Podcast 244: Herbalists’ Views on the Top-Selling Herbs (Part 2): Apple Cider Vinegar, Cranberry

This episode continues our series covering the top-selling herbs in the United States. As we give you our thoughts about these popular herbal supplements, we’re hoping to help you break out of the box. These herbs are frequently pigeon-holed into very narrow ranges of application – the answers to the question “what is it good for?” are usually very limited! There’s more to say about them than their most effective selling points or marketing campaigns.

If you’re a practicing herbalist, you should be well-informed about the herbal supplements people take most frequently. You should know what’s popular, and why. You should know how to answer people’s questions about these herbs, how to sort hype from health, how to identify better alternatives, and which ones simply aren’t worth the money. This series is intended to help you do that!

If you’re new to herbalism – we’re glad that we get to help you form your initial opinion of these herbs. More broadly, though, this will serve as an introduction to marketing literacy in the realm of herbal supplements, as well as some good materia medica study.

In today’s episode we cover apple cider vinegar and cranberry supplements.

5. Apple Cider Vinegar – Malus spp.

• jim mcdonald’s Apple monograph
• Katja’s recipe for Paleo Apple Fritters

6. Cranberry – Vaccinium macrocarpon

• HHP 224: Herbs A-Z: Urtica & Vaccinium
• HHP 006: Dynamic Desk Work + Crazy for Cranberries (discussion of cranberry starts around 25:30)

Find the first episode of this series here: HHP 240: Herbalists’ Views on the Top-Selling Herbs (Part 1): Psyllium, Elderberry, Turmeric, Ashwagandha

Whether you’re a brand-new beginner or an herbalist with experience, it’s always helpful to study the herbs in depth! Our comprehensive presentation of herbal allies is in our Holistic Herbalism Materia Medica course. It includes detailed profiles of 100 medicinal herbs!

Like all our offerings, this self-paced online video course comes 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!

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Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

Episode Transcript

Ryn (00:14):
Hi, I’m Ryn, and I’m here at Commonwealth Holistic Herbalism in Boston, Massachusetts, and on the internet everywhere, thanks to the power of the podcast. Katja and I are sort of tag teaming podcast episodes today. So, I think we’re going to release them one or two days after each other. But if you didn’t check out the one that she just made, then you definitely should find that in the feed. Today, my topic is going to be a continuation of a series I started a few episodes back looking at the top selling herbs in commercial products, commercial supplements and continuing on today with a couple extra to continue that series. The idea with this series again was just that these are popular herbs. Lots of people are taking them, taking them in the form of these supplements. And they’re being advertised, and sold, and promoted usually along fairly narrow lines. So, we’re looking to do a couple things. One is just to make sure that you, the listener, is familiar with these herbs and familiar with the forms of supplements that are occurring out there in the marketplace and being most prevalent in what people are taking most often. And then it’s also to give you a bit of our perspective on those same plants and to try to broaden that a little bit. Because most frequently supplements that get popularized in this way, they get pigeonholed at the same time. And they get put into a box, and it’s a very specific box. You take this thing for that problem. And it’s quite limited, actually. So, our perspective is going to be a little bit broader. And I’m going to try and share that with you as we go along.

Ryn (01:45):
So, first I just want to remind everybody that I’m not a doctor. I’m an herbalist and a holistic health educator. So, the ideas discussed in this podcast do not constitute medical advice. No state or federal authority licenses herbalist in the United States. So, these discussions are for educational purposes. We want to remind you that good health doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. Good health doesn’t exist as some objective standard. It’s influenced by the individual’s needs, experiences, and goals. So, please keep in mind that I’m not attempting to present a single, dogmatic right way that you must adhere to. Everyone’s body is different. So, what I’m talking about may or may not apply directly to you. But I hope that it’ll give you some new information to think about and some ideas to research and experiment with even further. Finding your way to better health is both your right and your own personal responsibility. That doesn’t mean that 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’s discussed on the internet or prescribed by a physician, that’s always your choice to make.

