Podcast 239: A Definitive Guide to Bitters

Welcome to 2025, everyone! Let’s give the year a bitter start – that’s better than a bitter end, right? If you don’t think so yet, listen to this episode and by the end, we’re sure you’ll agree!

Bitters are a truly indispensable piece of an herbal toolkit. They – like demulcents, adaptogens, and alteratives – can achieve things in the body which pharmaceuticals, acupuncture, and other healing modalities simply cannot replicate. Bitters are one of the herbalist’s superpowers!

In this episode, we cover:

• bitter as signal – and why their actions on the body are nearly immediate
• bitter deficiency syndrome – a uniquely modern human problem
• energetics of bitters – is bitter always cooling, or is it more complicated than that?
• actions of bitter herbs – digestion-activating, fluid-draining, liver-awakening… mind-centering…
• bitter-tasting constituents – and an ode to the flexibility & variety of bitter taste receptors
• subcategories of bitter herbs: pure bitters, mild bitters, aromaic bitters, inulin/berberine/artemisinin-bearing bitters, fungal bitters, warming/relaxant/moistening bitters, …
• how to take bitters – drops, sips, chews, and more.

Since they’re so helpful – and really, not only for digestion – we address bitter herbs in many of our courses. Quite possibly all of them, now that we think about it! They’re that important. Bitters get a significant mention in:

• Holistic Herbalism Materia Medica
• Herbal Medicine-Making
• Holistic Nutrition & Digestive Health
• Basic Phytochemistry
• Neurological & Emotional Health

Like all our offerings, these are self-paced online video courses, which come with free access to twice-weekly live Q&A sessions with us, lifetime access to current & future course material, open discussion threads integrated in each lesson, an active student community, study guides, quizzes & capstone assignments, and more!

If you have a moment, it would help us a lot if you could subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen. This helps others find us more easily. Thank you!!

Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

Episode Transcript

Katja (00:00:14):
Hi, I’m Katja.

Ryn (00:00:15):
And I’m Ryn.

Katja (00:00:16):
And we’re here at Commonwealth Holistic Herbalism in Boston, Massachusetts,

Ryn (00:00:20):
And on the internet everywhere thanks to the power of the podcast.

Katja (00:00:22):
Woo-Hoo.

Ryn (00:00:23):
In 2025, no less.

Katja (00:00:26):
Yeah.

Ryn (00:00:27):
No more.

Katja (00:00:28):
New year, new chair. Old chair, actually.

Ryn (00:00:31):
Old rocking chair.

Katja (00:00:32):
Very old rocking chair, but I’m just trying it out. We’re going to see.

Ryn (00:00:36):
Yeah. It’s 2025. And we have decided that we are ready for this. And it’s going to… We decided, yes.

Katja (00:00:45):
We decided. We decided we’re ready. We’re ready.

Ryn (00:00:48):
It’s going to be great. This is going to be a great year of podcasts for you. And we’re going to kick it off right now with today’s topic, bitter herbs.

Katja (00:00:56):
Yeah. Today’s topic, or what we wrote as our title here, was a Definitive Guide to Bitters. And I mean, as soon as you say that something is definitive, I guess that’s…

Ryn (00:01:11):
Can we just differentiate definitive from exhaustive? Because we’re not going to do the latter.

Katja (00:01:18):
That’s nice. Well, I mean, yeah. Just fair warning, dear listener. This episode might be longer than usual. Because while it’s not exhaustive, I think it is pretty definitive. I think it’s fairly definitive.

Ryn (00:01:34):
We will define bitters. And we will not give them a small definition. We’ll, give them a big one. It’s going to be good. Because look, bitters are really important. They’re a critical part of your work as an herbalist. And you know, they’re one of those things like demulcent herbs, like adaptogens, like alteratives that you don’t get anywhere else. You don’t get them from drugs. You don’t get them from the pharmaceutical world. You don’t exactly get those kinds of impacts from acupuncture or – I don’t know – reiki or whatever else. Other modalities don’t have that to offer. These are things that plants can give us. And so thanks plants, as always, right? But those are always worth looking for, really. And I mean, if you’re into lots of modalities, they’re worth looking for in whatever ones you practice. Like what can this do that other things…

Katja (00:02:28):
That other things can’t do.

Ryn (00:02:29):
Can’t do? Or can’t do as well, or can’t do in this particular way, or something like that, so.

Katja (00:02:35):
I think in general, that is an excellent model for thinking about health and care specifically. Because if you just tie yourself to one modality. And you’re like well, I am this, and this is what I do. Then you run the risk of missing out on tools that you could have had available to you. And so if instead you’re looking for what can I get here that I can’t get anywhere else? I guess I’m just getting at, there’s always this setup about wanting to be natural about our healthcare, and wanting to avoid chemicals as much as possible, and all those things. And those are really important, great things.

Ryn (00:03:25):
We want that.

Katja (00:03:26):
Yeah, we definitely want that. But not so much that if something were to happen in your life that would really require something not natural, a surgery or a pharmaceutical in order for you to survive, we want you to still feel like you have that option, that tool available to you.

Ryn (00:03:47):
Right, because the sword cuts both ways. Those modalities have things that they can do and accomplish that herbs can’t, right? As we always say, I don’t have an herb for your sucking chest wound.

Katja (00:03:57):
I would prefer, yeah, for that to be dealt with in a different manner, like in an emergency room. But yeah. So I think that just allowing yourself the flexibility to be in a place of natural approach as much as possible. And as much as possible at various times in your life or even many times in your life might be 100% of the time. But just so that you are still open to whatever tools it is that are going to get you what you need. And then the flip of that, that the people in your life maybe who are very conventionally medically oriented can also hopefully be open to oh, but yeah. This bitter action, that’s actually an important action in the body. And we don’t have that anywhere. That’s a tool that I should make available to me. Yeah.

Ryn (00:05:01):
And as a practitioner, it’s good to identify these things within your scope of practice. Just so that you can know what you have to offer in a collaborative kind of an environment or an integrative kind of situation. And yeah, it’s kind of what you bring to that table.

Katja (00:05:19):
Yeah.

Ryn (00:05:21):
So, that’s our topic for today, bitters. But first, a quick reminder. Don’t forget that we teach herbalism online, and not only through our podcast, but through a complete and full-fledged online learning platform. Ha-ha. Doesn’t that sound good?

Katja (00:05:38):
Yes. The podcast is great to dip your toes into. But if you really want to learn herbalism, a podcast is not enough. So, what you’re going to need is a well-organized, systematic course of instruction. And we’ve got that for you. We teach by video. We teach also all the videos by audio as well, so that you can watch it if that’s what works for you. You can listen to it while you’re moving your body, if that’s what works for you. We have printable materials. We have ways that you can get your questions answered very quickly. You can type them in while you’re watching or listening to a lesson and get your answer within a day. You can attend live Q&A sessions twice a week, actually more than twice a week. Right now, four times a week. And you can also join our student community. And this community is not on Facebook. It is a private student community, specifically dedicated to working through the course materials, keeping you motivated, keeping you engaged. Making you not just feel like, but really know that, that there is an active community of support for you. And you are not just having to learn alone by yourself without a bunch of people who like herbs around you. So, yeah, it’s as 360 as possible. It’s great, y’all, is what we’re saying. So, if you really want to learn this stuff. And you like the pod, and you’re like oh, they finally made another pod episode. Then hey, join the school.

Ryn (00:07:19):
Follow the links in the show notes. Or go ahead and pop over to online.comonwealthherbs.com. That’s what. All right. Let’s talk about bitters. And I want to start out by talking about…

Katja (00:07:31):
Oh wait. Do we need to do our reclaimer?

Ryn (00:07:33):
You’re right. We should do that. I almost forgot.

Katja (00:07:37):
It’s because it’s been a little while.

Ryn (00:07:38):
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Katja (00:07:40):
Seriously, it’s not a resolution, but it definitely is a goal to be more consistent in regular episode creation this year.

Katja (00:07:51):
We’re doing it.

Ryn (00:07:52):
We’re doing it. We’re starting now. It’s happening already, right? So, here’s our reclaimer. We remind you that we are not doctors. We are herbalist and holistic health educators.

Katja (00:08:02):
The ideas discussed in this podcast do not constitute medical advice. No state or federal authority licenses herbalists in the United States. So, these discussions are for educational purposes only.

Ryn (00:08:13):
We want to remind you that good health doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. Good health doesn’t exist as an objective standard. It’s influenced by your individual needs, experiences, and goals. So, keep in mind that we’re not attempting to present a single dogmatic right way that you must adhere to.

Katja (00:08:31):
Everyone’s body is different. So, the things that we’re talking about may or may not apply directly to you, but we hope that they’ll give you some good information to think about and some ideas to research and experiment with further.

Ryn (00:08:42):
Finding your way to better health is both your right and your own personal responsibility. This doesn’t mean you’re alone on the journey, and it doesn’t mean that you’re to blame for your current state of health. But it does mean that the final decision, when you’re considering any course of action, whether it was discussed on the internet or prescribed by a physician, that’s always your choice to make. Yeah. It holds up. We still believe it.

Bitters as a Signal

Katja (00:09:08):
All right. Now bitters now.

Ryn (00:09:10):
Bitters, yeah. And I wanted to start by thinking about bitter as a signal, right? Because we keep using this phrase bitter, bitter. And we can talk about categories of herbs because of different qualities that they have. Like we can do an episode on warming herbs. And we can do an episode on adaptogens. And we can do an episode on relaxant diaphoretics. And we can categorize them in different ways. But this is a flavor. It’s a sensation. It’s something that you detect, right? And you detect that in your experience of the world, your sensorium. You know, I taste something bitter. But you’re also detecting it as a chemical, right? Your tongue is responding to the chemistry in the plant or in the tincture that you’ve made. And there’s a whole set of reactions apart from your sensation of bitterness, right? Even if we went into your brain and plucked out the part of it that turns signals from the tongue into a sensation of a taste, right, there would still be reactions in the rest of your body. There would still be a lot of things that happen throughout your system. And one really important thing about this is that they are a reaction to the flavor. They are a reaction to the taste of the plant or the chemistry of the plant. And that reaction means that what happens in your body happens fast. It happens faster than the amount of time it would take for those chemicals to touch your tongue but then be absorbed in. Whether through under the tongue into the blood, or down through your stomach, and through the whole digestive process, and then out into the blood, and then move around, and then reach some tissue, and then act on it, right? Which is often the model that we have of I ingest something, and then it acts in my system, right? We expect all of that to have to take place. But bitter is a really clear example of how that’s not always required. There can be a faster than circulation bound impact.

Katja (00:11:12):
There will be. Yeah.

Ryn (00:11:13):
Right. It’s kind of a clumsy way to say it. But it’s just to say that you taste it, and right away stuff starts to happen inside of your body.

Katja (00:11:19):
I think that bitter also is a really fun, deep dive in physiology. And not just in physiology, but also you know how there are those images. I’m thinking about a kaleidoscope, but I think that’s not what I really mean. I.

Ryn (00:11:43):
You mean magic eye?

Katja (00:11:45):
No, I mean you start off with a picture at a kind of fairly high level, and you drop down to greater magnification. And you see that there are similarities between them. And you get to a greater magnification, and you’re like wait. There’s still similarities here between all the levels.

Ryn (00:12:00):
Fractals.

Katja (00:12:02):
I think fractals, yeah. I think that’s what I’m thinking about. So, what I mean here is that when you taste something bitter… We’re going to go with black coffee as an example, because that’s probably something, a flavor that you’re familiar with. And maybe you don’t like black coffee. Maybe you do, that’s awesome. But maybe you don’t, and you prefer the Starbucks version with the cream, and the sugar, and all the stuff, or coffee ice cream, or whatever. And so you taste bitter. And what happens is that you as a person with feelings and preferences wrinkle your nose. And you’re like ooh, that’s bitter. And so you have received the message of bitterness and made some immediate actions because of it. Eww. Yeah, exactly. Eww. But then the thing is that if you go down a level of microscopic enlargement, whatever, the same thing is happening on your tongue. You taste bitter on your tongue. But on your tongue, bitter is recepted in specific receptors for the bitter chemical. So, you as a human are tasting a flavor, but that flavor exists because of chemistry. And this is also like when we talk about bioflavonoids and the red and blue pigments. And that the red color of beets or the blue color of blueberries does not represent something present in the plant that is good for you. It is the thing in the plant that is good for you. Okay, there are other things that are good for you too, but whatever. And so that’s going on here. The bitter flavor that you are tasting is also a specific type of molecule that is being recepted on your tongue. But then we can magnify it even more. And maybe not magnify but go down a little more. And then we realize that there are receptors in places that are not just your tongue. There are receptors all the way down the digestive tract and also in your lungs. Like there are bitter flavor receptors, bitter molecule receptors in all kinds of places that you would not expect them. And now it’s story time. Because the other day Ryn was drinking some tea. This is like real life at home with Ryn and Katja. Ready? The other day Ryn was drinking some tea, and it went down the wrong pipe. And he started choking or coughing and making a big to-do about coughing, because he really swallowed some. And I’m like babe, are you okay? And when he finally stopped coughing, he looks at me. And he’s like I’m just testing out the bitter receptors in my lungs.

Ryn (00:15:09):
Yep.

Katja (00:15:10):
But anyway, yeah, we’ve got bitter receptors in the lungs too, which is like oh, fascinating. That’s not because you’re supposed to inhale your tea.

Ryn (00:15:19):
No.

Katja (00:15:20):
Just to be clear.

Ryn (00:15:21):
Yeah. Receptors are often what’s called promiscuous. They react to many different types of compounds. And they have varying reactions based on who it is that tangled with them today. But yeah, the fact that bitter receptors are found all throughout the body is one way to understand that the effects of these herbs are not only in the digestive system, which is kind of what they’re most famous for, right? And this is one of those things that everybody, when they’re learning herbalism at some point your teacher’s going to be like I want you to take this bitter thing. I want you to taste it. I want you to observe what happens in your body, right? And if we could do this in a very leisurely way, and we had hours and hours with all of our students, that might be one of the first things we would try with them as a way to impress that herbs do stuff, and you can feel it happen, right? With bitters, you can feel the increase of your digestive secretions, saliva, right? You can feel your stomach start to move around as more acid gets secreted, and the stomach itself starts to kind of work a bit. You may not be able to feel your bile coming out of the liver or the pancreatic fluid coming out of your pancreas. Sometimes I sort of imagine. I’m like was that a little squirt out of my liver? Did that just happen out of my gallbladder? Did that just happen? Did I feel that?

