10 Plant Medicines and How Our Drugs Come from Nature 💊 🌱
September 11, 2021
We only know only a little bit about the science of food and nutrition, but what we do know provides us with a glimpse of the powerful potential to use food as medicine. 🌱
Now, let me explain.
Most of nutrition science has focused on only a few handfuls of vitamins, minerals, and enzymes. But, in all reality, we know that our natural food actually has close to 50,000 complex components if not more yet undiscovered.
So, as the human capitalistic system works, man tried to manufacture their own kind of food without fully understanding what they were getting themselves into. Up to this point in food manufacturing and consumer based products, they have largely focused on macronutrients, and with some subtle consideration for vitamins and minerals with respect to kids and pregnant mothers. Likewise, we’ve done the same thing in agriculture, mostly focusing on size, yield, sweetness, and consumer buy-in instead of looking at the complexity of science involved with plants and their biology.
For instance, we know that antibiotics can impair the natural healthy innate immune system of humans, and likewise, burying a seed in soil that’s been sprayed with chemicals that kill and alter the natural microorganism biome of the soil, in turn alter the health and natural immune response of the plants and crops we grow.
I’ll take it one step farther, as we know that when someone netually gets sick and naturally overcomes a sickness or environmental exposure like a virus or bacteria in a natural way, they actually strengthen their immune system and become healthier.
“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”
Likewise, as plants are grown in soil and are faced with extreme temps, droughts, floods, times of sufficient sunshine and times of excessive shade, they too face hardship, but become stronger because of it. If bugs and insects begin nibbling on their leaves, our powerful and largely overlooked plant kingdom friends start to fight and defend themselves at the microscopic level. The more difficult life they face, the stronger they become as they decide to produce more plant defense systems, greater antioxidants, pursuing survival at all costs, and they become more robust nutritious plants because of it.
When we run thousands of acres of mono-crops, start fiddling around with GMO agriculture, over tilling and failing to recognize the systems biology ecosystems approach with our food, we start destroying the health of the soil, decreasing the innate health of the plants we grow and lower their nutritional components.
You proabbyl know all about how many animals have grown extinct or close to it due to the overwhelming overtaking of land and agriculture that man has caused to nature. Likewise, we’ve been on the cusp of losing the hundreds and thousands of food varieties known in the ancient world. You probably also know that most conventionally grown food today is a bland mediocre imposter of the real food that we had just a few generations ago.
It’s less complex, less healthy, less nutritious, but supposedly “smarter” with farmers paying millions of dollars to access data about their technologically savvy crops and chemicals from their phones. For the most part, large scale farmers have lost their personal agency, were misinformed, lied to with propaganda and falsified research. They’ve been duped and for a pretty penny are required to fall in line with large scale corporate legislative regulations, political ideologies and can’t afford to do anything else. They just want to put food on the table, but for far too long they’ve been part of a broken system doing exactly the opposite, taking real food away from the family table.🥦
Just like doctors, just like pharmacists, just like researchers, chefs, and lawmakers…just like you and me… we’ve all been taken advantage of by the flow of money, power, and influence to some degree. Sometimes I wonder how many of us live a truly awakened life, you know what I mean? When you read in your local paper or talk to your community friends and neighbors, you learn a lot more about their personal experiences and personal struggles than you could ever find on the national news. We’re not even going to touch on how national news overtook the thrones of local news as technology advanced and local news channels, older generations of towns people were both required to adapt to federal standards for digitalization.
That’s one way to make sure everyone thinks and feels the same for sure.
But anyway, what I was saying about local folks is that sometimes a local family physician will throw in the ropes because he or she felt like they sold their soul through all the opioids they were led to prescribe like candies to children at Halloween or hand over statins, PPIs, NSAIDS, and birth control every single day… “when I thought I signed up to help people with their health.. I didn’t know there would be so much red tape, so little I could do on my own, and so many hoops I’d have to jump through just to help people, work with their insurance, and actually support them.”
“I’ve written scripts for 30 years, seen thousands of patients year after year…. I would say only a fraction of them really got better. It sucked. I got depressed a lot. I overworked myself and overwhelmed my staff too. I lost my bedside manner and became cold-hearted. I was expected to always have a prescription at the ready for anyone coming in with any complaint. It’s like I was a literal drug dealer depending on what someone had issues with and it just took me way too long to open my eyes and finally quit.”