#5: Apple Cider Vinegar & Blood Sugar Regulation

Ryn (02:49):
All right. So, continuing on talking about top-selling herbal supplements. And if you missed the first episode in this series, remember this is data derived from a market report. And it’s dealing with information from the year 2023 because that’s the most recent data we’ve got. So, that’s what we’re going to work with for now. We addressed the top four bestsellers in the prior episode, which was episode number 240 if you wanted to scroll back. And in that one we looked at psyllium, a species of Plantago, psyllium, elderberry, turmeric, and ashwagandha. Today, we’re going to continue on with numbers five and six on the list, and those are going to be apple cider vinegar, or apple, and cranberry. All right. So, some similarities in these two. Some crossovers for us to discuss. Let’s get started looking at apple cider vinegar. This is the way these supplements are labeled. Apple cider vinegar supplements, apple cider vinegar capsule or gummy, or of course the liquid itself. You can actually just go and buy apple cider vinegar, and you can take that supplement, supplementarily, supplementarily if you would like to. So, when you find yourself in a shop. And you look at a line of supplements, and you see that there’s an apple cider vinegar product. What you’re going to notice is that these are presented in the market as being for blood sugar regulation.

Ryn (04:23):
The thing about apple cider vinegar supplements is that they’ve been around for a while. And of course, apple cider vinegar itself has been around for a really, really long time. Humans discovered that particular result of a fermentation process a very, very long time ago in pre-history, if you want to call it that. But we didn’t actually really see apple cider vinegar supplements getting super popular until fairly recently. And if we look at the history data from the top sellers list, apple cider vinegar as an entity wasn’t really on that list for a bunch of years. The first several years that I was paying attention to this stuff, it wasn’t there. But it emerged several years back. And it kind of crept up and then leapt up the charts. And I think my impression here is that the biggest single factor in the increase in sales for apple cider vinegar supplements has been the development of gummies. People love gummies, a nice little sour gummy is kind of appealing. And you can take apple cider vinegar, and essentially what you’re doing is concentrating the acetic acid, right? That is the acid that’s inside apple cider vinegar. Apple cider vinegar is something like 3% or 5% acetic acid in the bottle. And the rest of it is just water, right? So, when they make an apple cider vinegar supplement, whether it’s in a gummy, or it’s in a capsule, they’ll take the apple cider vinegar. They will evaporate the water, retain the acetic acid. And there are some other plant acids, like malic acid is going to be in there as well, right? Malic, connected to Malus, the botanical name for apple, right? It’s all connected. But yeah, you will get just the concentrated plant acids, malic acid, acetic acid, et cetera. And those are going to have been separated from the H2O molecules, right, the water itself. That’s why you can have a gummy, and it can be equivalent to taking a dose that’s like a tablespoon, or a shot glass, or half a shot glass of apple cider vinegar as a liquid itself. All right. So, the development of those gummies increased the popularity for that one. Also, some other herbs, you know, I think I talked in the last episode in this series about ashwagandha gummies being extremely popular. That’s another one that seems to have gotten broader reach when that format became available. Yeah.

Ryn (06:53):
All right. So look, it is true that apple cider vinegar can improve blood sugar regulation. It is most effective at doing this when you take it close to the meal itself. So, rather than taking this on an empty stomach between meals in the day or taking this first thing when you wake up in the morning and not eating for a while, or other patterns of timing and dosage that we might recommend for this or that product. For apple cider vinegar itself, or supplements of apple cider vinegar as an extract, they’re most effective when you take it either together with the meal or just before the meal. Because really what we’re trying to do is alter your digestive processes a little bit. When you take a shot of apple cider vinegar before a meal, you are introducing a bunch of acid right into your stomach, and then you’re going to go and eat. So, part of the job here of the acids is to aid your digestion. To work alongside your stomach acid and enhance your digestion of your meal. Make sure it’s like the second step of breakdown. The first one is all happening in the mouth with chewing and saliva, right? Second step here in the stomach, trying to make sure that that process is going really, really well. So that everybody further down – you know, your small intestine, your large intestine – they’ve got an easy time of it from there. Then there are also some direct changes in the way your body’s going to handle and absorb sugars that result when you have consumed the acids just beforehand.