Katja (00:16:39):
Did I feel my gallbladder?

Ryn (00:16:42):
But those are quite perceptible effects, right? Either because you can just be like wow, I’m really salivating now. Or because you’re like I take bitters before this meal. I don’t take bitters before the same meal. I feel really different afterwards.

Katja (00:16:55):
In how I digest it.

Ryn (00:16:57):
In terms of how I digest it, and how it sits in me, you know?

Katja (00:17:01):
But that whole signaling thing. So, when you taste it on your tongue, immediately your body starts signaling through all different kinds of signaling mechanisms. It starts at your tongue. And it goes down through the whole digestive tract and says oh, we’ve got to get the engine going so that we’re going to be able to digest food in a minute. So that’s happening. That kicks off immediately when you actually taste it. And so if you put bitters in your mouth and then spit them out – don’t do that – you would still be getting many of the effects. Because the messaging system is kicked off immediately from the receptors on your tongue. But then that’s not all because most of the time you don’t spit it out. Most of the time you’ll swallow it. And then literally as it’s traveling down your esophagus and into your stomach and traveling through all the parts of your digestive system, you have more bitter receptors through the whole digestive tract. And so whatever of the bitterness didn’t get recepted on your tongue, now it is still available to get recepted, to be received throughout the digestive tract. And so some of that signaling: Hey stomach, get the hydrochloric acid ready. We’re going to have some food. Some of that gets kicked off on the tongue. But some of that also is happening actually in the stomach, as the stomach says oh, it’s getting here. My receptors are getting full. I better speed up this process. So, all of this messaging… It’s like bitter is… When we hear the word messaging – I don’t know – we think about marketing, or corporate communications, or whatever.

Ryn (00:18:57):
No, no, no. Just getting the idea out there, yeah.

Katja (00:18:59):
Yeah.

Ryn (00:19:00):
So look, a lot of what’s going on here is a matter of activation of the parasympathetic arm of your nervous system, right? So, sympathetic versus parasympathetic is basically fight and flight versus rest and digest. So, parasympathetic is that rest and digest mode, right? When you take bitters, they have those impacts on your digestive organs, but those are conveyed to them through the nerves, and especially through the vagus nerve, which you may have heard about. A lot of people are talking about the vagus nerve, and polyvagal syndromes, and different effects on these. Because they’re really, they’re literally big nerves, and they’re big in terms of importance as well, right? They help to convey messages from your kind of central processing unit in your brain, down through all of your visceral organs and make sure that they’re coordinated with each other. That everybody’s squirting out their juices at the right time or doing their jobs so that things work in a nice, organized way. And bitters essentially enhance that type of communication along with sending those direct signals of wake up. Prepare. Get ready to digest.

Katja (00:20:11):
The vagus nerve, yeah. It’s really trendy right now. You’ll see tons of stuff on social media about the vagus nerve. It is actually two nerves, a left and a right. Which I find so fascinating because just the left hemisphere of the brain, and the right hemisphere of the brain, and whatever. But the vagus nerve starts at the base of the brain and goes all the way through the whole trunk of your body, and it touches every organ. And if it is tense. If you are in that fight or flight mode. If you are in that stress place. Then all your nerves are also tensed up. I don’t know. If you’re listening to this, you can’t see me. But I am tensing all the parts of me up, and that’s not a good way to digest your food. And so we sort of think about bitters and digestion and stress and digestion. But just to be clear, digestion is not the only thing that is like impaired by stress. The way that we breathe changes. The way that our blood circulates through the body changes. The way that we interpret information that we are getting in our brains changes. The way that our eyes function changes. And so if we have a tool that improves digestion by getting the body into that state where it is prepared to digest food, that sounds kind of trivial. Oh, take bitters because it’ll make you digest your dinner better. But it’s actually quite profound. It’s so much larger than that when we think of it in terms of how good digestion happens, and the connection to the nervous system, and to the sympathetic versus the parasympathetic states, and to vagus nerve health.

Ryn (00:22:13):
Even before we get to you are what you digest, right? The health of all your organs, the health of all the processes in your body is dependent on the availability of nutrients. And if you don’t digest well, you don’t get everything good from your meal, even if it’s fantastic, quality food. I want to make a comparison to adaptogens here actually. Because with adaptogens, sometimes people talk about them as having impacts on the adrenal glands, right? Like licorice is going to bolster your adrenal glands.

Katja (00:22:43):
It’s good for adrenal fatigue. You saw the quotes around that, right?

Impacts on Gut Flora & Nutrient Assimilation

Ryn (00:22:46):
Yeah. And so that’s one way to talk about it. And some of the adaptogen herbs do have direct impacts on particular endocrine organs, right? Like ashwagandha and the thyroid, there’s a direct effect on that. But one of the great things about adaptogens is that whether they have those strong direct impacts on a particular endocrine organ, what they all have in common is improving communication between all those organs and other parts of your body, and your system’s immunity, and inflammation, and so on, right? And so it’s more than just what does it do to the adrenals? What does it do to the thyroid, right? And in the same way, bitters are more than what does it do to the liver? What does it do to the stomach? They’re about communication. They’re about coordination, right? So, it’s again, on that level of the signal and the communications. Yeah. And so because of that, it’s not just oh, your juices are flowing. We’re getting modulation of inflammatory processes all throughout the body, especially with extended work with bitter herbs, not just a one-time shot. We’re getting improvements in metabolic function. And yeah, some of that’s straight out of liver activity. But again, some of it’s out of coordination with hormones and other types of signals within your system. And even some adjustments to gut flora, right? And I’m not just talking about bitters like Oregon grape that will directly alter some of your flora and get some unfriendly critters out of your life. But really every bitter, because of the way it changes what reaches your gut, what reaches your large intestine, is going to change who lives there, right? Let me back up a minute. When you take bitters, you improve your digestive secretions starting with saliva, stomach acid, right? That allows you to break down food that you might not have been super efficient at breaking down before. And so you’re literally changing what kind of food components reach your gut flora. And ideally they should be well broken down. That’s what the flora like. The ones who are friendly to you, right, that’s what they like, what they thrive best on. So, improving digestion up here really supports flora health down here. And, you know, that’s not just about digestion. That’s about immunity, that’s about hormonal balance. That’s about a whole range of different stuff too.

Katja (00:25:01):
Yeah. When we’re thinking about the flora, it’s also about creating an environment that they want to live in. The most friendly microbes that you want in your guts expect a certain acidity. Well, that’s true actually in all of your body. They expect a certain setup of… Okay, humans do best with clean air and clean water, and not a bunch of smoke in the air, and whatever. Well, microbes don’t live in the air. They live inside of our bodies. So, they’re washed in fluids all the time. And bitters change the makeup of the fluids inside our body and specifically in the digestive tract. The amount of acid that you produce, the amount of pancreatic juice that you produce, the amount of all these things is variable depending on what you’re eating and whether or not that’s nourishing. But also whether or not you’ve got the mechanisms in place to do the production that you need. And because the microbes that you want, that your body wants the most, expect a particular environment. Then whatever we can do to create that environment is going to create a better distribution, or profile, or set of microbes that then helps us digest our food better. Because some things we can’t digest. Some things microbes digest for us or synthesize and metabolize. Some things microbes do for us. Okay.

Ryn (00:27:00):
Yeah. And that’s really important for certain forms of a sensitivity to foods. And I’m not talking about like a deep allergy, like somebody who’s celiac or has a gluten sensitivity or something like that. But there are some things, including even something like histamine intolerance, which is getting a lot of discussion in recent years.

Katja (00:27:20):
Right, trendy.

Ryn (00:27:21):
Some of that can be significantly mitigated by alterations to gut flora. Because some of them can break apart histamine that was coming in through that route.

Katja (00:27:29):
Right, right.

Ryn (00:27:30):
So, there are lots of examples like that out there, you know?

Katja (00:27:33):
Wait, there’s one other thing. Can you hold that thought?

Ryn (00:27:36):
Yeah, do it.

Katja (00:27:37):
Okay. There was one other thing you said a few minutes ago that I wanted to come back to. Because you just sort of said it in one quick sentence. And I was like wow, that was actually super important. And you were talking about changing the way that we assimilate nutrients from our food. And I think a lot of this the last few minutes here has been kind of around that. But the key that I wanted to just… The next sentence that I just wanted to say after that was that basically this means that bitters are basically the most important thing. Because then that has just so many impacts beyond. If you are digesting your food, and then assimilating your food, and then really getting the components that your body needs. That alone… Even though we’ve already actually discussed several mechanisms of mental and emotional health here with bitters, and we’ll talk about some more. But even just getting the nutrients alone will make a huge difference in your ability to regulate mental and emotional health. If you don’t have enough minerals, then your nerves can’t function properly. And it’s going to lead to anxiety. It’s going to lead to all kinds of emotional upset. But it’s actually kind of hard to get minerals. This is like when you make a tea or an infusion, and you want the minerals from it, you’ve got to let it sit overnight, or you’ve got to decoct it or something like that so that you really get all the minerals out. Because it’s not actually easy to get all those minerals out. Well, that’s the same inside your body. And if you’re not getting them, then that is changing the way that your nervous system relays messages, or fails to relay messages, or relays them falsely, or whatever else. Right. And okay, that’s just one example, but there’s just… Anyway, I just wanted to push that next sentence because it really is critically important.

Ryn (00:29:47):
Yeah. All the systems are connected, right? This is holistic herbalism after all.

Katja (00:29:53):
We have literally only just now got through the first segment.

Ryn (00:29:59):
We’re doing good. We’re doing great.

Katja (00:29:59):
It’s going to be a really long episode. We’re sorry.

Where did the Bitters Go?

Ryn (00:30:01):
Yeah. And so, already you’ve gotten the sense that we think bitters are really important, and that they in fact have been for humans always, right? And so you might wonder if you look around at modern diets and be like well, where did the bitters go? Or were people really so different back in the day that these bitter greens tasted good to them, or that they intentionally sought out these flavors on purpose?

Katja (00:30:22):
Or wait, it could be even a level higher than that. Like so what did they do before they had tinctures? How were they taking their bitters before meals? No, the meal was the bitter because vegetables were bitter.

Ryn (00:30:37):
Right. So, yeah. When we were all hunter gatherers, when we were all living off of what was available to us in our environments, people ate a really great variety of foods, and especially plant foods. Part of that was about seasonality, right? What’s growing now isn’t going to be here or is going to be as abundant or as beautiful in a month or in three months. And some of it was also because people would be wandering through areas or however their society was set up. So, people always had these in their diets. And at those times they weren’t necessarily taking them as medicine. It was more about well, this is the green leafy thing that’s here right now. And we eat it, and it’s got a bitter flavor to it. And that’s part of our life. And it’s part of our human story for a long enough period of time that we regard this as something essential to the human experience, in the same way that walking every day is essential to the human experience or human health. Because it so strongly matches what so many generations of our ancestors did. And there’s been a break in that in our society today and for a hundred, 150 years, however you decide to draw the line on that. That’s a very short period of time in comparison to our evolutionary history. Yeah. So, as we’ve gone through time, of course we’ve changed our environments. And we’ve changed where our food comes from and how it gets processed before it enters our mouth. And in the course of all of that, most of the vegetables that we’ve domesticated have actually lost a lot of their nutrient content. And some of this is because of, a large part of this is because of generations of selective breeding to make the vegetable larger, and sweeter, and more appealing. And that’s reasonable. We understand why somebody wants the biggest, reddest, sweetest tomato around. Sure. But there is a consequence that comes along with that. And at the same time, there’s also been processes like climate change, like global warming. And also changes to the soil content because of repetitive industrial agriculture, which have led to changes in the composition of the plant. So, all of these things have basically led to more sugar in the vegetables, more sweetness. And less other stuff, including phytochemicals that have bitter flavors or some other strong flavors, maybe like pungent, or sharp, or acrid, or other things like that. And so the result might be a vegetable that pleases the palate but deprives your body of something that was ancestrally important, expected, or every day and became protective to our bodies as we adapted to having that in our lives all the time.

Katja (00:33:37):
It’s really important to recognize that just like your schedule, you can only do a finite number of things in a day. You can’t just keep cramming more things into your day, although I would like to. The same is true inside of a plant, right? There’s space for a finite number of ingredients, of constituents of that plant. And so as a plant creates more sugar so that your carrot is sweeter, so that whatever, it has less we keep saying other stuff. Well, what is that other stuff? It has less minerals. It has less proteins, plant proteins. It has less of the essential oils or less of the stronger also constituents.

Ryn (00:34:33):
And the things that are called secondary metabolites and are often what we are most interested in as herbalists and looking at plants as having medicinal activity to them. Things that aren’t necessary for the basic metabolic survival of that plant, but support in other ways like deterring pests, or helping it resist UV radiation, or other things like that. And they might have similar benefits for us, or they might do something in us very different from what they do in the plant. But they’re again, not just about making energy, and keeping the plant cells alive, and allowing it to generate sugar through photosynthesis and stuff like that.

Katja (00:35:11):
Yeah. So, the key here is that intentionally humans said hey, if I had bigger carrots, I wouldn’t need to get so many carrots because they’d be bigger. Yes. Hey, if these carrots tasted a little better, that would be great too. And so the way that that happened was the plant that made the tastiest carrots. Okay, well those are the seeds I want for next year. So, that’s like a natural… It’s not like it was GMO or anything like that. You know, we’ve been doing this for thousands of years.

Ryn (00:35:44):
This is how we ended up with corn. This is how we ended up with the things that we recognize as apples.

