Introduction to the Legitimacy of Plant-Based-Medicine

Okay here we go! welcome to the Introduction to the legitimacy of plant based medicine.

I want to do a few things with you. I want to deliver something very simple, something I call: "Your Foundation for Investigation" Take what I am saying and challenge it to know its true. Take it and apply it to your life and continue to investigate these simple concepts and make them grow.

Lets get started:

First, I want to legitimize plant based medicine.

I will do this using 3 proofs; Traditional, Scientific and the infamous, ancient method of interpreting the one medicinal use of plants called The Doctrine of Signatures.

Traditional

This proof is what is simple. It is what is traditionally said about the plant and its medicinal use. 

Scientific

This proof is most complicated. This is where I take what our elders - and anyone who has studied medicine - say and have said for hundreds of years, and prove it with the latest most compelling empirical science.

The Doctrine of Signatures

This is an ancient method of interpreting the medicinal use of plants. This is where the plants signature feature is indicative of its doctrine. You simple observe a plants signature feature, the part of the plant that makes it unique, the part that separates it from every other plant in its family, location or on the planet. Observing that feature will make it very clear what specific part of the body that plant has been created to heal.

Second, I want to enrich your connection to nature.

I will show you that every plant has one specific medicinal use. I will show you that every single plant has been created to show you what body part it has been created to heal. I hope that you will feel umbilically connected to these plants and transform how you connect to nature

Third I want you to be able to take healing into your own hands!

Every plant has been created for one specific medicinal use, use them! We teach, most of all, how to sustainably harvest each and every one of these plants. We teach how to harvest in such a way that promotes the plants ability to reproduce, so that every year, the places we harvest have more medicine in them than the previous year.

The driving force of this blog is to instill a great appreciation to nature, via your innate connection to it. I hope that this appreciation will drive you to do everything you can in your life to ensure that these very special plants are protected. Not so our grandchildren can only see them, but touch them, smell them, taste them and experience their perfect healing qualities.

Carrots  

Carrots are an amazing root we are all extremely familiar with. Its bright earthy flavour is almost always an addition in the best stews. They are most known for their vitamin A, C, Calcium and Iron. They are also full of fibre Vitamin K and potassium. Beta carotene is what gives carrots their bright orange colour.

 

Traditional

All of us parents out there have all told our kids: “Eat your carrots because they are good for your eyes” For us kids out there we have all heard this from our parents. My mother was always really cool and said: “Eat your carrots, they will help you see at night time!” 

Were they right?

Scientific

We know that carrots are good for the eyes! They have beta-carotene which our body converts to vitamin A a nutrient crucial for eye health.

That same compound we know exhibits rigorous scavenging activity against major oxidative stressers. Also been labelled by the scientific community as a chemopreventative 

The Doctrine of Signatures

For all you beautiful gardeners out there who have grown carrots, it is incredibly obvious that the signature feature of a carrot is the root. A cross section of the root reveals that it looks exactly like an eye.

Kidney beans

 

Next we have kidney beans, beautiful kidney beans. All the best bean salad recipes, all the best chili recipes have to have kidney beans! You haven't lived until you have tried kidney bean hummus.

 

 

Traditional

It is said that kidney beans are good for your kidneys, by almost everyone that has eaten them! The connection is not hard to miss seeing as the name of the bean is a kidney bean!

Scientific

Kidney beans are an excellent source of magnesium and potassium, we know that a deficiency in any of these two minerals will result in a kidney stone. Our bodies need to have lots of magnesium and potassium to be able to use calcium, if those two helpers are not there our bodies will allow the calcium to build up in your kidneys and you will get kidney stones. Calcium will also be deposited in you gall bladder and you will get gall stones. Calcium will also deposit in your joints and you will get gout! To avoid these common issues, eat kidney beans and use the calcium you are eating!

Kidney beans are also a high source of fiber and protein without all the saturated fats meats have, giving your kidneys quite a bit of a filtering break!

The Doctrine of Signatures

The kidney beans themselves are the signature feature of the plant, and they look identical to the kidney. This one is extremely clear! So clear that growing up when I would eat my mommies chili and bean salads I would pretend that I was a monster eating a ton of kidneys!

Mushrooms

Mushrooms are a huge part of my daily diet, and should be for all of you! Mushrooms tend to have some of the most powerful antioxidants. They provide a true earthy tone to any meal, they are my favourite with pastas and eggs

 

 

 

 

 

 

Traditional

There are a lot of people and groups who have been told that mushrooms are good for your ears. That if you are eating enough mushrooms you don't have to worry about developing issues like deafness and earaches!

