When, many years ago, I was walking through Prospect Park with my then toddler Francis, tasting the sprouting plants, he pointed out a lace-leafed plant with a lovely aroma.  We tasted it and agreed that, in judicious quantities, it was delicious and used it in our wild salads and omelets  along with chickweed, oxalis and wild onion.  But once it got over five inches the bitter taste was overpowering. This was our introduction to mugwort.

Mugwort is a shrubby artemisia, Artemisia vulgaris, although other mugwort species can be found in temperate climates.  It looks in the spring a bit like a chrysanthemum or baby poison hemlock, so smell before you taste and look at the underside of the leaf.   A feathery perennial, mugwort has deeply divided pinnate and opposite leaves which are fuzzy on the underside with their signature, a powdery silver sheen. The crushed leaves, when crushed, emit a pungent, distinctive aroma reminiscent of chrysanthemums and sagebrush.

Mugwort grows to be from three to five feet tall, in thick stands, generally found along streams or near sources of water.  Howie Brounstein talks about following a stand of mugwort up an otherwise dry Southern California hill, finding a hidden spring with archeological treasures.  I have found it in Eastern Washington state above petrified logs, along with its cousin sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata.  It is ubiquitous in Brooklyn because of our wet summers.

Mugwort is well-known for its use in dream pillows.  Dream pillows are traditionally made with late summer or autumn mugwort, although the essential oils are stronger before flowering. It works just to hang a few stalks bundled over your bed, but filling a pillow is more fun.  The oils stimulate dreaming, or the memory of dreams but the pleasantness of those dreams depends upon your own subconscious.   You can pull off the small leaves and dry them to stuff the pillow, or can rub the dry leaves between your hands until the leaves form an owl-pellet constituency which makes for a softer pillow.  If you keep rubbing and compressing you can make moxa, used for moxibustion in Chinese medicine.

In China, the related species Artemisia argyi is used both internally and to make moxa which is traditionally burned over acupuncture points to heat the body and over the little toe to turn a breech pregnancy.  The fluff of rubbed leaves of a plant over a foot high is compressed into cones or rice grain-sized rods, or is rolled into a stick the size of a cigar wrapped in parchment.  The herb has a very directional heat:  if you light a small cone over a watermelon  and  keep replacing it, the cone will make a laser-like hole as the heat penetrates instead of a wide mushy area.  This allows the heat to penetrate to the meridians.  Broad areas are warmed using a moxa box, a small box with a handle that has a double layer of screen allowing moxa fluff to burn above an area like the kidneys to warm them.  There are different grades of moxa depending upon the cleanliness of the fluff and the quality of the herb. Long snake moxibustion is used along the spine, shown in the Pacific Symposium Facebook video here.   Low quality greenish moxa may smell like marijuana while the higher grade gold moxa is less odorous.

Mugwort is high in minerals like calcium and magnesium and I use it to make an infused vinegar that is both bone-building and digestive.  Mugwort qualifies as a warming bitter so can be taken long term. The bitterness of the leaf,...

Continue reading Spring Mugwort:

http://www.acupuncturebrooklyn.com/alternative-health/spring-mugwort

I am not a fan of grapefruit seed extract, because  as a natural antibiotic it is a scam, a drug basically.  But grapefruit seeds themselves do have antimicrobial effects and apparently, like many herbs, can reverse antibiotic resistance.

First the extract:  Chemical manufacturers take leftover grapefruit pulp, a waste by-product from grapefruit juice production, and in an intensive, multi-step industrial chemical process, change the natural phenolic compounds into synthetic quaternary ammonium compounds. Typically, in chemical synthesis of this type, chemical reagents and catalysts are used under extreme high heat and pressure or vacuum. Synthetic ammonium chloride is one of the chemical catalysts used in this process.  The products either contained the preserving substances benzethonium chloride, triclosan and methyl paraben or they didn’t work.  GSE is not an essential oil, tincture or glycerite.   Wikipedia’s article gives a significant discussion with sources on why you shouldn’t consider GSE a natural product.

However grapefruit or pomelo seeds themselves are potentially botanically useful antimicrobial agents.

This is not a widespread traditional herbal use.  According to Todd Caldecott, Registered Herbalist (AHG) ...

Continue reading Private: Grapefruit seeds for urinary tract infections and diabetes http://www.acupuncturebrooklyn.com/alternative-health/grapefruit-seeds-for-urinary-tract-infections

As someone who was around in the ’50s and ’60s when there was less obesity, I have to tell you that diets were not that good.  TV dinners, Wonder bread, instant mashed potatoes, fish-sticks and whole milk predominated and vegetables tended towards the overcooked.  Food was cooked in Crisco, full of trans fats, and cotton seed oils.  Fresh vegetables came in during the late 60s, but predominated on the coasts.  There was less soda and no high fructose corn syrup, and portion sizes were somewhat smaller, but the caloric difference may not be enough to explain why we have an epidemic of infant obesity today that we didn’t then.  And I doubt that the babies today are doing any less exercise, although their older siblings may be indoors on computers more instead of riding bikes.

While diets included a lot more fresh vegetables after the 1960s and mothers showed an increased willingness to breastfeed, obesity rates increased.  And not just in couch-potato adults or fast food addicts.  The  Harvard School of Public Health reported in 2006 that the prevalence of obesity in infants under 6 months had risen 73 percent since 1980.  You need to look at more than calories in and calories out when infants start showing up obese.

One thing that has affected all of us, , from the developing embryo to the adult is a category of chemicals named obesogens by researcher...

more at:  Acupuncture and Herbs by Karen Vaughan blog