Katja (00:35:49):
Right, right. Exactly. So, I don’t want to say that that’s evil. But it does come with even if I use the word consequences, that still sounds pretty bad. But it’s a tradeoff. So, okay. So, we’ve been doing that for a long time. But then we’ve done this industrial agriculture for a long time, which means that soils don’t have the mineral content that they once had. Because we remove all the rocks so that it’s easier for the machines to go through. Because we don’t replace the minerals in the soil except for the absolute minimum required to produce a product, not to produce health. And then, so okay, so now there’s no minerals to take up. But then also as there’s more carbon dioxide in the air, on one hand that’s great for fast plant growth. But the flip side of that is they’re producing primarily sugars. And this is not good for humans or animals. Because especially if we think about herbivores who depend on the plant proteins that they’re going to then synthesize. And their bodies work that way because they’re a cow, and they’ve got four chambered stomachs or whatever. Well, now they’re not getting enough protein because it’s not there in the hay anymore. It is primarily sugars. So, it’s like all of these things that are degrading the quality of the vegetables while also making them sweeter. And I think about honey crisp apples, those are my favorite. And they’re so delicious. It’s like candy on a tree. But it’s nothing like what an apple used to be. So, when we think about what people ate. Even if we think about well, just vegetables and whatever, it’s hard to imagine what that was really like and how big a role bitters played. No one had to intentionally take bitters before a meal. Nobody ever even had to think about bitter. That just was like the air that you breathe. And we didn’t used to have to think about the air that we breathe either, but now we do.

Why Incorporate Bitters

Ryn (00:37:58):
And now we do. Yeah. And so this is all to say that there’s even more reason now than there ever has been before to intentionally incorporate bitters into your life, right? And by the way, there are different ways to do it. Anything that tastes bitter is a bitter. So, if you have a salad before a meal or with your meal, and it includes bitter greens like radicchio or endive – endeeve, ahndeeve, however you prefer to say it – then there’s some bitter for you. And that’s helpful. And that’s where that tradition of a salad before the meal comes from, right? Or when people are taking an aperitif, a little bitter liqueur, or cocktail, or something like that before a meal, a Kräuterlikör or whatever like this, those things are also there because they support digestion. They’re there to be taken before you have a big meal, especially a holiday meal or something like that because they help you to handle it better. Or even black coffee, right? There’s a lot of places where it’s normal to drink a little black coffee with your meal. And black coffee is a bitter herb, right? It serves that same kind of function. So, yeah. Well, don’t worry.

Katja (00:39:11):
So, it doesn’t have to be too complicated. If you are somewhere out and about in the world, and you don’t have your fancy little tincture bottle of bitters, then that’s okay. In most places you can get some black coffee, or you might have access to a bitter salad, or something like that. But just to start at the very lowest, simplest level here, it used to just be part of our dietary environment, and it actually still can be. You have to work a little harder to find bitter flavors in our modern food environment, but it’s not impossible to do it. And so that’s your starting point.

Ryn (00:39:57):
So, it’s worth doing, yeah. And look, this is all… We’re connecting this through ancestry, through diet, through changes on these large scales. Like the way people eat, and what they regard as food, and so on. And it’s because we see really frequently, and every herbalist we know sees really frequently people who are dealing with a whole constellation of issues, which bitters can touch all of, right? Bitters can work on a whole range of problems. And one way to say it is like this: Bitter herbs can help with dry mouth, and heartburn, and indigestion, and bloating, and constipation, and dysbiosis of the flora, and malabsorption of your nutrients. And they can also help out with detoxification functions in your body. And they can help with inflammation. And when we get to the psychoemotional stuff, they can help with anxiety, and depression, and sleep. And we could keep going, right? That’s one way to say it. But another way to say it is that all of those things are predictable results of a life without any bitter in it. And so this is sometimes referred to as bitter deficiency syndrome.

Katja (00:41:09):
Yeah. Which is not like a real syndrome. It’s just a thing that herbalists say. But it is real, right? So, if you think about this: human bodies do not synthesize vitamin C. Cat bodies do. Cats do not have to eat oranges or kale because they can create vitamin C themselves. Humans cannot do it. Why can humans not do it? It’s clearly possible. Cats can do it. Why can’t humans do it? Because throughout all of our evolutionary ancestral history, we have gotten vitamin C from our food. And anything that we have to synthesize is more expensive. It’s harder for us to do. If we can just eat it, that is so much easier. And the body has so much work it already has to do, that it’s not going to be like well, I can just get vitamin C from vegetables. And in fact, my normal expected environment has vitamin C in it every single day. But you know, I’m just going to go that extra mile. I’m just going to synthesize it myself. No. There’s too much other work to do. So, recognizing that humans require consumption of vitamin C because human bodies cannot synthesize it. It doesn’t mean that we have some sort of problem with us because we can’t make it. It’s just that that’s how bodies evolved. Just like we expected a diurnal cycle, sun and then darkness and sun and darkness. And so we evolved with bitters. And we do not have a mechanism for efficiently starting the digestive process independently of what we are consuming. So, if you just imagine that vitamin C was the kickoff to – it’s not, but you know – something that we could synthesize ourselves. We can’t self synthesize this process. And so to say that oh, I have constipation, and I can take a bitter to fix that. Isn’t that cool how nature provides the solution to my problem? No, no, no. The problem was here because of having left nature. The problem was here because the body actually requires bitters so that the poop will come out.

Ryn (00:43:41):
Yeah, yeah, right. And you can get by without it, just like you can get by without vitamin C for a while.

Katja (00:43:49):
For a while.

Ryn (00:43:50):
But there are going to be some problems that emerge sooner than others. The longer that you go on deprived of this thing, the more systemic and severe the problems are going to get. And so that brings us back to another point about this whole bitter deficiency syndrome. Again, it’s not just about digestion. That this reaches to psychological and emotional issues as well. And so you can say that the gut and psychology are linked. And so you need to mind the gap, the gut and psychology, GAP, mind the gap. Yeah. Okay, it’s fun. But look, that part I think is really worth keeping in mind. And it’s also worth keeping in mind for those of you who are moving on in your training as an herbalist a bit. And you’re like all right, I’m ready to help some people. I’m ready to do some tough stuff. I’m ready to get to some… Let’s get some depression. Let’s work on some anxiety for people that’s really making it hard for them. I’m ready for that. I can get past the stomachache now. Don’t leave your bitters behind when you move on to more difficult cases, right? Never neglect the fundamentals even or maybe especially for the most severe situations that you find yourself trying to help people with. That’s what I think.

Katja (00:45:05):
I’m with you.

Bitter Energetics

Ryn (00:45:07):
All right. So, when we think about herbs, when we understand them, we look at them often through the lens of energetics. Is this herb heating or cooling? Is it moistening or drying? Is it tonifying or relaxant? These fundamental spectra help us to understand our herb, to orient it in relation to others, put it into an effective formula, match it to the right person.

Katja (00:45:31):
And I think also to see it in its full context. When we say bitters will help digestion, there’s an extremely small view of what is really going on. But when we look at the energetic actions. And we say oh, okay, this is stimulating of fluids in the body. This has a most commonly drying aspect or whatever else. Then we can break out and say oh, I need a plant that can be drying and draining. And I don’t have a lot of options right now. If you are thinking that a certain bitter plant… Let’s go with – I don’t know. Let’s do something super, super just bitter and go with centaury. And you’re thinking oh, that’s for the stomach. Okay, yes it is. But if you think about it energetically. And you recognize okay, well it’s cooling. It’s drying and draining and a little astringent, a little tonifying. Then if you are someplace, and you’re like hmm, I don’t have a lot of herbs available. But I do have my centaury with me because I take that as my bitter before a meal. And this other person is having this other problem of too much moisture and too much laxity in the body. Well, centaury is not just for digestion. It has these actions, and those actions are going to work in many aspects of the body. And so then, so what we’re saying here is that when you think about things energetically, you are not pigeonholing your herbs into one particular place that they’re effective. But you’re able to see the full context of their skill, of their talent, of their abilities, of their actions, so that you can plug that in in many more places than you thought you could.

Ryn (00:47:35):
Yeah. And energetics, it comes in tendencies rather than, than definitives. So, there are two ways to talk about bitters here. One would be to say that bitters are almost always drying, usually cooling, and there’s a lot more variability in terms of tonifying and relaxant. We could also say that what in an herb is bitter is going to be drying and cooling, and then maybe more often relaxant. But in that same herb, there’s a bunch of other stuff that can alter, or overwhelm, or adjust those energetics that the bitter elements are contributing, right?

Katja (00:48:21):
Yeah. That was why also choosing centaury as the option, because centaury is fairly purely bitter doesn’t mean that there’s nothing else going on. But so you can depend on it to fit those real classic actions. Whereas if we thought of something like calamus or elecampane where they’ve got a lot of other stuff going on in the plant. Like heating components, and spiciness, and all these different flavors just because they’re a very complex plant with lots of different…

Ryn (00:48:55):
But they have complex flavors is the thing, right?

Katja (00:48:57):
Yeah, phytochemistry, right.

Ryn (00:48:58):
So, with a calamus or an angelica, you taste bitter. You also taste pungency. And pungency says heat. Pungency says fire, right? So, you can say all right, so there is the bitter element. This herb, if we were to somehow remove all the fire from calamus, it would, it would be a cooling bitter plant, right? But that pungency is there. That fire is there. And so it overwhelms that innate cooling quality of the bitter unto itself, yeah.

Katja (00:49:24):
It’s like because so frequently, almost always plants themselves are formulas. Plants are complex. You are a formula also. You are not just a person who likes herbs. You like also other things. Maybe you have some friends who only know that you’re the plant person. That’s fine. But there’s a lot of complexity to you as a person. That’s true in the plants as well. At that chemistry level there just a lot of complexity going on. And so we can think about each plant as its own formula, actually.

Ryn (00:50:03):
Yeah. So, if I tasted something – I don’t know what plant it is – and it just tastes straight up bitter. I’m going to expect it – 99 times out of a hundred – I’m going to expect it to be a drying influence on my system. And think of it this way. When you secrete fluids, they go somewhere. Even if you secrete them into the tubes inside of your body, many of them are still going to exit your body. Some stuff gets reabsorbed. Yeah, okay. But a lot of it exits, right? So, you squeeze the juice out of the meat of you into the tube of you, and then it’s going to leave you. And so, yeah. Ultimately that has a drying impact. A lot of bitter herbs are also going to have some diuretic action, right? Because again, it’s not only your stomach and your liver. There can be kidney activation here as well. And so there can be that root to dryness at the same time.

Katja (00:50:52):
Please always do that. Always be thinking about oh, I am secreting fluids out of the meat of me into the tube of me and out of me. And that’s why it is drying. Don’t just memorize centaury is drying because then you have no way to explain that to somebody. You don’t understand the mechanism of action. You’re just trusting somebody else who told you that it was drying. Don’t do that. Don’t trust anybody. Don’t trust us. Work through that in your own mind and in your own body. And thinking through how is it drying? How is that happening? So that okay, you don’t so much have to say how is cayenne heating? It’s really spicy. It’s heating because it’s really spicy. Sometimes it’s super obvious. But sometimes when it’s like oh, it’s draining. Well, what does that mean? And it’s not that it’s not obvious. I mean, it wasn’t super complicated. It’s draining. Yeah, you’re squirting out fluids so that you can use them in the digestive process. And then you’re going to remove them from your body, and you’re going to need to make more of those fluids. Yeah. So, you end up literally draining the fluid out of you. But going through that process of saying that to yourself so that you really understand why it’s working, why it’s happening. That also is going to give you such a broader spectrum of ability to apply any given herb to many different situations. Which is just always good because you don’t always have everything at your fingertips.

Ryn (00:52:38):
Yeah. So, we taste something bitter. We expect it to be drying. There are exceptions, stay tuned. If it has bitter without a bunch of other flavors on top, it’s usually going to be cooling in nature, right? Generally, if it’s bitter, but it doesn’t have a pungent flavor to it or a spicy flavor to it at all, then you’d say all right. This is going to be net cooling. We expect that. That’s the more common one. And then for tonifying and relaxant, with this you could either say that it’s highly variable, and think on the one hand of goldenseal, a wicked, wicked, tonifying herb. Or motherwort, right, almost as bitter. In terms of just straight up bitterness, they’re fairly close, right? But motherwort is extremely relaxant as an herb. So, we could say there’s strong variability between all of our bitter plants. We could also say maybe that it’s about which tissues or systems they’re most active on, right? Like motherwort is an amazing bitter, but it doesn’t have a lot of activity on mucous membranes. It has a lot of activity on the nervous system, right? Whereas goldenseal is like give me those mucosa. I’m going to squeeze ’em tight. But not a ton of nervous system activity there, right? So, you could say in general bitters, we could expect them to tonify our digestive mucosa and relax our nerves because of that parasympathetic activation. And certainly in terms of your own emotional experience, as a lay person do you say I feel tense, or I feel relaxed right now? Because of that parasympathetic effect, it’s more often that kind of subjective relaxation that you experience. So, tonifying relaxant is a little complicated. Think about tissues, think about the variation between different bitter plants. And just let that be. Yeah. All right.

Bitter Actions

Ryn (00:54:23):
So, you know, energetics are important in and of themselves. They help us match herbs to people. But between your energetics and the tissue affinities that a plant has, that’s where our actions come from, right? When an herb like a bitter comes into your body, it stimulates, as we’ve said over and over, digestion. You can say that they’re appetite stimulants, that they’re digestive tonics. That they’re cholagogues, they make the bile flow, right? And so those are all about waking up digestion, getting it moving, improving the efficiency and so on. And those are the most famous effects of bitters. Sometimes they’re the most obvious effects of them. There’s a little nuance here too though, right? When we talk about the appetite, with bitters I find them super, super helpful for people who wake up in the morning, and they’re not hungry for breakfast. Maybe because they ate late or close to bedtime last night, or it’s just been their habit for years and years. But if you wake up in the morning, and you take some bitters, you can generate some hunger for breakfast. And that can be really helpful. Another thing though, and if you dig into some bitter science you’ll find this as well, is that bitters can reduce overeating behavior. And so for some people, you hear those two things next to each other, and you’re like that’s kind of contradictory. What’s going on here? And I think in one sense it’s not actually contradictory at all. They’re about waking up the stomach and helping the rest of you to be connected to your stomach and what’s happening in it.