Scientific

The only reason why you are able to hear anything is all thanks to a bunch of tiny little cartilage-type bones in your ears that vibrate and your brain registers those vibrations as sound.

Mushrooms have everything that those little bones need to fix themselves and become healthy. Mushrooms are an amazing source of bio-available Vitamin d3, Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium, Silica, Iron, Copper and even zinc!

Mushrooms provide your ears everything that they need to fix themselves and become stronger.

The Doctrine of Signatures

This one may be a little abstract for most. This is why I am starting with food, it is much easier to grasp. A cross section of the mushroom reveals an ear shape with gills representing the bones in your ears. Many wild mushrooms look like ears just dangling off of random trees! 

Tomatoes

Tomatoes are a staple in my summer diet. My favorite way to eat huge amounts of tomatoes was introduced to me by my amazing Italian friends, Pico da gallo. I eat it like a salad, most like to use it as a special a dip in veggie trays!

 

 

 

Traditional

I know a few genuine Italians and trust me it is not a stereotype, they like tomatoes. One friend of mine says: “Lets make a sandwich” to which I gratefully respond: “sure!” because I know anything he cooks is ridiculously amazing. So his idea of a sandwich was a thin pita bread with ladles of tomatoes poured over top, and that's it. I had to ask: “Wheres the meat! Wheres the lettuce! Is this it?!” If that wasn't enough, Spain naturally lacks snowballs and it was in their love for tomatoes that they invented a genius alternative, the La Tomatina, where literally dump trucks of tomatoes are whipped around in the worlds largest tomato fight. Canadians don't even have snowball fights that large and snow is a lot more available than tomatoes!

Scientific

Tomatoes have a myriad of nutrients that, when combined, all fight to reduce the progression and severity of atherosclerosis (artery...failure). Lycopenes, beta-carotene and vitamin C get together and neutralize free radicals that destroy arterial tissues and overall efficacy of the heart, dampening the entire cardiovascular system, Lycopenes alone have been shown in countless studies to prevent a heart attack! Tomatoes also have potassium, niacin, Vit B6 and Folate, which the EMPIRICAL side of science knows to all have extremely heart-specific healthy qualities. 

Tomatoes are known to have enough antioxidants and essential nutrients to stop a heart attack! 

The Doctrine of Signatures

Not all Doctrine of Signatures examples are: “this plant looks exactly like this body part” sometimes they are a little more abstract. Tomatoes are red and separated into chambers just as the heart is red and has chambers. 
    

Walnuts 

 

Apparently walnuts are so good for you brain health that the FDA has them listed as a drug and not a food!

Walnuts are such a healthy food that even the FDA doesn't regard them as a food and rather, a drug. Raw organic unpasteurized non-irradiated walnuts are my favorite go-to snack in the fridge that satisfys sweet bitter and the satiating oils leave me feeling near full after a cup!

Traditional

Walnuts in my house growing up were often referred to as brain food.

Scientific

Walnuts are loaded with omega 3 fatty acids that feed the brain. Our brains are 60% structural fat, our brains need to maintain this percentage of fats, constantly. By eating walnuts you are providing your brain with all the fatty acids your brain needs in order for it to maintain its structural integrity.

There are polyphenols in walnuts that scavenge brain-related free radicals, severely reducing oxidative stress on the brain. The loads of polyphenols in walnuts reduce the inflammatory load that our brain deals with on a daily basis, which has numerous benefits, namely interneurosignaling and neurogenesis. 
One method of recording cognitive performance is by measuring the inferential verbal reasoning, which a walnut rich diet scored a good 11.2% in a United States Study done on young adults.

Our brain faces enormous amounts of stress, everyday. When these stresses are managed – a good way of managing stress is a great diet – our brains age much more gracefully. 

A huge stresser that is now linked to all brain aging difficulties is the issue of polyubiquitinated proteins. These are incredibly toxic proteins that can accumulate in the brain causing great amounts of stress and without managing them, an ungracefully aged brain is certain. Human and animal trials indicated that a mild amount of walnuts significantly cleared protein aggregates out of the hippocampus, the part of the brain that chiefly deals with memory.

Walnuts are also a great god-send for our epileptic population. They exhibit some pretty specific and intense anti-epileptogenic qualities.

