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It is often said that herbal medicine is a gentle medicine.
What is less well known is that 80% of all conventional medicines or their active ingredients were originally discovered in a plant.
The same applies to food: whether fruit, vegetables, pulses or cereals – everything is plant-based and contains nutrients.
Some of these far exceed the daily requirement for energy in the form of carbohydrates, fats, proteins and vitamins.
But what are vitamins?
On their own, vitamins have no value in a food.
Digression:
A hamburger can contain up to 8 grams of pure ascorbic acid.
That is many times more than the body needs in vitamin C.
Despite this, the consumer’s blood hardly shows any vitamin C after the meal.
The same applies to tocopherol, vitamin E.
Fast food also contains plenty of this as an antioxidant for fats. Our organism cannot benefit from this.
Anyone who studies the biochemistry of plants and foodstuffs first comes up against the fact that there are very few plants whose active profile has been fully researched with all their active ingredients.
A healthy, natural plant can contain up to 100 different active ingredients. A plant produces this abundance of substances for itself in order to ensure its own health, reproduction, growth and survival.
These substances react in the human organism, turning them into active ingredients. They trigger something. This does not always have to be positive. The plant world is also known to have very strong toxins.
A plant does not produce one active ingredient, but a large number. This means that we are dealing with a mixture. All the substances in this mixture have the potential to react with each other and when we ingest this mixture, we experience an even greater variety of reactions in our organism. The reality is that modern biochemistry concentrates on a few so-called lead substances and tries to reproduce their reactions in the human body. This is then described using models and approximate assumptions. No one can say exactly how and what happens with such a mixture of active ingredients in our body. Some of these mixtures have a positive effect, others do not.
Example: Artemisia Annua
The annual mugwort “Artemisia Annua” is a plant from classical traditional Chinese medicine.
It is described there as an effective antimalarial. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Novartis company discovered this plant for itself. An active ingredient, artemisinin, was isolated and it was shown that this active ingredient inhibits the absorption of iron by the malaria protozoa, causing it to die. In Chinese medicine, tea made from the herb was drunk and it was observed that the infection rapidly subsided within a few days. Studies have shown that the pathogen load drops by 80 % within 4 days. The Novartis drug initially achieved truly miraculous results. The load fell to 0 % within a few days. After a few years, however, a phenomenon became apparent: in some patients, the pure artemisinin was no longer effective.
The malaria pathogens had become resistant.
With over 500,000,000 treatment units produced annually, Novartis had a problem with this. A genetically modified species of Artemisia Annua, which contains many times more of the active ingredient, was to be the solution.
In Africa, where this drug has its main sales market, Artemisia Annua was cultivated and it was found that the tea is still the best remedy and that the resistant pathogens have trouble with it.
So it is not enough to package the key mechanism of a disease as a medicine. Why?
Artemisia Annua is not only an antimalarial. The plant reduces fever, stimulates the immune system, has an antibiotic effect in the intestine against fungi and, last but not least, it also inhibits the absorption of iron in certain types of tumors. In other words, it can also be used with great success in cancer therapy. This is thanks to a very broad mixture of active ingredients. If this mixture is left unchanged, it works without side effects and there is no development of resistance at various levels of our organism. It unfolds in a balanced way. This is precisely what is most important for understanding herbal medicine. It is not the quantity of a single active ingredient that is decisive, but the proportions of all the substances in the mixture in relation to each other that produce the effect.
Algae experiment:
We fed microalgae with nutrients extracted from plants. These extracts contained small amounts of substances that were toxic to the algae. The amount of toxic substances was small but sufficient to paralyze the algae’s cell metabolism in theory. We expected the algae to die. The opposite was the case:
However, in combination with the other active ingredients in the extract, these toxic substances acted as a stimulant. The algae showed faster growth and were healthier. Even 15 generations later. Algae reproduce quickly.
CONCLUSION: A TOXIC SUBSTANCE IN A MIXTURE DOES NOT WORK AS IT SHOULD
If a mixture contains substances that change the toxic effect in an organism, then this is understandable.
Example in humans: In Hildegard’s medicine, columbine is used as an antibiotic. However, columbine is also classified as a poisonous plant. It is also correct to emphasize that the amount of toxic substances is very small. It would take a huge amount of fresh plants to have any effect. On the other hand, this poison has a restorative effect on our immune system. The plant not only kills off annoying pathogens, but also has an effect on our immune system by building it up. There are countless examples of this. It is important to understand that these mixtures of active ingredients are more than the simple sum of their parts. They have the potential to react between the substances in the human organism.