Katja (00:55:59):
Right. If you’re not getting the message that you’re full. If you’re not getting the message that you’re sated, satisfied, then you’ll keep eating. And it’s important to recognize also that food science and food engineering, that is an entire industry specifically created to override those signals so that you will eat more, so that you will then purchase more. So, that is important to recognize. But what if you were eating something that wasn’t engineered? What if you were just eating cherries or something like that? Getting that signal from your body into your brain that says I had enough. I don’t need anymore. Well, all of that is about having that connection between your brain and your body. Which is why when you are eating at the computer – you’re working, and you’re snacking – it is a lot harder to know when you should stop snacking because you don’t need any more food. Because your brain is inside the computer. It’s not inside your body anymore. It’s in the computer doing the work on the computer. And your body is just sort of sitting there by itself, like I guess I’m snacking.

Ryn (00:57:15):
Where is the attention in your body? Which signals are getting through to the brain, to your consciousness, to where you really experience them. And so in this way bitters are kind of an awareness medicine. Awareness for what’s going on inside of yourself. Mmm, that’s pretty deep, huh? You know, through this suite of digestive effects and stuff we mentioned before – like helping to break down your food into more readily digested or readily absorbed components and through some of those effects on the gut flora – there can be a predictable impact on your blood sugar levels when you start to work with bitters. To help bring them into a more normal range, right to reduce spikes, to reduce troughs as well. But especially to reduce the high spikes of blood sugar level. And just as a side comment, in recent years berberine in particular has become very popular as a supplement, or a nutraceutical, or an isolate to take to improve blood sugar regulation. And I’m not saying it doesn’t work because yes, it does. But sometimes it confuses…

Katja (00:58:21):
But I’m saying it’s not a good idea.

Ryn (00:58:22):
But yeah. This odd thing happens though, where people hear that about berberine, and then they learn that berberine comes from plants. And then they say great, I can go, and I can grab a plant tincture. And I can take it, and it will give me the berberine. And that will normalize my blood sugar. And the nuance here is that we do expect them to get some improvement in their blood sugar level, but not solely because of the berberine in that plant. Especially because in a lot of cases the dose they’re taking of their herb extract is providing a tiny amount of berberine in comparison to the capsules of isolated berberine that are clinically proven to reduce blood sugar by this many points and so on.

Katja (00:59:01):
Yeah. But the thing is that it’s also really tonifying, really tightening, really drying. And so it’s not without a cost. You can get to where you’re taking that, and sure, it is helping blood sugar levels. But it’s also giving you gut cramping and making it harder even to absorb nutrients because everything is astringing so much in the guts.

Ryn (00:59:31):
So, what I would say here is if people are excited when they hear about the benefits of plant medicines to improve their blood sugar, I wouldn’t say what you have to do is find the herb with the most berberine in it and get that. I would say find the bitter that matches your body, your needs, your set of systems and symptoms as well as it can. Because that’s going to be the best one for you over the long run. And blood sugar regulation is not a short-term job.

Katja (00:59:55):
Right.

Ryn (00:59:56):
This is long term.

Katja (00:59:56):
It’s an everyday job.

Ryn (00:59:58):
Yeah, right. Okay. So, other actions of bitters that we can always suspect. Any bitter, we expect all these actions we’re describing here. So, it’s like you mentioned before, draining, right? And that can be very helpful when there’s fluid bloating. Maybe there’s fluid bloating around the belly. Well, let’s get some bitters into you. Let’s try to drain that excess fluid, stir it up, move it around, get it to your kidney, drain it out of the system. Reduce that fluid retention. Really, really handy.

Katja (01:00:28):
Plus, when we’re thinking specifically about belly bloating, a lot of that fluid is coming from problems in digestion. Either because you’re eating something that your body is sensitive or intolerant of. And so you’re actually having an immune response. And that fluid that is bloating is literally immune system response. You have lymphatic glands all around your digestive tract exactly the same as the ones in your neck. When you were a little kid, and you wanted to stay home sick from school because you didn’t feel good or because you were trying to avoid a test. And then your parent would touch your throat to see if your glands were swollen. And if they were swollen, then you were allowed to stay home because that means you’re sick. Because if those glands are swollen, that is an indication of immune activity. Does that make you feel differently about the bloating in your belly? It’s the exact same in many, many cases. Sometimes it’s just like gas or that kind of thing. But when it is a bunch of fluid in response to what you ate, it’s the same as your glands in your throat getting swollen. So, that is your body saying something here is triggering an immune response. Something here is not working right. And when we introduce bitters into that situation, we’re repairing so much of the digestive process. Now, it would also be great to extra-duce foods that are causing this intolerant sort of situation or sensitivity situation. And because we mentioned mast cell activation syndrome, and that is kind of very tied up here. You could just lay that on top of everything that just got said. There are so many parallels here. Because that immune response, there is an inflammatory aspect of that. And mast cells, while they’re not the entire immune inflammation cascade, they are part of the inflammation cascade. So, recognizing that by removing the food – that part is important – removing the foods that are causing that extra inflammatory response. But the other part of that is bringing in the bitters to repair the digestive function. All this stuff is super important. And when we say oh, it’ll just make the bloating go away. We just think oh, then my jeans won’t feel bad after a meal or whatever. And we don’t really think through that what’s going on there is an immune response that really does need to be addressed. So, I don’t ever want to miss the opportunity to… yeah.

Ryn (01:03:22):
Yeah. So, you know, between that, those like direct influences on the way the immune process unfolds. Between those effects on normalizing the blood sugar levels, improving digestion. Reducing inflammation in the GI tract itself, which can be the spark, and then the fire spreads throughout the rest of your body. Through all of these effects, bitters have anti-inflammatory actions to them. And of course that’s really relevant in a time in the world when most of the chronic diseases people are coping with are inflammatory in nature. Yeah. Another thing about bitters is that they can have antimicrobial effects. And some of them are more famous for this than others, like wormwood and other plants that contain artemisinin. And then any of the plants that contain berberine like goldenseal and Oregon grape root, famously herbal antimicrobials, yes? But almost every bitter constituent is serving an antimicrobial role in the plant it grows in or is produced by. So, remember, plants make these chemicals for their own purposes.

Katja (01:04:30):
Yeah. They’re not doing this because they’re altruistically trying to help humans out. Plants are living creatures, living beings all on their own. And they are creating all these chemicals, phytochemicals to enable their own lives. Yeah.

Ryn (01:04:47):
And so they don’t have tongues, they don’t have stomachs, they don’t have livers. Okay. But they do sometimes get attacked by microbes, and these constituents can help combat them. So, if you find yourself with your little herb travel kit somewhere, and you realize you didn’t pack anything for an infected wound. Get the bitterest remedy you’ve got and put it on there. And you can expect some improvements for sure. So again, if it’s a bitter herb, you can expect all of those actions we just discussed. Any bitter plant is going to have other actions as well on top of those. And that’s where we get into differentiating them, and what makes them unique, and why we choose this one over that one for this purpose, for this problem, for this person.

Katja (01:05:34):
For this person. Yeah.

Bitter Phytochemistry

Ryn (01:05:35):
Exactly. Right. Just briefly, because we’ve mentioned constituents and phyto chemistry once or twice. Your bitter taste receptors do not respond to one chemical that is the bitter compound of the world.

Katja (01:05:52):
Capital THE, capital BITTER ™.

Ryn (01:05:56):
Right. Yeah. There’s a lot of different types of chemistry that are going to trigger that bitter response, that flavor, that taste, but also all of these reactions within your body we’ve been discussing. So, that can include terpenoids. And we go like category terpenoids, and then the mono terpenoids. And a group in there in particular is super, super bitter. They’re called secoiridoid compounds. And a couple of examples come out of gentian and related plants, including centaury. One of the most bitter compounds that’s been found on earth so far is called gentiopicroside. And you can hear genitia in it, right? It comes out of that group. There’s also amarogentin, which is basically if you break the word down, amaro is bitter. Gentin is like from the gentians. So, sometimes chemistry names look intimidating, but actually they’re really simple. It’s the bitter stuff from the gentian plants. Cool. Cool. So, that’s one group.

Katja (01:07:00):
But even that, that’s just two examples both found in the gentian plant and other plants as well. Just because it has the name gentian in there doesn’t mean that other plants don’t also have it. What that means is the first time that we discovered it in such a way that it required a name, we were looking at gentian at the time.

Ryn (01:07:23):
Yeah. You can play a game when you read constituent names and be like do I recognize the plant that comes from, right? So, in a related group here called sesquiterpene lactones – these are small terpenoid compounds with a particular ring structure on them – we find artemisinin and taraxacin. And if you’re thinking hey, is that from Artemesia, mugwort, wormwood? Is that from Taraxacum, dandelion? Then give yourself some points. You did it. Good job.

Katja (01:07:55):
But artemisinin, you should not expect that it can only ever be found in the Artemisia family. One of my favorite examples for this is thymol. T-H-Y-M-O-L. You are like well, that’s in thyme. Yeah, and it’s in basically every mint plant or all the smelly mint plants. Or like limali…

Ryn (01:08:30):
Linalool? Linal – o – ol.

Katja (01:08:34):
Yeah. With two O’s right next to each other.

Ryn (01:08:36):
Some people say lin-a-lule, but whatever. You can say what you want. It doesn’t matter. So, but that one is most famously found in lavender, but it turns out in a bunch of other floral bits as well.

Katja (01:08:46):
Right, right, right. And so we get in these places where we think oh, that is called thymol because it’s in thyme. And then we’re shocked when it’s in oregano. No. They smell really similar. But then we’re shocked when it’s in a plant that we didn’t necessarily think about thyme when we… But that’s the thing. We just name these chemicals based on the plant that we found them in first. And just always remembering that they can show up in other plants too. Just like you maybe use a wooden spoon in your kitchen. That doesn’t mean that other people don’t use wooden spoons too. If it’s a helpful tool, it’s a helpful tool. And lots of people may have figured out that a wooden spoon is really great because it doesn’t scratch the bottom of the pan, and it this and that and whatever. It doesn’t get hot. So, there are lots of great reasons to use one. Plants do the same thing with these chemicals. So, like oh, hey, if I make this, that’s going to make my life easier. But lots of plants may have figured that out.

Ryn (01:09:50):
Yeah. On the other hand, not every plant can make every chemical. And there are a few things that seem to be very particular, like maybe just a genus if not only one species. A diterpenoid example of bitter compounds include kahweol and cafestol, which both come from coffee. Remember, we’ve been talking about black coffee. And even some triterpenoids can be bitter. Like there’s one called actain, which is found in Actaea racemosa or black cohosh. And there I just mentioned that because now we’ve gone from monoterpenoids to sesqui- to di- to tri-. So, we’re getting progressively larger molecules here. And the thing about bitter as a flavor is it’s not bound to only super tiny molecules or only super big ones. Contrast that with something like the mucilaginous sensation or flavor. That’s only going to come from big molecules, polysaccharides. These things that if you draw a chemical diagram, they take up half the page if you really draw the whole thing. So bitter is something that we can detect from a really broad range of sizes and shapes of molecules. It’s something that our bodies clearly wanted to pay extra attention to because we developed this flexibility in what we notice.

Katja (01:11:08):
If you’re wondering what the size is going on there, a monoterpenoid, that’s one. Sesqui- is one and a half. Diterpenoids are two. And triterpenes are three. So, that is re referring to when you look at the molecule itself, they’re getting progressively larger because there’s more things stacked around.

Ryn (01:11:36):
Like more units are added on.

Katja (01:11:38):
Right. Right. Right. So, that’s what we’re talking about in terms of that molecule size. And the reason that that’s so important is that it means that the receptors we have for bitter either are very flexible, and they can recept many different sizes, many different types of molecules. Or, and in fact it’s going to be and/or, we have many types of receptors. Because we realized that all of these different molecules were really helpful, and we needed to be able to grab onto each different kind. So, we need to be able to make a receptor that will specifically grab each one of those.

Ryn (01:12:24):
And then to trigger similar responses, right? So, if it’s one receptor that’s multipowered. Or if it’s multiple receptors that all feed into the same signal that comes in and says bitter up here. And says wake up down here. Then thanks, evolution. Pretty good job on that one. A couple other constituent categories that can taste bitter: some of the flavonoids. Quercetin is one that’s actually very common in green leafy veggies. And this is where some people will taste things like kale and detect a bitter note to it. And those tend to be super tasters for bitter. The person reacts much more strongly to bitter flavors than the average human does. That’s one of those kind of variants in human taste, like the cilantro thing, like a bunch of stuff. But some people… If you have a friend, and you give them a tincture of a moderate bitter like yarrow. And you’re like this is not super intense. This isn’t like gentian root. This is okay. And they take it, and they’re like blaaah, then they may just be a bitter super taster. And they may be just fine with some mild bitters. That may do the job for them.

Katja (01:13:41):
They may also just be a person who eats a ton of sugar.

Ryn (01:13:44):
They could just be new to it, yes.

Katja (01:13:45):
Yeah, and so they’re not calibrated for bitter. But that whole concept of a super taster. Listen, we are not all the same actually. We didn’t all put our bodies together the exact same way. Yeah, okay, we’ve all got these bodies. But your heart is not in exactly the same place as my heart. And all your different organs, there’s variability in size, in location, in shape. In how many receptors did you make for this thing versus that thing. And how many capillaries do you have here, or there, or whatever. It’s not like you cut us all open, and we’re exactly the same inside. We’re not exactly the same outside. We’re not exactly the same inside either. Even though you look at the anatomy books and it shows one picture. That is like the composite, standardized picture. It’s not how bodies actually are. And if you want more information about that, then just ask any med student. Because this is famously – especially like a med-surg student – because this is famously a thing when they start doing real dissections. And they’re like hold on, nothing is where it’s supposed to be. It’s not where it was on the book.

