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By Root 851 0

of extraction. Only within this last 100 years has there been an emphasis on making concentrated alcohol and/or glycerin solvent tinctures and other highly concentrated fractional extracts. This compulsion has followed in the footsteps of those Western scientific interests who sought to isolate and concentrate pharmaceutically “active” constituents. Mainstream pharmacy secured its livelihood by catering to these flourishing medical practitioners who chose to rely on the drug qualities of botanicals. In current mainstream medical pharmacy (mimicked by today’s predominant herbal mass marketing), these concentrated alcohol extracts continue to be considered more sophisticated; therefore, they are aggressively marketed as more potent.

After experiencing the energy of a wide variety of differently prepared extracts, it is my sense that our culture’s current obsession with so-called “pharmaceutically active ingredients” has erroneously (and I suspect naively) disregarded as superfluous the remaining so-called “inactive” or “passive” components. The urgency and consistency with which twentieth (and now twenty-first) century medical pharmacists and herbal product marketers have acted to isolate and concentrate the “active” components as a method to establish increased “potency” in their products has heedlessly eliminated vast amounts of each medicinal plant’s complementary “ballast,” or so-called “inert” components.

In my opinion, these “inert” constituents—common residents in infusions and decoctions—are carriers of a plant’s “tonic” mineral stash which a human body requires for successful digestion, assimilation, elimination, repair, toning, and overall health maintenance. And equally important (in fact, profoundly essential to physical health), many of these “passive” components, especially the non-digestible ones that slide into our colon untouched by our erosive stomach secretions, supply food for multi-millions of beneficial microorganisms that dwell in our gut. These microorganisms have been recently termed “pro-biotics,” for they are the good-guy germs that live (and ideally are thriving) in our digestive tract.

Microbiologists have observed many nutrients taken into the human body as food are not used by the body, but instead appear to be eaten by friendly bacteria that live in colonies lining the human intestine. The formidable presence in our gastrointestinal tract of these beneficial organisms is essential for our physical well-being, because they participate in the chemistry of digestion and prevent non-beneficial pathogenic organisms from capitalizing on any opportunities to establish colonies in our digestive tube. The pathogens are so overwhelmingly outnumbered that they can’t secure any intestinal real estate to colonize as home. In other words, the “inactive” constituents of a plant make up the fodder that feeds the pro-biotic organisms which render healthy digestion possible and constitute the substrata of the geography of our entire physical immune system. With this information, it requires little imagination to speculate that the “inactive,” “inert” ingredients in whole herbs are also used as food for these bacteria in the GI tract, and this allows these microorganisms to assist the body to assimilate the nutritional components along with the “active” components of the herb.

Stemming from this insight, I contend that the Chinese style of low heat, slow decoction, and to a lesser extent our own culture’s historic use of infusion-pots (see illustrations, this page), yield medicinal-tonic extracts that are overall superior to other methods of extraction. These simple techniques supply us with extracts that deliver not only the pharmacologically active components of an herb, but their nutritive components as well, along with the fodder that is used by beneficial intestinal flora to help us digest and assimilate all of this. And subsequently, these same flora, well-fed, go about their life cycle, thrive, and therein lay the primal groundwork for our physical immune system. In other words, except for those folks