Now we take the rue plant Ruta graveolnes. This plant also comes from Hildegard’s medicine and has been used in the Mediterranean region since ancient times as a spice and medicinal plant. In many European countries, it is compulsory in pharmacies as it can be abused for certain purposes. This does not mean a hallucinogenic effect, but something completely different. Let’s take a rue from the Mediterranean region that has grown in a dry, well-drained, slightly acidic soil and let’s take a rue that has grown in more northern climes. The plants differ considerably in their appearance. The one from the Mediterranean region appears longer, taller and has less foliage. The one grown in colder, more humid regions is a magnificent little bush.
In the laboratory, we first compare whether the composition of the active ingredients is the same. We find that the Mediterranean plant clearly has a broader spectrum of active ingredients, especially terpenoids.
Then we look at the quantity ratios of the active ingredient profile.
It is noticeable that the Mediterranean plants clearly have higher quantities and therefore different ratios.So the rather lean, inconspicuous soil shows up in the laboratory as having more ingredients and even more concentration?How does rue work?Well, we will restrict ourselves to the application as described by Hildegard von Bingen.A woman in the menopause changes her hormones, which can lead to complaints.If rue is taken together with fennel, the hormone balance is regulated.No hormones are replaced, but the woman’s own hormone balance is stimulated to achieve a balance and a steady, slow reorganization. The known complaints disappear because the active ingredients have acted on the cause.In the spirit of Hildegard von Bingen. We first give the extract from the northern latitudes to a volunteer for three months. She felt a slight improvement but not the success she had hoped for. Then, after a break of one month, we gave the same volunteer the extract from the Mediterranean region and after a few days she reported a significant improvement. It would not be enough to use just one woman as a test subject. This extract has been used in several medical practices throughout Europe for more than 16 years.
The amount of data that has been obtained is corresponding and the effect is proven in thousands of cases.
We learn not only that this remedy works, but something much more important. A medicinal plant works very well or not at all, depending on where it grows and how it thrives.If active ingredients are missing, the mixture also has a different effect.
One reason why herbal medicine is dismissed as gentle and often ineffective is precisely this.Where and how a plant grows determines its healing effect.
The current situation also poses two further problems that must be taken into account without exception. Climate change is having a drastic effect on medicinal plants. In the laboratory, this often manifests itself dramatically. For example, it can happen that simple fennel seeds from the Mediterranean region are completely unusable for a year because drought or too much rain have impaired the plant’s growing conditions to such an extent that the mixture of active ingredients is practically unusable. Europe in particular is massively affected by this development. Climate change is insidious and is permanently changing the conditions for our flora. What’s more, practically every year is a mystery. We no longer have any consistency in climate forecasts.
The same applies to the quality testing of medicinal plants. Another aspect of quality is the issue of organic certification. A farmer decides to convert to organic farming. However, this does not mean that his soil will do the same and his immediate environment does not have to convert. We have been investigating medicinal plants from wild collections, conventional farming and organic farming for years. The
The results are inconclusive and suggest that organic farming is of little benefit for medicinal plants in Europe. On the one hand, most wild collections are supplied from the Balkans. Depending on the country of origin and the degree of industrialization, there are clear differences in quality. The more deserted an area is, the better the quality.
The picture is similar for conventional cultivation. Here, too, it can be seen that the quality is significantly higher when cultivation takes place in an otherwise sparsely cultivated area.In this case, the farmer can also do without agrochemicals.This is because they have no place in the cultivation of medicinal plants. And you don’t need them either. This is because medicinal plants are rather undemanding in themselves. In organic farming, it can be proven that many farms are sometimes massively overburdened with agrochemicals due to the legacy of the past and, above all, due to neighboring farms. This makes the organic label itself questionable. In our opinion, medicinal plant cultivation should only take place where conventional agriculture is not present. Agrochemicals spread over very long distances. These poisons have an extremely harmful effect on us humans. These substances can accumulate in medicinal plants in exactly the same way and significantly change the properties of the actual mixture of active ingredients. If you want to treat something with medicinal plants, they must not undergo any change in the mixture of active ingredients. Anything else will not be successful. It goes without saying that the same applies to food as to medicinal plants. But it will be difficult with the available agricultural land. Anyone who expects agrochemicals to leave our health unscathed has not understood what toxic substances are being used. Especially as they do not simply break down in the soil, but can accumulate for years.It should also be noted that no soil analyses are carried out for most organic residues from agrochemicals.There are even no standard tests available. The consumer must consciously ask for more and sustainable quality, then things will change.