Ryn (01:14:58):
How did your heart get over there on the right?

Katja (01:15:00):
Yeah, right? But that’s the thing. It’s just like all of our bodies are different. And so we have this oh, it’s a super taster. Yeah, that’s only for the people who have the job where they taste the wine and tell you what’s in it. No, no, no. All different people have different numbers of receptors for things. And so sure, it might just be that they live a high-sugar lifestyle, and that can be calibrated for. But it may also be that they just have a ton of receptors.

Ryn (01:15:27):
Right. There’s hardware and software differences, right? Like how many receptors you have, versus how often you use them, versus just how familiar you are or how your body processes the priority of the signals. Yeah, okay. So anyway, quercetin is a thing that turns up in green leafy stuff. And then another flavonoid, naringin, this turns up in in citrus peels, right? So, if you ever eat citrus, maybe you are really picky, and you peel off all the white stuff. I urge you to eat the white stuff. That’s got some of the best stuff there for you, naringin and other associated flavonoids, nice anti-inflammatory action there. Cool things. And then finally… Well, not finally, but another example before I close here: alkaloids, right? A lot of alkaloids can be quite bitter. And alkaloids is a big group. It’s a complicated group because it’s not strictly about molecular shape. Sometimes it’s about well, that chemical just has a real strong action on human nervous systems. So, we’re going to call it an alkaloid, right?

Katja (01:16:27):
It’s like the adaptogens of the chemistry world.

Ryn (01:16:29):
As long as it has a nitrogen molecule or nitrogen atom in there somewhere, and it acts strongly on the nervous system. Yeah, that’s an alkaloid. Sure. So, there’s a lot of variety there. But some of them are very bitter and very famously so, like quinine is what’s called an indole alkaloid. That’s the group it’s in. And quinine is a very powerfully bitter substance. And then berberine in the isoquinoline group. Those are of course also famously very bitter. And it’s not just berberine there. It’s hydrastine and a couple of other related compounds as well that are very similar to berberine and work synergistically with it. And that’s why we always like to get not just one berberine herb. But give me as many as you can find and put them into a mixed tincture, or a mixed spray, or something like that because that works better for infection management.

Katja (01:17:22):
And anytime that we mention berberine containing plants and infection management, I just always want to note it is topical only. This is not the herbal antibiotic that you can take as tincture and expect that to get all the way through your blood system and get to wherever you need an antibiotic the same way that a pill does, that a pharmaceutical antibiotic does. It is strongly antibiotic topically. So, on your skin and the lining of your digestive tract.

Pure Bitters

Ryn (01:17:55):
Especially the mouth, esophagus, stomach, yep. All right. So, we’ve been talking in some generalities. We’ve could have given a few particular examples, but we wanted to kind of go through some categories of bitters to emphasize again, that it’s not that there is bitters. And they’re all there together, and it doesn’t matter. Just get any one of them, and that’ll be great. But that we can be more selective about them.

Katja (01:18:24):
I mean, get any one of them, and that’ll be better than no bitters.

Ryn (01:18:27):
Fair enough, yeah.

Katja (01:18:28):
But we can do so much better than that.

Ryn (01:18:32):
Yeah. So, we have some categories here, and we’ll give some examples of each and talk about the exciting stuff about them that comes to mind. I want to say that this is not a rigorously schematized set of categories. But I think that these are…

Katja (01:18:50):
It’s not an alphabetical order, is what he’s saying.

Ryn (01:18:53):
Yeah. But I think these are helpful. And let’s start with pure bitters, right? This is what I call plants where you taste them, and they just taste bitter. And there’s not a hint of aromatics in there.

Katja (01:19:05):
There’s like nothing else going on there.

Ryn (01:19:07):
There’s not some pungency going on, or a sour note, or whatever else. They’re just straight up bitter, very straightforward, very clear. And so for me, centaury is my favorite. It was the first. Not the first herb I really worked with, but the first herb I studied as herbal school.

Katja (01:19:21):
Yeah. It was your first herb of the month.

Ryn (01:19:23):
Herb of the month, yep. And it made a huge impression on me. Because that was a time when I was doing some initial work to repair my digestion and change my diet.

Katja (01:19:35):
Oh boy.

Ryn (01:19:36):
Yeah. I mean, I was powered on Triscuits and cheddar until I met Katja. And anyway, so when I took a month, and I drank a quart of centaury tea every day.

Katja (01:19:50):
All by itself too. He really did it, y’all. If you’ve ever tried to drink an entire quart of centaury, it is an experience. And he did it every day, the whole thing.

Ryn (01:19:59):
Take a little sip every now and then through the day. Don’t give up, you’ll get there. But it made a huge impact on my stomach, on my digestion, and then as a result on my mood, and a bunch of other things as well. So, I feel really attached to that plant, and it’s a favorite. And the other thing I like about it is that it’s not threatened in the wild. And gentian root, especially yellow gentian and white gentian, those are quite seriously threatened in their natural environments. They’re often cultivated as well. And if you’re going to buy products made from these herbs, get them organically cultivated. Cultivated because they weren’t wild harvested. Organic because they were tracked, and you are sure they weren’t wild harvested, or grown in weird ways, or whatever else. So, that’s a couple of pure bitter plants. And by the way, there are others. But we’re just giving a couple examples for each category.

Katja (01:20:58):
Yeah. I mean, we could toss blessed thistle into this group and stuff like that. But when we say pure bitter, I think also a thing to say here is that these are cold plants. And when you taste them, it tastes cold, even if it’s warm.

Ryn (01:21:17):
It’s really true.

Katja (01:21:18):
You really feel there’s something cold about it.

Ryn (01:21:25):
They have what we call a refrigerant effect, which is essentially to like dial down the thermostat in your body and cool you off.

Katja (01:21:34):
It’s like how a cucumber is cooling, even if it was at room temperature, or like a watermelon. And the thing is that when you eat watermelon or a cucumber, you might think that’s happening because of the water aspect, but it’s actually not. Even if you dehydrated it – that would be very weird – it would still have that cooling aspect. And that is the same kind of thing – it’s not exactly the same chemistry – that you are getting from these pure bitters.

Ryn (01:22:05):
If you work with pure bitters like that, that’s the place where you need to be more cautious about the constitution of the person you recommend them to. You can have somebody, and they have some indigestion, and some bloating, and so on. And you’re like all right, any bitter is going to just move stuff along in your GI tract, and that’s going to be great. And if you give them these pure bitters, that will happen. The digestive issues will be relieved. But if they already had cold hands and feet, and they shivered a lot, and they always were wearing scarves and that kind of thing. You could push them even colder. Or you could take a neutral body and make it cold if they were to work with these plants in isolation. It’s easy to formulate around this problem. It’s easy to say well, you’re a cold person. I really want to give you centaury though because I want to get that stomachic effect. I want to build you an iron stomach. So, I’m just going to mix your centaury 50/50 with ginger. And that’s the thing you’re going to take before your meals and so on.

Katja (01:23:02):
I think actually you’re even a great example of that. Because at the time that you did herb of the month with centaury, you had a lot of extra fluid just because of what you’d been eating. But if you were to do straight centaury for a month now, that would be extremely uncomfortable. I don’t think you would make it through the month. Because in general, you do tend towards… Well, not tend towards dry, you are solidly dry.

Ryn (01:23:27):
I’ve also really changed my workout habits. Because at that time I was doing kind of high intensity exercise every night close to bedtime.

Katja (01:23:35):
For hours. For hours and hours.

Ryn (01:23:36):
And so I did have more heat in my makeup at the time. Now my heat’s a little more spread out through the week. So yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

Katja (01:23:46):
Yeah. So, at that time. So, like, even though…

Ryn (01:23:49):
If I took it now, it would be like centaury with fennel.

Katja (01:23:52):
Yes, yes, yes. And possibly a little ginger in there too. But yeah, so thinking about even though Ryn’s constitution is dry and cold and always has been. At that time, a drying, cooling herb actually made sense because there was too much extra fluid from food sensitivities going on, and a lot of extra heat because of really over-training actually.

Ryn (01:24:24):
It was, yeah. You could tell it because I kept spraining my ankles.

Katja (01:24:28):
Yeah. So, just recognizing that we don’t always say oh, that’s a cold, dry person. We’re never working with centaury at all. Well, okay, we can formulate. But even sometimes a cold, dry person is out of their cold dryness, and so that might be appropriate.

Ryn (01:24:51):
That’s that current state idea we can bring forward. Yeah, right. So, those are bitters where you want to exemplify to somebody what does bitter taste like? Let me give you my blessed thistle tincture.

Katja (01:25:03):
All of the bitter.

Ryn (01:25:04):
You’ll know, right?

Katja (01:25:05):
This is just a bottle of bitter. There’s nothing else in here.

Mild & Aromatic Bitters

Ryn (01:25:09):
But in contrast, I think it’s worth talking about mild bitters. Talking about bitter plants that are not super intense. And for me, chamomile comes to mind first. That is a complex plant. It has a lot of aromatics to it, a touch of sweetness. But the amount of bitter in chamomile is mild, right?

Katja (01:25:27):
But real. It’s mild but real. It’s not like oh, I don’t know. There’s only a tiny bit in here. No, there’s a legitimate amount of bitter, it’s just not super, super unpleasant or intense.

Ryn (01:25:41):
It’s easier to taste in a tincture. And it’s much easier to taste in a long infusion tea than a short infusion one. When people take a tea bag of chamomile and steep it five minutes, then they mainly get a sweet, aromatic, floral kind of a beverage. When you take a lot of chamomile, and brew it strong, and brew it covered, and let it steep for 30 or 40 minutes, then you taste it, and the bitter is unmistakable. This is also much more effective for digestive or menstrual cramps or a lot of other things that we turn to chamomile for.

Katja (01:26:12):
Yeah, You really do need it that strong. Yeah.

Ryn (01:26:14):
Yeah, right. But it is a really nice herb to introduce that bitterness to people. And you can do it gradually. You can be like okay, today you’re going to steep your chamomile tea for seven minutes. And tomorrow or two days from now it’s going to be eight minutes. And you’re going to gradually increase the amount of bitter you experience through chamomile infusions. Sure. There’s a couple other mild bitters I think worth mentioning. And I’m going to mention betony, Stachys officinalis I mean, and also skullcap. And those two herbs are probably holding hands in your mind, I hope because they are… Aren’t they really nice, relaxant nervines? Aren’t they very good herbs for people who are calm, and anxious, and have a restless mind?

Katja (01:26:59):
No, not calm. They’re anxious, but they’re not calm.

Ryn (01:27:02):
They’re not calm. They’re, yeah. What did I… Okay.

Katja (01:27:05):
You want them to be calm.

Ryn (01:27:06):
We want them to be calm.

Katja (01:27:07):
You want that for them.

Ryn (01:27:09):
Yeah. The betony was already working on me, yeah. And we like to point out the bitter element in many of our most effective nervine plants. We like to draw that connection to that embodying, that presencing activity of bitters. Whether we phrase that as taking you into the moment or bringing you out of your worries and your regrets and so on.

Katja (01:27:38):
Getting you out of your head and into your body.

Ryn (01:27:42):
Right. Parasympathetic activity again, rest and digest activity again.

Katja (01:27:46):
Grounding is another word you might say there. All of this is that movement downward, and it’s driven by that bitter aspect.

Ryn (01:28:03):
So again, mild bitters can be really, really helpful, and especially if you think of it not as a one-time solution. And that’s how these herbs work best. Nervines, many categories of herbs work best when you take them consistently. But yeah, reaching through digestion into emotion. Yeah, that’s something that these plants can really do well. All right. And then there’s aromatic bitters, and yeah, chamomile goes into this group. And aromatic is one of those flavor slash scent words that is very open-ended. And we could give every one of them more adjectives alongside.

Katja (01:28:43):
Right. You could think of the word aromatic is completely agnostic. If it smells, it doesn’t matter what it smells like. If you can smell it, it’s aromatic. If it has also that flavor of smell. You know, like if you’re thinking about oregano, the flavor of oregano and the smell. You can’t really divide them. But there are things like centaury. It doesn’t really have a smell, but the flavor is super present, right? So, aromatic is anything that has that smell, and the smell is often also an integral part of the flavor itself.

Ryn (01:29:26):
Yeah. So, aromatic bitters include chamomile, but also sage and citrus peels, coffee, cacao. And with these, the thing to keep in mind is that you’re layering on the bitter effects and the aromatic effects, and these two go together really nicely, right? Because aromatic effects, if we just stay with the two kind of major systems we’ve been looking at today, digestive and nervous, aromatics also operate on both of those every single time you work with them. Generally they’re either like stimulating or releasing tension in the digestive system. And actually the same kind of thing in the nervous system: stimulating and releasing tension, moving things around, stirring things up, releasing barriers that are holding things stuck in place. And it’s very frequently the case that getting both the aromatic and the bitter influence together is really valuable. And these herbs let you do that in one shot. You don’t really need to formulate to make it happen. Yeah, that’s handy.

Katja (01:30:33):
And my brain is just sitting here, just popcorn listing off. Like oh, but what about that one? What about that one? Yeah, there’s many more herbs in these categories. We just want to have a couple here for you to get the idea of the flavor, get the idea of the action.

Ryn (01:30:50):
Yeah. Kind of a subset of aromatic would be floral, right? And there I’m thinking about rose and lavender especially. Because these are ones where sometimes people make a cup of tea out of them. And then they make a little frown, a little devastated face. Because they smelled it, and it was oh, rose, lavender. Yes, ah. And then they sip it, and they’re like what happened? Why is this bitter?

Katja (01:31:20):
It is so bitter.

Ryn (01:31:21):
What have I done, you know?

Katja (01:31:22):
What have I done? And even what did I do wrong? Like somehow it was your fault. No, no, no. These plants are bitter. They’re bitter. And that’s not bad.

Ryn (01:31:32):
No. I kind of like that actually with rose in particular. It’s not the same thing as the thorns on the rose. But it’s a different way of rose being like I’m not what your hallmark cards have pretended I was.

Katja (01:31:46):
Yeah.