“It was different when I started than it is now. I’ve seen trends come and go, fellow practitioners come and go as well. This job is not easy. Not everyone is cut out for it. I found more delight teaching seasonal seminar classes with the community than I did with my regular office time. Then could I actually work with people on things I felt mattered, like their mindsets, their emotions, how to cook, how to think, how to feel, how to find their inner sense of joy and positivity with life. A lot of my patients are dealing with some sort of chronic pain, and I just wanted to help them more than I could in my office, so that’s why I had to offer the extra evening classes each season to talk more about mindset, lifestyle and environment. At the end of the day, that’s where most of these problems come from anyway.”
What if…
Often I wonder if I would have liked becoming a naturopath instead of a dietitian. Now, I also wonder how much most of us know about how drugs are made, how they are studied, researched, trialed in clinical trials, or even discovered in the first place. 🔍
For instance, did you know that the vast majority (70-80%) of medications today were originally developed from isolating active constituents found in plants with other portions of medications developed with the help of studying fungi (15-20%), bacteria and other creatures on this planet. 🗺️
Yep, that’s a complicated way of saying most drugs and medications are pill forms of profiting from the natural plants all around us. Most cultures around the world know this, but some of us in the western world, less biologically connected to our earth civilizations have lost this truthful insight over the last few generations. 💊💊💊
Warfarin, sold as Coumadin used as a blood thinner – active ingredient coumarin, used as a blood thinner found in sweet clover and other plants like tonka beans (also known as cumaru)
Aspirin – anti-inflammatory, pain reliver, anti-blood clotting, blood pressure lowering with active ingredient Salix or Salicylic acid found from the Willow Tree (thank the global leader and multilevel conglomerate across several industries known as Bayer)
Pain Medications like Morphine, Codeine, Opioids from opium plant and others (thank companies like Merck & Moderna, Johnson & Johnson for these)
Menthol used in may pain relievers and nerve numbing applications – from the mint family of plants
Cocaine used in anesthesia – from the Coca plant
Caffeine used in many medications from headaches, fatigue, and more – coffee plants, tea leaves, cacao pods 🍫🍫🍫
Digoxin used to lower the heart rate – found in the digitalis aka foxglove plant
Quinine used as an anti-malaria medication throughout Africa and elsewhere – derived from the bark of the Cinchona tree
Pilocarpine used to contract pupils and support individuals with cataracts – derived from Jaborandi leaves 👀👀👀
I could go on and on and on. The main point here is that most of our medications actually come from nature, originally but we’ve lost that education as consumers and that personal agency as farmers, gardeners, and plant medicine cooks. 🌿
Maybe sometime we’ll dive into the lists of side effects from common man-made massive marketing ploys for profiteering from pills prepared in a manufacturing plant instead of lists of phytochemicals derived from plants prepared by nature.
But now you know.
Now you can rethink what it means to use food as medicine in a whole new way. This isn’t the full story but just a teaser of a lesson for the giant encyclopedia of plant medicines, using all kinds of plant components for promoting health and treating disease. That’s what kind of still excites me about the world of nutrition, is that we still have so much left to learn, left to explore, and I firmly believe we can learn so much if we look to our past as a symbiotic piece of nature rather than thinking we were separate and better than nature.
We are nature. We need nature.
Let’s appreciate it as such.
Drop me a line in the comments below to tell me your favorite plant-based medicine or supplement! Did you know that many man-made medicines are actually isolated compounds and active ingredients we found present in plants around the world?
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I believe in education. I believe we deserve to know. I believe we deserve the chance to live our best lives possible with an awakened mind, open eyes and open hearts to enjoy our lives to the fullest living life together - not against.
Stay together fam, much love in a crazy world 💙
Today marks the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 a day forever marked in history of the United States that shaped our culture, community, and also our hearts. I implore us to take time to reflect and appreciate the freedoms, safety, and security we do have in this country that can so easily take for granted.
Having visited the Twin Towers monument, I can attest it is breathtaking and highlights the honest void that this tragic event caused in our cultural hearts and the trauma we experienced as a nation because of it.
Many lives were lost that day and the days following.
The stories we often suggest to forever remember are those of incredible service, sacrifice, and camaraderie we saw in this country from friend and stranger, neighbor or not. We came together in desperate times, and this is inherent to our super powers as human beings. Remember that, we have super powers of love, sacrifice, and service.
May we relish, cherish, and practice these super powers on a regular basis.
Stay together fam, much love in a crazy world 💙
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