Ryn (08:20):
So, yes, these can be helpful. They’re not going to be revelatory. They’re not going to completely change somebody’s health status if all they do is incorporate a supplement of apple cider vinegar. You’re not going to take somebody from being a diabetic to making them have normal glycemia, totally healthy, totally quote-unquote normal blood sugar levels if all they do is take these. But in combination with some diet changes, maybe some reduction in refined carbohydrates, maybe some increase in protein. Other kinds of rational things we could do to improve the quality and the nutrient density of the diet. This can be a helpful thing to add on top of that, right? Again, like what we’re talking about with all these things is supplements. They are additional to the foundational changes that we might make in our baseline habits of eating, and moving, and sleeping, and dealing with stress, and all of that kind of thing. All right. So, that’s kind of again, the most popular reason people are taking these. When herbalists think about apple and we think about apple cider vinegar, well, those are two different things. And we’re going to talk all about apple in just a moment. But first, let’s stick with ACV, apple cider vinegar.

ACV as a Menstruum

Ryn (09:32):
So, herbalists are most familiar with this as a menstruum, as a liquid that we use to extract activity and chemistry from our plants so that we’ve got it in a form that we can do something helpful with, right? A simple example of an apple cider vinegar extract is fire cider. And fire cider may be something that you’re already familiar with. It may be something that you’ve prepared for yourself at home. Fire cider is a simple apple cider vinegar extract of pungent herbs like garlic, onion, ginger. You can throw turmeric in there if you like. A lot of people do these days. You can put horseradish for a nice pungent quality. You can throw cayenne into there to really add fire to it. And you can add other herbs as well to alter the flavor, make it a little more appealing. A lot of people like to add something with a citrus element. So, that could be citrus peels themselves. It could be something like lemongrass or lemon balm to get a little bit of that element into there. When we make our fire cider, we’ll often include sage, and rosemary, and things like that as well. But when you do that, you put the herbs and your items into a jar, cover them with apple cider vinegar. Let it soak, let it macerate for a period of time. And then go ahead and strain it out.

Ryn (10:56):
And now you have that liquid. You can take shots of it, you can take spoonfuls of it. And all those herbs are hot, and pungent, and warming. And they’re stimulating to blood circulation, to immune activation, respiratory defenses. And so this is a common thing people prepare to help get through cold-flu COVID season. Or anytime when you’re feeling like I’ve been exposed to a lot of germs. Like I traveled on the city bus, or I got on an airplane. And I’m going to take a little bit of this to kind of boost up my defenses and try to prevent the likelihood of getting ill. So, that’s one pretty well-known example of working with apple cider vinegar as a menstruum. But you can infuse lots of herbs into vinegar. And this is a nice menstruum to work with, particularly when there are limitations on alcohol, right? Somebody may have an allergy to alcohol, and they can’t consume any. Somebody may have a religious or personal reason for not consuming any alcohol at all. That can include a history of alcoholism, but there’s other reasons that people choose to do this. And so some folks are not going to want to take an herbal tincture made in alcohol. And instead we can prepare an extract into vinegar, and they can work with that. In general I will say that vinegar extracts don’t tend to be quite as potent as alcohol ones, but it does depend on which specific herb we’re talking about. And sometimes, depending on your purpose, we’re not here to maximize potency above all other things. Sometimes the fact that they’ll take it at all is a big win. And so that’s going to be our higher priority, right?