Bitter Roots & Inulin

Ryn (01:31:48):
So, I appreciate that quite a lot. Okay, listen. Some of the most fundamental bitters in western herbalism are the ones that are roots. And we, I myself anyway, think of these sometimes as the inulin plants. And that’s a little reductive, and I apologize to the plants. But I’m talking about dandelion, burdock, chicory, yellow dock. The reason I get to it through inulin is because that’s adding onto the bitter element in those herbs a very important set of digestive actions, right? Inulin, if you’re not familiar, is a prebiotic fiber. It is the favorite food of some of your favorite gut flora. The ones that are best to you, the ones that help you the most. And so with these plants – dandelion, burdock, chicory, yellow dock – they have bitter that’s doing all these digestive actions we’ve discussed so far today. And they add on this inulin element of feeding your friends, which is going to chase away your enemies. And this is a super critical thing whenever we’re trying to adjust gut flora. You can’t adjust gut flora just by taking probiotic capsules. It won’t work. Even if it works while you’re taking the course of them, it won’t last.

Katja (01:33:12):
It won’t last. Right.

Ryn (01:33:14):
They’re transient. They move through you. In order to get them to stick, you’ve got to feed them. It’s like the birds coming through your yard. If you want them to hang around, you have to put food out. And you can’t just do it once.

Katja (01:33:26):
You’ve got to keep doing it.

Ryn (01:33:27):
You’ve got to do it every day. Yeah..

Katja (01:33:30):
Two things here. We need to add elecampane to this list.

Ryn (01:33:34):
Thank you. Because it’s Inula.

Katja (01:33:35):
It’s Inula. Yeah.

Ryn (01:33:36):
It’s where the inulin came from, right?

Katja (01:33:38):
Yeah. But it is a much more complex flavor than the rest of the herbs listed there. Okay. So, that’s one thing. And then the other thing is that if you’re like oh, that’s fantastic. Then I’m just going to take this dandelion tincture that I bought. And it’s crystal clear, and I can see through it. And I’m getting the bitter, and I’m getting inulin. And this is going to be great. No, you’re not. So, just because dandelion has inulin in it doesn’t mean that you are getting any of it, unless you actually are getting it. So, if you’re taking a clarified tincture, there’s no inulin in there. Inulin is cloudy, and white, and not soluble. So, if you can’t see it, it’s not there. And even if you take it in a tincture, you’re getting such a tiny amount of it. So, if you want the inulin, you need to eat the roots, like really eat them. Or put them in the broth and then do not strain the broth. You’ve got to eat that gritty, powdery stuff at the bottom. And it’s also not in the leaves. So, if you are taking the leaves, and you’re like ooh, not just kidney health but also inulin. It’s in the roots.

Ryn (01:34:59):
Yeah. If you make a decoction, and it gets cloudy. Or some people say milky, but I like cloudy better. Then that has inulin content, and that’ll feed it to your system too. But really the best way is to eat them. And maybe burdock’s the easiest one because you can often find it in a grocery store. And it’s a little easier to chew than the others, yeah.

Katja (01:35:19):
Yeah. And it has a little milder flavor.

Ryn (01:35:22):
Yeah. I mean, there’s food items that have a lot of inulin content. The sunchoke, or some people call it Jerusalem artichoke, that’s a food item with a ton of inulin content to it.

Katja (01:35:33):
But you feel it too. When you eat those, you feel the feeding frenzy in your guts.

Ryn (01:35:41):
The thing about those is they don’t have much bitter taste to them, especially the ones that have been cultivated for longer.

Katja (01:35:48):
Yes. Right.

Ryn (01:35:49):
Like we were saying before. And so they won’t… They’re not exactly the same as getting your dandelion decoctions, or eating your burdock root snacks, or things like that. Yeah, that’s real. Okay.

Katja (01:36:03):
Yeah. And just remember inulin is a really good poster herb for that concept. Because people often are like oh, well, I took my this, or I took my that, and it’s got this action. Well, it might have that action. In theory it has that action. But it’s not necessarily going to have that action in every extraction method. And it’s not necessarily going to have that action in every location of the body. So, you’ve got to know that what you want from the plant is present in the way you are consuming the plant.

Ryn (01:36:40):
Yeah. And it’s also worth noting and emphasizing again, that inulin is not the only thing in these plants. And when we take them as food, or when we take a decoction of them, or things like that, then we’re getting more than just the inulin. And I think that matters, especially because inulin is added as an ingredient to a lot of processed foods. And there have been some studies that have looked at processed foods or isolated inulin as some kind of a supplement having occasional negative effects on the system. And when we looked at those studies, we were like okay, that’s interesting. But it doesn’t scare me away from dandelion, and it doesn’t scare me away from burdock or things like that. Because inulin as a hyper-processed food object ingredient is probably not equivalent to inulin as a constituent of the herbs we work with. This is just a story we’ve seen turn out over and over again with a lot of different constituents in plants. So, that’s what we expect there.

Katja (01:37:42):
Yes.

Ryn (01:37:43):
Kind of similar to carrageenan from Irish Moss and other seaweeds.

Katja (01:37:48):
Yeah. Some people have a lot of sensitivity to that. Because you can’t take something, and isolate it, and concentrate it, and then put that isolated concentrated thing into some food. It’s not the same as the original thing that it was in. It’s in such a high proportion that you would not normally be exposed to naturally. So, if you wanted to eat that much inulin as what they put into these snack foods or whatever, you would need to eat a whole pile of Jerusalem artichokes. And you would stop because you would be like I’m really full of these things. I’m not going to eat anymore of this. But you don’t have that option when it’s a snack food that’s like hey, we’re high in fiber. We’ve got inulin. And you’re getting a super unnatural quantity of inulin just so that they can write fiber on the label. Or because inulin is trendy right now, and they can put that on the label. Yeah.

Ryn (01:38:50):
I think the biggest offenders here are situations where they’re adding these ingredients – inulin, or carrageenan, or whatever – to liquids as thickeners to an alternative nut milk substance or something like that or a creamer. I think those are the ones where they tend to bother people the most. And it’s really just flooding you. There’s not other fiber and solid matter to distribute it with.

Katja (01:39:16):
Right, right, right.

Airy & Earthy Bitters

Ryn (01:39:17):
Yeah. It’s just coming like that. All right. There’s at least a couple of plants that whenever I think of them, I’m always right on that line between your liver and your nerves or more broadly digestion and emotion. And the two I’m thinking of here are yarrow and St. John’s wort. And if you taste them, taste them side by side, they have a really similar degree of bitterness to them. In terms of your liver, they have a similar degree of activation. But the nice thing about yarrow is that it doesn’t have that specific effect, which St. John’s wort has, on those specific enzymes in the liver that are responsible for a lot of drug metabolism. So, St. John’s wort can interact, or better said, alter the way your body metabolizes a lot of pharmaceuticals because it upregulates the production of a particular enzyme that that does a lot of that work. And so because of that, there’s many, many situations where someone is taking this drug, or that drug, or six drugs, and we don’t want to give them any St. John’s wort. But we do still want to give them a liver remedy. We do still want to give them a bitter herb. We do still want to give them, and this is where I especially come to yarrow, something that has that gut-brain intersection. And I feel like yarrow is the best next choice when St. John’s wort is off the table for that reason.

Katja (01:40:51):
Yeah. I would also… I might also put chamomile in that category.

Ryn (01:41:01):
Hmm.

Katja (01:41:02):
I would prefer yarrow, but I might put chamomile for somebody who found yarrow too bitter, and they weren’t able to do it. Because it doesn’t matter how great an herb is if a person can’t stomach it. If they can’t handle the flavor of it, and they’re just never going to take it, then it’s not going to do anything for them. And so I don’t want to say that chamomile is exactly like yarrow. But because both yarrow and St. John’s wort are moving further down the bitter spectrum and becoming more intensely bitter, I still find both of those quite pleasant. But I think that not every past me did. And so for that person, I think it’s worth putting chamomile in that.

Ryn (01:41:58):
Yeah. And you know, maybe not for everybody, but certainly for you, goldenrod can be here as well. Goldenrod for you is for when you’ve got too much water on the brain.

Katja (01:42:09):
Yeah. Which usually also is too much water in the trunk too.

Ryn (01:42:15):
The goldenrod and yarrow together, they have this quality of aromatic to them. Goldenrod leans a little more toward the floral side. But yarrow is in this group where I just can’t get away from they’re airy. They’re the air element…

Katja (01:42:31):
They really are. They really are.

Ryn (01:42:32):
In an aromatic terpenoid blend.

Katja (01:42:36):
And if you want to really push that, grow your own yarrow and harvest the flowers. When you purchase yarrow, it’s mostly leaf and stem. There’s a little flower content in there, but it’s mostly leaf and stem. If you really want to push this, you get only flowers. And it is a totally different experience. And especially if you don’t love the flavor of yarrow, I think if you try just the flowers, you will be really surprised. Because then you get so much more of the aromatic aspect, and you might be really surprised at how the flavor changes for you. And even yarrow and goldenrod together. In fact, when we’re done with this episode, that’s the tea I’m making. Yeah.

Ryn (01:43:19):
It’s good stuff.

Katja (01:43:23):
Just the flowers in both cases. You can work with the leaves, you can work with… It is very effective. There’s something amazing about the flowers of those two, blending them together. Yeah, just so good.

Ryn (01:43:39):
A breath of clean air.

Katja (01:43:41):
Yeah.

Ryn (01:43:42):
Nice. All right. Well, if we want to go in a more earthy direction, there’s some fungal bitters that are worth knowing and experimenting with. Reishi in particular is a very interesting flavor complex. It has an aromatic element to it, which is not the same as but close to what’s going on with coffee. Chaga is closer to coffee in that regard. And in the type of earth flavor it has.

Katja (01:44:09):
Do you think so? I would go the other direction. I would say reishi is closer. I think that Chaga is… Okay, well.

Ryn (01:44:15):
Okay. Wait, wait. Here we go. Chaga is closer to coffee on the bitter earthy side. Reishi is closer to coffee on the aromatic side.

Katja (01:44:23):
Maybe, but I think that chaga tastes better than coffee does. And it tastes better than reishi does, even though I have come to really appreciate the flavor of reishi. But still. And then of course we always just need to say that chaga is super trendy, and it’s not sustainable. So please just recognize that nobody actually… I know all the marketing is telling you that chaga will solve everything, and make you rich and happy, and all the whatever. Really nobody needs chaga. There’s nothing that chaga could do for you, that you could not get in other ways that are more sustainable.

Ryn (01:45:06):
We’re worried about over harvesting.

Katja (01:45:08):
It’s been happening. It’s been happening now for a long time. So, if you can’t get guaranteed sustainable chaga, then don’t. Just don’t. And so if you live in a more rural area…

Ryn (01:45:23):
You live in a birch forest.

Katja (01:45:25):
Yeah. The one way to have it sustainably – it still isn’t sustainable, but – is make friends with all the loggers around. Because they will cut down trees, and they know what chaga is. Don’t let them use their chainsaw to take it off. Have a clean axe or a hatchet that you only use for this purpose, so that you know it’s clean, and it’s not got bar oil in it and all that kind of stuff because you don’t want that on the chaga. But in that case, that chaga was going to die anyway because they cut down the tree. Now, cutting down the trees is not necessarily sustainable. But okay, whatever. There’s some complexity there., But regardless, it happened. And so that’s the chaga to work with. But not all and not most chaga on the market is that kind of situation. So, I feel like we just can’t ever say the word chaga without saying you don’t actually need it.

Ryn (01:46:28):
But what is worth saying though, about both reishi and chaga is that if you wanted a bitter, and an adaptogen, and an immunomodulator, well, you only need one herb.

Katja (01:46:41):
Yeah.

Ryn (01:46:43):
Those are some powerful, multifactorial categories of herbal activity, right? And here we have three of them layered into a single fungus. So, no wonder it is reishi, the mushroom of immortality.

Katja (01:46:57):
Yes. And reishi, really it’s the one to go to because you can cultivate reishi. It’s perfectly happy to do that. And it doesn’t lose its awesomeness for that reason. But you can’t cultivate chaga, so.

Bitters for Immunity & Sleep

Ryn (01:47:10):
Yeah. There’s tons of debate about whether all Ganoderma species qualify to be referred to as reishi. I’m mostly in the camp that says they’re not identical, but they’re all within the same ballpark. And so if you have Ganoderma applanatum or whatever where you live, go for it. Don’t feel oh, I’m getting third best reishi. Eh, it’s great. It loves you. You should love it. All right. So, that’s one way to influence immunity, right, through immunomodulatory effects of fungi like those friends. There’s other ways to influence immunity, and sometimes they come in a bitter package, like when we get boneset or calendula. Now calendula isn’t the most bitter one around. It’s more clear in a good strong tincture, especially a high-proof tincture. I know you don’t love them.

Katja (01:48:03):
No, But well, with calendula you do kind of need it. It’s true. I hate a high-proof alcohol tincture. But calendula has got that resin, and in order to get the resin, you really do need to bump up the alcohol percentage. But I will say that calendula is… If we’re comparing calendula and boneset regarding the bitter, calendula is like a 10th as bitter as boneset. Boneset is really…

Ryn (01:48:31):
It’s a strong bitter.

Katja (01:48:32):
Astoundingly bitter. Astoundingly bitter. But man, I just do not like the flavor of the way that calendula is bitter. It’s just so unappealing to me, which okay, you formulate around that. It’s fine. Yeah. And it’s funny to me that the boneset is actually less offensive even though, you know?

Ryn (01:48:54):
That’s true. That’s true. And listener, remember, you might feel differently, okay?

Katja (01:48:59):
Yes, yes, yes. I think this is maybe unusual. I think this is one of those places where I’m extra weird. Yeah.

Ryn (01:49:06):
But, you know, both boneset and calendula, we can call them immune stimulants. We can call them lymphatics because they do help to circulate that particular type of fluid in your body. And that’s critically important for good immune function, and surveillance, and clearance, right? So, super helpful there.

Katja (01:49:25):
Hold on. Immune stimulants?