The Doctrine of Signatures

Walnuts look near identical to the brain. When I was a child (and today) I pretend that I was a zombie eating a ton of brains!

Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes are the fuel of Olympians and diabetics – seriously! Sweet potatoes riddled with ghee is a great lunchtime treat. My wife has been having a lot of fun growing sweet potatoes in our garden, from scratch!

 

 

 

Traditional

Don't know anyone who said directly that sweet potatoes are good for your pancreas except maybe for dietitians.

Scientific

Sweet potatoes have been labelled as an anti-diabetic! They have some pretty extreme hypoglycemic effects. Sweet potatoes lower your blood sugar! Now, this is odd, something about this doesn't make sense. I thought that the one feature that makes sweet potatoes different than other potatoes is the presence of sugar! Than why do they lower your blood sugar, something doesn't make sense here. 

Well, the reason that this all doesn't make sense is because we like in a very Greek orthodox society, where everything is linear is right and wrong, left and right, stop and go. Where in the natural world everything tends to be cyclical. 

This is where i will introduce you to something really amazing called counter-intuition. This concept is riddled in nature! Almost everything is counter intuitive, or goes against the 'normal' way of thinking. Let me just say, i would have loved to live in a world where the linear mindset was counter intuitive. 

Sweet potatoes are full of special fibre and proteins that when eaten with the huge amount of carbs and sugar, ultimately they lower your blood sugar! 

So sweet potatoes are an amazing source of energy, I'm sure that every Olympian is very fond of them for this quality. They give a long lasting constant energy, whereas sugar is a short burst of energy with a crash, you never crash with sweet potato, you just keep going! Its amazing. So at the time that I was learning all this my daughter was about 9 months and we were experimenting giving her different foods and one evening she was fussy and – after a lot of trial and error – we found out that she wanted some food! It was 11pm at night and we thought: “If we give her a nice big snack she will clonk right out for bed! Perfect!” We gave her sweet potato. I remember that night looking at the clock at 3:30am with burning hazy eyes at my daughter screaming at the top of her lungs flailing every limb she had. As my mother would say: “first time parents”

The Doctrine of Signatures

Okay, this one is glaringly obvious: Sweet potatoes simply look identical to your pancreas.

 

 

 

 

Avocado

This is my last food example.

My and my family have been on a low carb high healthy fat diet for quite some time now, which, in itself alleviated many of our problems. Avocados are so high in healthy fat, some 30g in a small-medium avacado! And as a result are one of our staple foods. We eat so much of these bad boys, just chilled with a knife and spoon, they even come with a perfect bowl, the shell!

Traditional

So this beautiful fruit has been labelled as being good for reproductive systems.

Scientific

When you go to the doctor, midwife, nurse, mother because you are pregnant want to become pregnant breastfeeding, even post nursing their first word of advice is to load you up with folic acid via prenatal vitamins. We know through rigorous science that when a mother developing a child is deficient in folic acid that baby is extremely susceptible to a huge number of developmental disorders chiefly, spinabifida.

So a diet rich in folic adic, or a diet full of avocados will be ridding the risk of most developmental disorders.

The Doctrine of Signatures

When you look in nature to every pear or womb like shaped fruit root leaf vegetable they are always absolutely loaded with the most bioavailable folic acid! Coincidence?

Pear, Squash, Avocado, Figs, etc.

Tamarack

Tamarack is one amazing tree. Tamarack is not technically an evergreen – it goes through one of the most gorgeous deciduous transformations from green to a bright, almost illuminating golden, and sheds its needles every fall - it is called a deciduous conifer!

All conifers, for the most part, grow bone straight. Tamarack when comparing it to its conifer counterparts grows with in incredibly beautiful spiral shaped trunk and 'S' patterned branches.

When driving along the highway it is easy and quite fun to spot Tamaracks using this identification technique as most are crazy dramatic.

Tamarack in my native language is called Mshkiigwaatik, which literally means 'swamp tree.' I often wondered why tamarack got that name, there are many trees that grow in a swamp: Ash, Black spruce, Elm, Red maple, Alder, Willows etc.. Tamaracks are the only tree that when faced with completely flooded conditions, are able to continue to grow whereas the others achieve this hibernation-like state and simply maintain life or slowly begin to die. Tamarack is truly the only tree that is deserving of the name swamp tree, or Mshkiigwaatik

3 Proofs of the medicinal claims of Tamarack:

Traditional

Tamarack is called nerve medicine.