Ryn (12:35):
All right, now, apple cider vinegar itself does have some of its own actions or qualities, right? We can look at that substance the way we can look at any herb that we choose to work with. So, apple cider vinegar is energetically speaking cooling. And that might surprise you a little bit because the feeling of acid is often described as a burn. Or when you taste it in your mouth, it can feel like a, like a hot or like an irritating sensation. Here we’re looking past that initial moment of reaction, and going a little further in time, and seeing the result of, say, repeated applications. One really great way to see this is if you have a pimple, a nice red, irritated spot on your face, or right on the tip of your nose, or wherever else. You can take apple cider vinegar. And put a little bit on your fingertip and apply it right on that spot. And one application isn’t going to make it disappear, right? But if you do that repeatedly, say three to five times a day, or five to seven times a day, you should start to see a perceptible change. Maybe take some before and after photos after one day, two days, that kind of thing. You should see that change. And what you observe is that that swollen, red, irritated tissue is going to shrink. It’s going to lose that red coloration. It’s going to fade back down. So, the shift from that red state back to a normal skin tone color is a cooling change, right? That shift from a swollen tissue state to one that has shrunk back down to appropriate normal size is a drying influence that we’re observing. And it’s also a tonifying influence as well, right? So, we can see these actions of the fluid through direct observation just like that. Okay.

Ryn (14:21):
So, when we have other manifestations of hot, damp, laxity going on, and oftentimes skin presentations are the best way to observe that. Something that’s again, swollen, red, oozing, eh, okay. These are rational times to go ahead and work with a preparation of apple cider vinegar. We’re going to tighten that up. We’re going to cool it down, and we’re going to dry it out. Of course, this stuff tastes acidic. It tastes sour. Things that have a sour flavor in the world of herbalism tend to also all be in line with those energetic qualities: cooling, drying, tonifying. You can think about rose hips or hibiscus calyx, the flower part, as good examples there. Those are things that we want to prepare and maybe drink as a sun tea on a hot summer day when we’re feeling hot, when we’re feeling humid right? And we want to correct for those internally and in our feeling, in our experience. Those are the kinds of things we’re going to work with. So, apple cider vinegar is a sour agent, just like those. It is anti-inflammatory on contact, as I’ve been describing. And then there’s another element of apple cider vinegar as a topical worth mentioning, which is that it has some antimicrobial qualities to it as well. So, if one of those sores or rashes that I’ve been describing that’s got the ooziness to it. If it’s oozing, it’s open. And if it’s open, it’s susceptible to infection. So, something like this can both be correcting the tissue state we’re observing and also protecting against microbial damage. Very nice.

Ryn (15:56):
Okay. And then of course, we can be working with apple cider vinegar, not just by itself. We can be working with that infused with other herbs. So, if you want to have a little bottle of some apple cider vinegar. Keep it in your bathroom for when you get little spots, little pimples you want to work on. Then you could have that just be plain ACV, that’s fine. Or it could be infused with rose petals. Or it could be infused with elderflowers. Or it could be infused with calendula, right? It’s a way to power up the agent that you’re working with beyond what apple cider vinegar has to offer in and of itself.

Apple & Leaf Actions

Ryn (16:33):
All right. But apple is, of course, more than just a source for making vinegar out of. Apple is a whole tree. It is a plant, right? It is an herb in the world. Apple itself, the apple, the fruit itself is well, a fruit, okay? First and foremost, it is a fruit with all of the good things that that implies. And here I want to maybe make a comparison. For those of you who are knowing a little bit about herbalism already, you might think about hawthorn berry as being really nutritive, and being anti-inflammatory, and supportive to the heart, and all of those things that it absolutely is. Yes. But when we think about apple, sometimes we’re like yeah, apple. Whatever, they’re good. You know, I heard that they can keep a keep a doctor away if you eat one every day. And that’s nice, but eh, come on. It’s just an apple, right? It’s just a food. Who cares? We care, right? These plants are in the same family. Apple, hawthorn, cherry, other rose family fruits like prunes and sloe, like the source for sloe gin. That’s from a tree called blackthorn. And it’s a similar type of a fruit, right? So, all of these share in several overlapping qualities. They share in having some degree of anti-inflammatory action for us. Some degree of sour flavor, along with some sweet flavor as well. Especially the ones that humans have done more interaction with over the centuries. More selective breeding to make the fruits larger and sweeter.