Ryn (01:49:29):
Boneset for sure. Calendula, stimulant is maybe not the right word unless you allow your definition of stimulant to just include we’ve improved efficiency.

Katja (01:49:41):
I almost feel that way about boneset though too. If I think about immune stimulant, I’m thinking more about echinacea, although even there we have a little problem. But boneset, I think so much more about bone marrow and about immune cell production. Which okay, that is stimulating because we are stimulating the production of more cells. But I don’t think of that in exactly the same way as we usually think of something that we call an immune stimulant.

Ryn (01:50:17):
Which is often just reduced to it makes more white blood cells happen.

Katja (01:50:20):
Or it makes more inflammatory process. Because actually even to say immune stimulant is so much more complicated or complex than what it sounds like. But when you say immune stimulant, then the next thing that you almost are thinking is, do I have to worry about a cytokine storm? And I don’t… So, I would never think about that with boneset.

Ryn (01:50:43):
I mean, most herbal immune stimulants aren’t monotonic. They’re not only doing one thing in one direction forever, so.

Katja (01:50:52):
I’m with you. It definitely is stimulating. But it is not the kind of stimulating that makes me say oh, I have an autoimmune disorder. I can’t work with that.

Ryn (01:51:01):
Yeah. Yeah.

Katja (01:51:02):
I think that’s really the little thread or hair I wanted to split, whatever.

Ryn (01:51:08):
Yeah. Yeah. You know, an herb that… I guess it’s got some touch to the calendula. But looking for a bitter, looking for one with immune relevance here. And I think of myrrh. Because myrrh, it’s a resinous flavor. It’s not… It’s different from other types of bitter tastes, well, because the chemistry’s different.

Katja (01:51:32):
Yeah. I mean, because there’s also heat inherent.

Ryn (01:51:33):
Yeah, that’s true.

Katja (01:51:34):
Just because of the resin. But there’s heat inherent in angelica. There’s heat inherent in calamus.

Ryn (01:51:40):
Yeah.

Katja (01:51:42):
It’s not like a disqualifier.

Ryn (01:51:43):
Right. And myrrh is, I think, interesting because you can taste the bitterness in it. But it’s also not on anybody’s list of bitter digestive herbs, you know?

Katja (01:51:55):
Well, it is not… It is famously not so easy to get. I mean, okay, you can just order it at Mountain Rose herbs, but you know, it’s…

Ryn (01:52:03):
Special.

Katja (01:52:04):
It’s special, yeah.

Ryn (01:52:06):
Yeah. But good stuff.

Katja (01:52:08):
Yeah.

Ryn (01:52:09):
Okay. We’ve got some bitters that will put you to sleep. And for me that’s wild lettuce and hops,

Katja (01:52:17):
You know, many bitters will help you to sleep.

Ryn (01:52:20):
It’s true.

Katja (01:52:21):
Because of all the great things they can do. And some of them also have relaxing action, right? But most importantly, I guess, the most direct mechanism of action there would be shifting into that parasympathetic state. Okay. That’s not the same as wild lettuce and hops, which will make you sleep. There’s a difference there. There’s allow you to sleep versus command you to sleep.

Ryn (01:52:48):
Put you to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. It’s real. So, some of their chemistry is so sedative to the nerves and to the brain that we put it in the category of being hypnotic. Which is to say even if you were well-rested and in the middle of your day. You take a significant dose, a big enough dose of these, and you’ll need a nap soon.

Katja (01:53:09):
You’ll feel tired. Yeah.

Ryn (01:53:11):
Yeah, right.

Katja (01:53:13):
Both cold. I’m trying to think of a hypnotic herb that isn’t cold.

Ryn (01:53:20):
Yeah. I don’t know. That’d be a tricky one, right, because the cold there is slowing down, sedating, turning down the dial of activity. And that includes alertness in a sense, not just metabolic movement.

Katja (01:53:36):
Yeah. I think it’s always going to be the cold aspect there.

Berberine & Artemisinin Bitters

Ryn (01:53:41):
Yeah. Those ones too, we don’t often take them as bitters, straight up. Because they could make you sleepy, and we want you to take your bitters with all of your meals. But sometimes you could say all right, well if you can handle having more than one bitter blend. You can have your daytime and your evening time. You can take some hops and wild lettuce and some friends before dinner. Or if you’re going to have an after dinner snack, then definitely get you some bitters with that too. These would make sense there. There’s a couple of constituent-based categories I want to mention, and you probably won’t be surprised that one of them is the berberine herbs. We’ve touched on a couple of these as we go along. But remember, berberine and related, very similar bitter alkaloids are to be found in goldenseal, goldthread, Oregon grape, yellow root. algerita, the amur cork tree. There’s others. I feel like I’m leaving somebody big out, but you can let me know later on.

Katja (01:54:49):
Oh, barberry.

Ryn (01:54:51):
That’s the one. Thank you for that. Yeah, barberry. Yeah. So, the fact that they contain the berberine is partly, well, for some of them it’s due to a family relation. A lot of them are in a, a similar plant family or a grouping like that, but not all of them. But the production of the berberine, the yellow color to the tissues that are most saturated with it. That particular flavor of berberine where it’s not just bitter. To me it always comes across with a metallic tinge.

Katja (01:55:29):
There’s something super specific about that flavor. It is the berberine flavor. It is. Yeah.

Ryn (01:55:35):
It’s worth learning in your mouth, in your senses. And the way to do that is to get as many of these as you can and line them up next to each other. Taste your goldenseal, taste your barberry, taste your Oregon grape root. And they are different from each other. They’re not exactly the same flavor. But there’s a consistency, and it’s the berberine. And you can start to identify it and be able to recognize it in the future. Yeah.

Katja (01:56:02):
It’s worth noting there that goldenseal and goldthread in this list are at risk or endangered, depending on what state you’re in. But barberry is really abundant.

Ryn (01:56:17):
Yeah. Where we are, Japanese barberry is considered invasive.

Katja (01:56:21):
So, yeah. Choose your berberine plants wisely. And depend on your other bitters. Berberine is so trendy right now, but it doesn’t have to be berberine.

Ryn (01:56:35):
Yeah, remember that for the old-school antimicrobial effects of berberine and its plants, and for the new round of blood sugar regulating effects. That for these plants themselves, it’s never been only the berberine. And it’s not that still when it comes to the blood sugar impacts. So, like we said before, choose your herbs for people based on the totality of that person, and their needs, and their symptoms, or conditions, or whatever. Not just on this herb has this chemistry in it, right? Get broader than that. It’ll be more helpful to everybody really. But they’re cool plants. They’re very potent and really good to have a blend. Remember, it’s better to have a blend in a first aid kit, or a go bag, or something like that. And then kind of similar, artemisinin containing plants. So, we also mentioned these earlier, but that’s mugwort wormwood, sweet annie, and other Artemesia species contain artemisinin. It gives them a bunch of their bitterness. Also famously a very potent antimicrobial, including against the malaria. The malaria, yeah.

Katja (01:57:49):
The malaria. It rolls off the tongue.

Ryn (01:57:53):
Yep. Yeah. These, they are cooling in nature. They increase in their cooling nature with the potency of their artemisinin content. So, mugwort’s kind of moderate, sweet annie a little more so, wormwood very powerful in both regards. Yeah. Okay.

Katja (01:58:16):
I’m pretty excited about the next three. I’ve been really waiting for them.

Relaxant, Warming, & Moistening Bitters

Ryn (01:58:19):
Yeah, right? This is because we get to energetics, right? So, like we said earlier, it, there’s not universals with bitters because the plants are complex. They have many chemistries. They have mixed qualities a lot of the time. But there is that tendency towards bitter plants to be cooling, drying, tonifying maybe more often than not. So, let’s look at the reverse of that. Let’s look at relaxant bitters. And here the motherwort and the vervain stand out to me as my first thought. If I want a bitter plant, and I want to relax somebody, those are the ones I’m going to be reaching for before my brain has fully processed what I’m doing.

Katja (01:58:59):
For me it’s the vervain and the calamus. Those two are the two that pop right to my head. Motherwort is an amazing plant. But I work with that in pretty specific ways. And blue vervain and calamus, a little bit more broadly. But also these are certainly not the only ones we could put in this category, but…

Ryn (01:59:22):
Yeah. I mean, even chamomile, betony, skullcap, those have relaxant aspects to them.

Katja (01:59:27):
Yeah. Passionflower could fit in there. California poppy could. Yeah. I mean, it will go a little further towards sedative, but that’s fine. But the thing here is that when you say the word relaxant, that might get you in a little bit of a pickle. Because calamus also has stimulating action. Motherwort has some stimulating action too. And so you might be like oh, I don’t know if I can put those. How can those both exist? They can. But it might be helpful also to think in terms of antispasmodic. Sometimes I find the word relaxant to seem a little passive when I think about it. And so that’s not necessarily bad. I’m trying to think of an herb that I think of as relaxant. Just relaxant. Lavender would fall in that category to me. Relaxant, but not really antispasmodic. And I feel like that antispasmodic part is really important. Because especially when we’re thinking about motherwort, blue vervain, and calamus. But also chamomile would fit here. Also betony, but that’s a little bit more metaphorical. It’s that it’s relaxing specifically something that is spasming. Something that is overtightening, or that is white knuckling, or that is stuck in this threat space. And to say oh, it relaxes you out of fight or flight. Well, that’s not inaccurate. But it doesn’t feel as active to me as these plants actually are. Relaxant feels like it’s pleasant. Antispasmodic feels like it’s doing the work. And that might not be true for everybody, but that’s how it feels to me. That relaxant is like hmm, might be nice to have a little damiana and relax a little bit. But calamus is like I’m kind of freaking out. I can’t. Nothing’s working right in my body. I feel nauseous and hungry. I don’t even know. I can’t think about one thing at the same time. I can’t stop worrying about stuff that I can’t control, whatever. That’s when I’m like ah, I need some calamus right now. I need some blue vervain right now. Or I’m having a little bit of a panic attack. It’s time for some motherwort. I feel like it’s… The word.

Ryn (02:02:25):
Stronger, stronger.

Katja (02:02:26):
Yeah. The word relaxant is accurate. But it doesn’t have the power behind it in our cultural use of the word that I want it to have to describe these plants.

Ryn (02:02:37):
Yeah. You could say that these herbs, their bitterness isn’t mixed up with some astringent elements or some tonifying elements, right? They’re devoting that activity of releasing tension without it being kind of blended with something else that’s squeezing, or tightening, or doing things like this.

Katja (02:03:07):
It’s not mitigated.

Ryn (02:03:09):
Yeah. That’s what. So, those are very helpful friends. And I mean, honestly, if we think about what plants we find ourselves recommending or suggesting people experiment with most often, the bitter relaxant mints, they’re up there. They’re very, very helpful for modern humans with all of our stresses, and anxieties, and tension inducing habits, and so on. Yeah. So, good friends to learn. We also find it super helpful for people to learn warming bitters, and to be able to offer warming bitters, and share them with our friends and clients. Because remember, like the classic idea of bitter includes that coldness, which is both anti-inflammatory effects. But also with a pure bitter, it’s just that direct refrigerant quality that the plant can have.

Katja (02:03:58):
But some people’s digestion is already so sluggish and so cold that they can’t handle extra cold. Too much cold. They’re already…Yeah. So, in order to fix the digestive issues, yes, they need some bitter aspects because they’re lacking that. But they’re also lacking the warming influences in their life of movement and activity in different climates, like different temperatures. And our indoor and sedentary monoculture, which some people have more active jobs and whatever, but most people are indoor and sedentary most of the time. And so here it is, these problems are due to a lack of the bitters, but also the lack of all the things that you’re lacking when you are indoors and sedentary most of the time. And so you need some fire to get in there because you’re not getting that otherwise.

Ryn (02:04:59):
Yeah. Not getting those exposures, right? So, warming bitters: calamus, angelica, elecampane, and don’t forget turmeric, which I often do when I’m thinking of warming bitters for some reason. Calamus, angelica, they come right together. Oh yeah, elecampane. But yeah, turmeric, don’t forget. And that’s a good way to differentiate turmeric from ginger, by the way. They’re in the same family. They’re very closely related. They share a lot of chemistry. But by impression, by our senses, there’s a big difference between turmeric and ginger. It’s that bitter element that makes turmeric more drying than ginger. It makes turmeric I consider it tonifying, whereas I think of ginger as relaxant.

Katja (02:05:41):
I think that too. Yes.

Ryn (02:05:43):
So, it’s a significant difference between them. And the flavor is an indicator for that going on. Yeah. The warming bitters are nice because well, they’re already formulated, right? It’s bitter with pungency. And so like we said before, if you have centaury and ginger, that’s kind of similar to what calamus is. But calamus is its own thing, right? Angelica is its own thing. And you might think of these and be like all right. I have warming bitter. And then I say all right, I really need an extra brain affinity, calamus. I need extra pelvic affinity, angelica. I need extra digestive affinity, elecampane, okay. Or turmeric, yeah. And that’s the way we get from the cloud of every possible herb to this is the one I want to hand you. All right. And then last, but by no means least, moistening bitters. Yes, they do exist.

Katja (02:06:44):
They do exist.

Ryn (02:06:47):
Right? Like I said before, the bitter influence has that drying effect because of the movement and the draining of fluids. But some plants can be bitter and also demulcent at the same time. It’s allowed, because it’s nature. It’s biology. Everything that can occur will.

Katja (02:07:02):
Yes. Including squares. Squares exist in nature.

Ryn (02:07:05):
Yeah. So, evening primroses is a mild bitter, but it’s there. It’s a really interesting flavor, especially fresh off the plant. You chew a leaf, and you get some pungency. You get some bitterness. You get some demulcent slime going on. One of my personal favorites because those three energetic qualities track with my needs really nicely. I could just drink evening primrose tea all day, and that would probably suit me just fine. Yeah. So, I really love that one. And it has some excellent nervine qualities to it as well, which you might expect based on that description. Yeah.

Katja (02:07:41):
And then Iceland moss.

Ryn (02:07:44):
Not a moss. It’s a lichen, right? It’s weird too though. It’s weird in many ways. It’s weird as a lichen that has demulcent qualities. That’s not normal, right? You don’t get that with usnea. No way.

