eating it straight. And tincture would probably work for many of the non-silica benefits of the horsetail as well.
Is nettle better than red clover for rebuilding bone? We have not, we just don't have a whole lot of research on this. However, I would say that they are both beneficial.
And I would say that nettle would be good as like a general bone remedy. And red clover would be a particular benefit if you were looking at like hormone balance issues. So peri-postmenopause, and you can combine them, but I lean more, I tend to lean more heavily into the nettle than I do as a red clover as a general rule.
Also red clover blossoms can get expensive. So making an ounce. per tea is a lot of flowers, but also it would get really expensive. So the nettle and the oat straw are more economical.
Do you recommend probiotics when taking red clover for phytoestrogen benefits? It would be a helpful thing to have probiotics. And in fact, one of the more impressive studies that they did for the perimenopausal symptoms with red clover was one where they did combine it with a probiotic to help make it more bioavailable. And there probably are specific... types of bacteria that are more helpful than others.
I don't know that information off the top of my head though. And if you're eating like lots of plant foods and lots of legumes, then your body's ecology will shift where you will start to have more of those beneficial bacteria at the same time. Part of the problem in the United States is so few of us eat legumes, even fewer these days, because our digestive systems are going down the tubes. And so we are just, you know, we don't get as much benefit. from them because we're not eating them.
And sometimes it's a matter, you know, every person is different, but sometimes it's a matter of slowly reintroducing so that your body has a chance to figure out how to digest them again. And then we also start to be able to unlock more of the benefits of them, but certainly folks who have been eating legumes over the course of their whole life are going to be able to get the biggest benefit from them because they have the microbiome that's suited for that. So one I threw in here that I'll admit, like, I don't know that much about because it's a new plant to me.
It's a new plant to kind of Western herbalism, if you will, is Moringa. And Moringa comes more from India and Africa, where it is beloved as a food and a medicine crop. In some areas, it is the, like by far the most nutritious food that you can easily grow in those areas. And, and the flavor, I recently got a little packet of it so that I could see what it tasted like, because I really didn't. I don't have a personal relationship with this plant and it was green and vegetal.
It kind of reminded me a little bit of what nettle powder might taste like, maybe a little bit with like a matcha green tea powder might taste like it's just like a little bit astringent, a little bit bitter, very green tasting, but not entirely bad. It's something that you could probably mix into a variety of things and make it be relatively palatable. And so this is a drought tolerant plant. that is in the broccoli family and the broccoli family. If you didn't know, if you have a plant that's in the broccoli family, you could be almost a hundred percent sure that it's edible.
I hate to ever say always, but generally speaking, the broccoli family is loaded with edible plants and a lot of nutritious plants as well. And so this is one of them that tends to grow in drought ridden areas of the, of the world, areas with less water drought ridden sounds not very nice. And so all parts have different benefits, but the leaf is the part that you'll most often see for sale in the United States and is the part that one of the parts that tends to be turned to for its nutrition.
And so it's very rich in protein. It contains 10 of the essential amino acids. Nettle also is relatively high in protein as plants go as a side.
It's particularly rich in calcium, potassium, magnesium, iron and other nutrients. And in one of the studies that I saw. the American Botanical Council has a really nice write up. They had for 100 grams, which is a pretty fair dose, that's about three ounces.
So it's a lot of powder. But you would have four times the vitamin A versus carrots, four times the calcium of milk, three times the potassium of bananas, two times the protein of yogurt, granted, it's easier to eat a lot of yogurt than it is to eat a lot of the leafy green, and then seven times the vitamin C of oranges. So like super duper nutrition powerhouse.
And it's often consumed like fresh cooked, dried. Like there are a lot of different ways that they work with it in, um, in traditional cuisine. throughout Africa and India and those areas of the world.
Medicinally, it also has other benefits. So it's also a little bit hypoglycemic, does have some benefits, especially in type two diabetes. It's anti-inflammatory. It's antimicrobial, tends to discourage urinary tract infections.
It is antioxidant, has some immunomodulatory, and it's also a galactagogue. So it is something that they sometimes will give to nursing mothers, especially in areas where nutrient deficiencies are a big problem. to help with breast milk production so that both the lactating parent, as well as the child has a more nutritious setup.
So that's a little bit, I decided to throw it in there as an extra, but like I said, I don't really have a lot of relationship, but I recently was reading more about it and was like, geez, like this sounds like it could give nettle a big run for its money. Like we should be learning about it a little bit more in Western herbalism, especially now that it's more commonly sold. Let's see. I read warnings of taking too much or taking horsetail for too long. Can you clarify the dangers and how much is safe to consume?
I don't have specific data, but I would be cautious and work with like a spoonful of horsetail in your tea versus like a whole ounce. And I might do it for a couple of weeks or maybe a couple of months and then give it pause. But it's not one that would generally be consumed if you were doing large quantities or, for example, one. One recipe that I've seen through Margie Flint, it wasn't hers, it was somebody else's, but it was to powder horsetail and then take like just a spoonful of it mixed in water. The powder is pretty concentrated versus like leafier stuff that's not powdered down.
And so that was something that they recommended just doing for like a week or two weeks and then taking a break. And then maybe you do a week or two weeks and then taking a break. But if you were adding like a teaspoon to your tea, it's like the looser, fluffier herb. That would probably be totally fine to do for a fair amount of time. But within a month or so, I'd suggest taking a break.
You'll see different recommendations from different herbalists. So I don't have a hard and fast rule. It's just more of the general concept of don't do as much of it as we're talking about for most of the rest of these herbs and take breaks and shorter periods of time. And let's see, Deb says, I put Moringa in capsules, love the plant, not so much the taste.
So yeah, capsules would be one way to get around it. And you'd still get some nutrition and you'd probably get some of the medicinal benefits beyond the nutrition. But with a capsule, like the quantity is pretty small. So it's only like a half of a gram. And they're talking about a hundred gram serving here.
So a hundred grams is a lot. I mean, most people probably aren't going to consume a hundred grams at a time. maybe if they were cooking with the fresh leafy greens, but, um, but just keep in mind that you're not going to get a ton of nutrition from a capsule just because the dose is so, so small. And that's true for all these plants. Smoothies, smoothies are a great way.
Yeah. That's a wonderful way to work these in. Cause you can put like a spoonful in or, you know, start with small amounts. If you're new to these plants, like do a little bit for a, see if you like it. So just a few quick extras, cause we need to go.
Um, but we've got maca, which is also a bit nutritious and an adaptogen. We've got calendula, which is really high in carotenoids. I talked about that one a little bit earlier. Got rose hips, which are high in vitamin C and bioflavonoids.
We've got hibiscus, which is, has some of our bioflavonoids in it as well and makes the fruity things taste fruitier. I've got my chai based recipe. That's going to make a lot of these herbs taste much better, especially if you do a decoction with them.
digestion. So a little bit about the bitters. Oh, and then you can get the audio and slides there through the thing. And I even snuck in the video for you. So you can get the video webinar on the heartburn class here through your slides link.
And there's more in your notes. And let me just see before I do my shameless plugs, any quick class questions or comments.