Ryn (18:09):
So, of course we have apple varieties that are very, very sweet and just a little bit sour. But if you try wild apples, sometimes you try to eat them, and they’re so sour and so astringent that they’re not very appealing. But of course, those are also presentation by that tree of medicinal attributes. Tannins, and concentrated fruit acids, and things that have these medicinal virtues for us. So, apple is like a hawthorn berry that you can eat in several bites and hold in your hand. That’s one way that you might think of this plant by analog to a little better respected medicinal herb that we can work with. All right. Another thing worth noting, and I think it’s particularly worth pointing out when we’re talking about apples themselves and not just the family in general, is that apples are a really excellent source of pectin. Pectin is a prebiotic fiber, and notably this is not the prebiotic fiber that we speak about most often because that’s inulin. Inulin from dandelion root, chicory root, burdock root, elecampane. The sunchoke plant, those tubers, they give us a lot of inulin content. Inulin is a prebiotic. That’s the word we use here. These are food for your friendly gut flora. And so if it is true that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, I think one big reason why that we can understand now is that it helps your flora. It helps your guts. It supports the friendliest kinds of bacteria that could possibly live in your belly. So, that’s really, really valuable. And again, when we’re doing work to reconstitute healthier gut flora, that’s not only about killing off the microbes. That’s not only about taking berberine capsules or other things to try to target unfriendly critters in the intestines and drive them away. We have to feed the good ones. We have to support them. And prebiotic fibers are a major way to do that.

Ryn (20:18):
Inulin is again, the first thing that leaps to the mind of a lot of herbalists when they’re trying to do that work. Oh, I want to build healthy flora. Okay. We can feed them with the burdock root decoctions, great. Yes, true, true. But let’s also get some apples or applesauce. This isn’t going to be destroyed on cooking. In fact, pectin is used to stabilize jams and jellies. And oftentimes these kind of plants are included in such a recipe. Like rose hips in particular is really high in pectin. Or hawthorn berry is also very, very high in pectin. And so those can be included as a way to stabilize that preparation. But you know, if you just eat an apple, you get a decent dose of pectin as well that way. Or applesauce for people who maybe can’t chew very much, but we do want to take care of their flora. I’m thinking of maybe an elder, somebody with chronic illness, or something like that. Applesauce is a great way to combine that. And, you know, with applesauce hey, that’s a good place to mix in herbal powders. You can stir herbal powders into applesauce. It shouldn’t have a clumpy or a gritty texture to it once it’s fully integrated. And the sweet familiar flavor of the applesauce can overwhelm many, maybe not all, but many herbal flavors that might not be super appealing just to swallow on their own.

Ryn (21:38):
All right. And then, so that’s the apple fruit and different ways that we can work with that. And then there’s the apple leaf, okay? So, apple leaf, here we break out our acronym JARFA. JARFA: just another rose family astringent, J-A-R-F-A, JARFA. Just another rose family astringent, yeah. And this is basically a way to say that if you have leaves from a rosebush, from an apple tree, from a wild cherry tree, from other rose family members, you are guaranteed to find those leaves to act as astringents. And that’s a very valuable medicinal attribute, right? That can be applied topically where we want to tighten up tissue that’s oozing, or leaking, or lax. And that could include various types of wounds and rashes. It can also include hemorrhoids or varicose veins. We can soak in these kind of preparations to tighten those up. And then internally speaking, astringents can be very helpful whenever there’s laxity or damage to the intestinal lining. So, damage can show up in the form of things like ulcers, whether that’s in the stomach, or in the colon, or anywhere in between. And then laxity is going to be manifesting as leaky gut syndrome or intestinal hyperpermeability, right? So, these are fairly common. And it’s often a good idea for people to get some stabilization of their membranes by getting a bit of astringency from our plants on a consistent basis.