Katja (02:08:01):
Yeah. That’s about as drying as you can be. Yeah. And I’ve got to say, Iceland moss is not delicious. Definitely not delicious, but super effective. And if you put enough ginger in there, anything is delicious. Cinnamon, you know.

Ryn (02:08:20):
We had that one time somebody made an Iceland moss pudding gruel thing with cinnamon and raisins and stuff. Tolerable.

Katja (02:08:27):
It was okay. A little honey, yeah.

Ryn (02:08:32):
Yeah. So look, again, these are just some categories that we listed out today when we sat down to, to write up the plan for this.

Katja (02:08:40):
It’s definitive. It’s not exhaustive.

How to Take Bitters

Ryn (02:08:43):
And we want you to be thinking like oh, I could add this one to that category. Oh, here’s another category of bitters for me to put into my schema of the world. Because that’s what you need in order to pick things, and be specific, and be targeted to the needs. Yeah. All right. So, how do you take bitters?

Katja (02:09:06):
Right. We’ve got all these bitters now. Let’s get ’em into you. Yeah.

Ryn (02:09:11):
So, one option is to take them straight up. And you can have a tincture or some other liquid extract of your bitter herbs and take them right on the tongue. Just like that. You can make bitter tea. You don’t have to be a weirdo who’s trying to impress his new herbalist girlfriend and drinks quarts of centaury all day.

Katja (02:09:33):
It was very impressive, y’all. It really was very impressive.

Ryn (02:09:38):
It worked. But you can make tea of a bitter plant. You can drink it. You don’t have to take enormous amounts. You could have a tiny teacup before your meals. That’s totally effective.

Katja (02:09:49):
You know, it’s great to learn the flavors by themselves. But it is better if you will actually do it. So, you always can toss a little ginger in there. Putting honey in or some sweetener does not always work. But putting a strong flavor often does, whether that is a strong, pungent kind of flavor or a heating kind of flavor like ginger or a cinnamon.

Ryn (02:10:21):
I find the sweet herbs do a better job than just a straight sweet like sugar. Like if you put fennel together with a bitter herb, it softens it.

Katja (02:10:30):
Yeah. That’s much better.

Ryn (02:10:31):
Significantly.

Katja (02:10:32):
Yeah. Or then the other thing is sour. If you put orange peel in with something or some of the berries in with something that’s bitter. For example, with reishi by itself, pretty bitter. But if you put it in with a little bit of cacao nibs and a bunch of hawthorn berries. Suddenly it’s like oh, this is actually not bad at all.

Ryn (02:10:59):
Yeah. For some bitter plants in particular, you can just take them and chew them straight. Calamus is the foremost in my mind for that. You can have little pieces or slices of calamus and just chew on them. Excellent way to take it. Yeah, very effective and very good.

Katja (02:11:17):
You could do that with dandelion and burdock too. And you know, just eat it afterwards. Because then you’re getting the bitterness. You’re slowly releasing all of the constituents of the plant. And then when you swallow it, you’re also getting all of that fiber.

Ryn (02:11:35):
Yeah, nice. You can of course make a digestive bitter formula for yourself. And generally when that happens, you’re combining your bitter herb with something carminative because our goal is digestion, right? So, carminative is the other major action of herbs in terms of basic digestive support.

Katja (02:11:54):
It takes a lot of heat to break down food, which is part of why cooking is actually so awesome. Because it predigests a lot of your food for you. And that reduces the amount of heating energy that your body requires. You’re not starting from zero, is what I’m saying. It’s like you’re starting with the oven preheated. Yeah. But so right, so those carminative herbs are also bringing more heat in. And especially if you run cold, and you tend to have sluggish digestion, bringing any extra heat in that you can is going to really improve the whole system.

Ryn (02:12:32):
Yeah. And then like you said, you can add other herbs for complimentary flavors to make it appealing, to make it work well. Or just for the theme, like this one here is actually a formula. It’s labeled evergreen, not so bitters.

Katja (02:12:48):
Because I thought that blend wasn’t really as bitter as it could have been.

Ryn (02:12:52):
Yeah. The amount of bitter we put in there probably could have been bumped up. But this was pine, and some hemlock, and a few other evergreen herbs tinctured in there together with it.

Katja (02:13:02):
I mean it is bitter, but it’s just so piney that you don’t… It doesn’t…

Ryn (02:13:06):
It’s a balsamic flavor. So, honestly it’s hard to think of a flavor profile or a flavor creation that you couldn’t tack a little bitter onto if you wanted to. And the other way to say that is the options for making a digestive bitters blend or a cocktail bitters blend are really broad. And sometimes if you see a preparation or a recipe, and you’re like that’s weird, try it. Because it might be awesome.

Katja (02:13:36):
It might be awesome.

Ryn (02:13:37):
It still may be weird. But after a while you’ll get used to it, and be like this is the best thing ever. Yeah. That’s happened to us a bunch of times.

Katja (02:13:43):
You know, I think that both digestive bitters and cocktail bitters, which you don’t have to put cocktail bitters into alcohol. You can put them into tonic water or just any kind of fizzy water. You can put them in juice, they’re fun. And they’re bitter, so that’s great. But that’s a really fun place to experiment. Because you can’t screw it up. As long as the end result tastes bitter, you know it will work. And formulating can be a little intimidating, especially for folks who are new to herbalism and new to formulation. Because sometimes you think oh man, I’m going to make this blend, and it’s going to really help. And then you taste it, and it is so gross. And you’re like I don’t know how to make this taste good. But with digestive bitters or cocktail bitters, if it turns out to not taste good, no problem. Because it’s bitter, so it’s fine. So, you really can’t mess it up. You can make them taste super fun and interesting and even tasty. But if you miss, no problem. It’s still bitter. It’s still going to work.

Ryn (02:14:55):
Yeah. The classic approach to something like a cocktail bitter preparation is you get bitter, sour, pungent, and sweet all together in the same remedy.

Katja (02:15:05):
In different proportions by preference. Not necessarily there’s a book that will tell you the exact proportions. I mean, you can find a ton of different recipes for cocktail bitters, but…

Ryn (02:15:15):
Yeah. If you’re making a citrus bitters, you’re going to have more sour than anything. Obvious stuff like that, right? But having all of those tastes triggered at the same time dials down the severity of the bitterness and makes it more appealing. Yeah. But look, you can play around with this a lot. You can try bitter herbs infused into wine, or vinegar, or honey. Sure, go for it. Why not? You can take these herbs the way you take any of your herbs. And it is worth experimenting with that. We’ve made little bitter lozenges, like all kinds of stuff. That’s good to do.

Katja (02:15:51):
Especially, a lot of times people think well, because bitters normally the most common way to take bitters these days is a tincture. It’s just the most available thing.

Ryn (02:16:03):
Some of them have spray tops now. But that’s what it is inside.

Katja (02:16:06):
Yeah. It’s still alcohol. But a lot of people don’t work with alcohol. A lot of people have allergies, people are in sobriety, people for religious reasons, or just plain don’t like it. It doesn’t feel good to them. And there’s no need for alcohol to get your bitters. Like yeah, make little bitter lozenges, like pastilles, whatever, you know?

Ryn (02:16:27):
Totally. Yeah.

Katja (02:16:29):
You can make so many different things bitter. You could make bitter cookies. Like why not?

Ryn (02:16:35):
Yeah. And don’t forget your salads.

Katja (02:16:38):
Yes. Bitter hot cocoa. All different, super interesting things that you could do. So, don’t limit yourself. Yeah.

Ryn (02:16:51):
If you need more inspiration, and you’re a student in our courses or will be soon. I just want to briefly mention that we cover bitters many places and many times because as we’ve…

Katja (02:17:02):
They’re so important.

Ryn (02:17:03):
Tried to lay out here, they’re multifactorial. So, in our Materia Medica course, we have full profiles on the following bitter plants: centaury, burdock, dandelion, angelica, calamus, yellow dock, mugwort, reishi, motherwort, turmeric, St. John’s wort, boneset, wild lettuce, blue vervain, hops, coffee, and cacao.

Katja (02:17:27):
Wait. And also chamomile.

Ryn (02:17:28):
Oh yes, chamomile.

Katja (02:17:30):
And calendula.

Ryn (02:17:31):
Calendula.

Katja (02:17:32):
And I think there’s more than that. Did you say yarrow, because we have one on yarrow.

Ryn (02:17:35):
I didn’t mention yarrow. Yeah, okay.

Katja (02:17:36):
Yeah, okay. So, there’s more. There’s even more than those.

Ryn (02:17:39):
So that’s at least 20 herbs out of 90.

Katja (02:17:41):
You say elecampane?

Ryn (02:17:43):
I’m not sure we have a… Oh, we do.

Katja (02:17:44):
We do. We do. We do. Yeah. So, there’s a lot is what we’re saying.

Ryn (02:17:48):
Yeah. and it’s also worth noting that of the 90 herbs that we cover in detail in that course, like 20 or 21 or so of them have bitterness as a significant part of their flavor profile. So again, let that be another reminder of the importance of this group. Okay, so that’s Materia Medica. In our Medicine Making course, we do have a whole chapter on cocktail bitters, and how to put them together, and a bunch of recipe examples, and things like that. Of course, bitters are featured prominently in the Nutrition course and the Digestion course. We talk about the phytochemistry underlying the bitter flavor in the Phytochemistry course. Big surprise. And there’s multiple mentions, multiple times we come back to bitterness as a flavor, but also a concept in the Neurological and Emotional Health course. Yeah.

Katja (02:18:42):
And probably, honestly, it probably shows up at least once or probably more than that in every other course. I can think of multiple mentions in the First Aid course. And you might be like bitters in first aid? Oh yeah. So, yeah. I think probably maybe not in Musculoskeletal. That might be the only one. Maybe not in Integumentary.

Ryn (02:19:06):
Maybe

Katja (02:19:07):
Because those are primarily topical, and you don’t taste it if it’s topical.

Ryn (02:19:11):
There are bitter herbs we work with there…

Katja (02:19:12):
There are bitter herbs in there.

Ryn (02:19:14):
But not because the bitter. Okay, yeah. Well, as a reminder, if you want to study with us, we would love to have you join us. When you learn at Commonwealth Holistic Herbalism, you get courses primarily made up of self-paced video lessons so that you can take them at your own pace and learn on your own schedule. You get access to twice weekly or more live Q&A sessions by Zoom with us.

Katja (02:19:40):
So, the reason that we do this is that everybody learns best at different times of the day. Everybody has different schedules that work for them. And so the bulk of the material you can do anytime that works for you. If you learn best in the morning. If you learn best late at night. If you learn when your kid is taking a nap, like whatever.

Ryn (02:20:02):
On your commute, you know?

Katja (02:20:03):
Yeah. But then we don’t want you to just be alone. Just like oh, I guess I’ve just got to work through this. And so that’s why we have these live Q&A sessions. They’re optional. They’re all recorded. You get all the recordings, but also all the history of recordings. There’s like 300 hours of recordings. Well, depending on when you listen to this, there’s probably many more of recorded Q&A sessions in there. And they have a global table of contents. And so the thing is that that opportunity to join live with the whole community, asking questions and seeing how other people are working through their content, working through their lessons. And how are they implementing this stuff, and how are they thinking about it? That helps you to think about how you’re thinking about this stuff, and how are you implementing it? And oh, they’re doing something cool. I’m going to try that too, you know? Yeah.

Ryn (02:20:59):
Yeah. What does your bitters blend look like? That kind of thing. And on top of that, there’s the student community. Which is kind of like a social media discussion space, but it’s not connected to Facebook or whatever else.

Katja (02:21:13):
Yeah, no, no. It’s totally private.

Ryn (02:21:14):
Yep. Private. But you can open it up on your phone, and you can scroll through. But now you’re scrolling through herbal learning, and herbal community, and discussion, and excitation rather than that other stuff. ,

Katja (02:21:26):
It’s awesome. Really, I feel so excited. There are people I talk to multiple times a day in the community. And there are people who just pop in once in a while. But I love getting to see what everybody’s working on. I love getting to know everybody better. And it’s just really fun.

Ryn (02:21:45):
As you’re working through the course material, if you have a question in the middle of a video, you click a button. It opens up an interface. You pop your question in. We answer it within 24 hours, and so you get to keep on moving.

Katja (02:21:57):
And not only that, but it will send you an email with the answer. So you don’t even have to go back and find it. You can. It’ll still be there. But also the answer will come directly to you, and you don’t have to do anything to get it. It will just magically appear in your inbox.

Ryn (02:22:14):
And of course, there’s study guides, and we’ve got quizzes, and we’ve got assignments for you at the end of each course. And that’s all great. And by the way, your access doesn’t evaporate. As long as there’s an internet and we’re on it, you will have access to your courses. And when we make updates in the future, you get those too. Yeah. So, we think it’s a pretty good deal. And you can find everything we offer at online.commonwealthherbs.com.

Katja (02:22:39):
Yeah.

Ryn (02:22:41):
All right. Well, I think we’re going to wrap up. So, have you taken your bitters yet today, my friends? Because if not, now is the time. Go get them.

Katja (02:22:50):
Yeah. I think we’ve been talking about it long enough. It’s time to go and get anything bitter that you’ve got to hand and get it in you.

Ryn (02:22:57):
And you’re ready to spread the good word about bitters. So, the next human you run into, just hand them something bitter and see how much they smile at you. And you might also want to share this episode with some friends.

Katja (02:23:09):
Yes. They might not smile about the bitters. But then you can be like no, no, just listen to this. You’ll understand.

Ryn (02:23:16):
Yeah. We’re going to correct the epidemic of bitter deficiency syndrome amongst our peoples. Let’s do that. All right. We’ll come back soon with another episode. So, until then take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Drink some tea.

Katja (02:23:31):
Drink some tea.

Ryn (02:23:32):
And take your bitters.

Katja (02:23:33):
Yes.

Ryn (02:23:34):
Bye everybody.

Katja (02:23:35):
Bye-Bye.