Scientific

Some pretty amazing studies have been done on Tamarack and its effect on the nervous system. Tamarack bark has quite a few different antioxidant flavonoids that have dramatic effects on nervous traumas.

Phenols

Polyphenols have been deservingly receiving a great amount of attention these past few years. They have a seemingly limitless amount of benefits. Strong evidence shows their amazing protective and regenerative and reversal effects on the nervous system. The advantage that plant-derived phenols have over synthetics is their ability to freely cross the blood brain barrier and express their qualities in diseases in the brain like Alzheimers. Lets look at a few of these phenols more closely. These are some of the most present phenols in tamarack bark.

Dihydroquercetin

Quercetin is a flavanoid that has been getting quite the buzz these days with its unique antihistamic effects, touting it great for treating allergies. Tamarack bark has a sibling called dihydroquercetin. A very special phenol flavanoid that has encourages huge nervous protection action. Very useful in diabetics and simply for ageing. Giving you some peace of mind as you grow older

Lignans

Lignans isolated from tamarack bark induce nerve growth factor secretion and perfectly inhibit NO production. Nitric Oxide is essential in the production of nerves but deadly when it is overproduced. Lignans from tamarack perfectly inhibit (regulate) the production of Nitric Oxide protecting the axons and mylien from great damage. Nitric Oxide is also one of the deepest causes of neuropathic pain, tamarack bark lignans eliminate it.

Secoisolariciresinol

Superb protective effects on nerves and the nervous system. Seems to be focused on ordinary issues like ageing. Also regulates Nitric oxide production. 

Isolariciresinol

Free radical DPPH is an absolutely devastating to the nervous system, most nervous degenerative-specific diseases are heavily linked to this venom. Of course, the antidote is isolariciresinol! Tamarack bark is loaded with it, regular consumption of tamarack bark is amazing to prevent degeneration caused by DPPH. Also regulates Nitric oxide production.

High studies have confirmed that in vivo tamarack bark extracts have severely increased nervous comeback in every nervous issue imaginable. Most processes are due to these antioxidants! The Cree of our Canadian North are very fond of this tree, in the aging who are going blind and sufferers of snow blindness burn the green log of tamarack until a thick black tar bubbles out of one end and they smear the resin directly onto the eye to cure blindness!! They sure knew and know what they were doing!

Now, lets take a moment to look at some of the other uses of tamarack bark!

Additional really amazing information about Tamarack:

Tamarack bark is a conifer, and all conifers play some extreme role in the immunity of my ancestors. Cedar purges the lymphatic system, juniper annihilates airborne communicable diseases etc... Tamarack bark has some pretty superb immunostimulative qualities that have been heavily confirmed.

Immune system

It modulates the immune system, making it incredibly useful in treating autoimmune diseases across the board. Increases properdin by a whopping 21% in some studies!

Tamarack bark stimulates Natural Killer cell toxicity making them much more effective and the sickness taken care of before the effects are even felt!

Anticancer

Its anticancer effects are felt in all parts of the body but most in the liver. The bark extract greatly inhibits the metastasis of tumour cells to the liver.

Allergies

A really neat compound concentrated in the wood burls of tamarack called arabinogalactans has been found to oddly and very significantly reduce the inflammatory response of dust in the upper respiratory tract. Also found incredibly useful in treating upper respiratory infections.

The Doctrine of Signatures

This ancient method of interpreting the medicinal use of plants is absolutely astonishing with tamarack. My ancestors walked past tamarack bark and knew that it was the plant for anything that had to do with electricity, or the nervous system. They knew that this plant has been created to show them what it has been created to heal, however did they know what neurons look like?

When you look at the human body under a microscope and look at all of our body parts at a molecular level, everything is different, everything has a shape that is distinguishable! Liver lobules look like hexagons, lymphatic vessels look green and scaly, blood cells are round etc.

When you look at everything that has to do with electricity under a microscope you will find neurons. There are 5 types of neurons and they all have something in common. All neurons have a smooth pronounced spiral shape with a distinct wave look to them. They are meant to cover as much surface area as possible. Dogs instinctively hunt in a perfect wave pattern because they know, that is the best way to cover as much surface area as possible.

Now look out at a tamarack tree and see how the trunk has a beautifully pronounced spiral pattern and the branches have a perfect wave shape to them. 













Tamarack has been created to show you that it was created to heal nerves.