Ryn (23:08):
Apple leaf is by no means the most popular or most common astringent herb that we would work with or recommend. But I want to mention it so that we’re not leaving it out of the picture. And we recognize that many parts of that plant have something to offer to us. Okay. In the show notes, I’m including Katja’s recipe for some paleo apple fritters in case that’s one way you’d like to enjoy apple. And I’m also linking to a monograph from the herbalist, Jim McDonald, about apple. Because this is one of the very few monographs you’re going to find out there about apple. And as usual, Jim goes into some really nice depth, and it’s worth reading. So, I hope you’ll check that out as well.

#6: Cranberry, D-mannose, & UTIs

Ryn (23:50):
All right. Let’s go ahead and move on to item number six on the bestseller list. And that is cranberry: Vaccinium macrocarpon. So, cranberry is pretty well known amongst the general public, amongst folks out there in the world, as a remedy to resolve urinary tract infections. And many people are aware of that. Whether it’s in the form of a cranberry supplement that you buy, capsules, or tablets, or something like this. Or if it’s in the format of cranberry juice. And always, whenever I get to this point, I like to pause and comment that we do definitely prefer sugar-free cranberry juice when we’re working for the resolution of a UTI. We find it to be more effective. We find it to be more certain to work in the way that we expect. And so that is our definite preference there, for sure. However, I have to admit that sugared cranberry juices have proven effective for this kind of intervention in a number of different trials. Not to say that they’re a hundred percent effective all of the time. Not to say that there’s no reason to prefer the sugar-free. But just to admit that look, if all you’ve got is some store brand cranberry juice, and you know there’s some sugar into there. It’s still going to help a bit. It’s still worth including in your UTI resolution protocol. Which if you are interested in that, then you may have noticed that in episode 241 just recently we discussed two different herbal UTI formulae moving beyond uva-ursi and cranberry. And getting into other herbs that work very well for this for this situation. So, you’re not stuck with cranberry. But that also means or that that doesn’t mean that we totally ignore cranberry entirely. And we say oh, that’s terrible. Don’t even take it. No. It is actually helpful. And it does do some beneficial work here.

Ryn (25:55):
Now, when we look at the supplements that are derived from cranberry and are sold out there – usually they just say to support urinary health with this idea that they’re clearly going to be chosen when somebody’s dealing with a UTI – you’ll find a few different things. You’ll find some supplements that are like a full cranberry extract, and you’ll find some that are more of an isolate. So, the word isolate means that you’ve chosen one constituent from the target plant. You’ve separated everything else away from it. And you’re just presenting a supplement of that single constituent. When it comes to cranberry, what that’s going to be done with is an unusual sugar called D-mannose. So, this is a particularly unusual sugar in that it’s not going to feed microbial infectious invaders. It’s actually going to be a detriment or an agent that works against them, right? So, D-mannose has been a target of study when it comes to cranberry and urinary tract infection for a fairly long time. And there’s been some identified modes of action there at the molecular or the bacterial level to say okay, this is how it helps. This is what it does to prevent adhesion, prevent the ability of the microbes to maintain their hold on the wall of the bladder or the lining of the tubes of the urinary tract, right? If we can prevent their ability to hold on, they’re easier to flush out. And so that’s what cranberry and this particular sugar are helping to do.

Ryn (27:43):
I like to always point out when things are not as reductionist as they might seem at first glance. And this is one case just like that. Because it turns out that it’s not only the D-mannose that is behind the activity of cranberry. When we have the whole plant, the whole fruit, the whole juice of them, we’re also getting other polyphenols from that. Polyphenols is a big category of chemical constituents that occur in plants. A lot of medicinal elements that turn up in our medicinal plants are in that group polyphenols. A lot of times they serve as antioxidants. Sometimes they have other roles. And in this case some of the polyphenols from cranberry and also from other Vaccinium species like lingonberry and indeed like blueberry, they share in this content of polyphenols that can serve to once again combat urinary tract infection. So, that’s pretty nice. That’s pretty nice. So anyway, what I meant to say a moment ago, and I think I skipped over that, was you will often find isolated D-mannose supplements. They might be labeled cranberry. And then it might just say D-mannose if you read the supplement facts label. You should have clarity there around whether it is an extract, or if they just name the herb. Like if the label just says cranberry: Vaccinium macrocarpon, what you have there is dried powdered berries, powdered out and stuffed into the shells. If it said cranberry: Vaccinium macrocarpon extracts, that would mean that well, they made an extract, right? Some menstruum, some process to pull some stuff out of the cranberry, and now that’s what’s in your capsule. But if it just said D-mannose from cranberry, okay, now you know that it is just that isolate, that one single constituent. All right. So, as usual, my preference on this kind of thing is going to be give me everything the plant has to offer. Get it as close to a full representation of what’s in the actual berry as possible. That’s what we trust. That’s what we find over and over again to be most effective. And also, just to be most similar to eating the berries, to crushing them and drinking the juice that you make yourself, things like that. Okay.

Ryn (30:04):
Now, any of these formats may be helpful for a UTI, and that’s why these are good sellers, right? Because people find them by reputation, and they find them to be effective when they try it out. You’ll even find tablets of isolated D-mannose available for veterinary purposes. For example, you can feed this to your cat and help them to resolve their urinary tract infection. It’s nice to have something like that in the isolate form. It’s less likely to be rejected by a particularly picky eater like many cats are. And so that might be easier to work with or let me say definitely will be easier to work with than trying to get your cat to drink cranberry juice. Especially because the doses when we’re talking about cranberry juice are fairly large. If you have a UTI and you can consume an entire quart of cranberry juice every day until your UTI feels resolved, that is the dose that I’m aiming at when I’m making this kind of recommendation. And so you think for a cat yeah, we’re going to scale down. But we’d still want them to be drinking it like water, and no cat is going to do that. So, that is a situation where the isolate makes sense. For a human, especially one who can handle a bit of sour flavor, we do prefer to have you drink that straight or mix it 50/50. Mix it half and half with tea. Now, we can get other herbs in the mix. That could be goldenrod, that could be nettle, that could be uva-ursi. That could be any of a number of things that are going to activate the kidney pathway, increase urine flow, flush away the microbes, kill them directly. We can overlap all those actions together. But cranberry is really, really handy there. All right.

Cranberry & Leaf Actions

Ryn (31:46):
But let’s get beyond UTI, right? So, cranberry is applicable for a lot of other things as well, because it’s a berry. It’s an antioxidant powerhouse. It’s really rich in pigment compounds, things that serve our bodies in multiple ways to keep inflammation down. To keep our metabolism working the way that we want it to. To keep things humming along in a nice, good manner. It’s a food, it’s a fruit. It’s beneficial in all those broad-spectrum ways. So, those are easy to kind of summarize real quick, like I’ve just done. But they’re also very, very important to pursue and to incorporate into our daily habits and make sure we’ve got them there. And something that tastes good and is fairly familiar and easy to get your hands on. These are always beneficial, right? If you’re a long-time follower of our show, you know that these are the kinds of things we spend most of our time focusing on and talking about. That’s the style of herbalism we practice. Yeah. Now, the polyphenols and also another constituent group called anthocyanins that we find in cranberry and other berries, okay, are really beneficial. They provide anti-inflammatory activity. They provide what we call vascular support. Which is to say maintaining a healthy degree of integrity in your blood vessels, in the tubes of your body. This is particularly relevant in the context of COVID because COVID damages those tissues. And the anthocyanins from our berry friends – cranberry, yes, but also blueberry, and blackberry, and any other berry you care to name – they’re supportive to those tissues. They’re helping to maintain good integrity so that they’re not breaking, they’re not leaking. They’re not subject to a lot of inflammation. And they’re ready to do their thing just the way you want. All right.

Ryn (33:36):
Cranberry is diuretic. And look, that can be relevant beyond UTI, right, just the flushing effect. Diuretics can be helpful when there’s fluid retention in the body. That might be around the belly. That might be down in the legs or in the ankles. But diuretics are an important part of any strategy that we’ve got to stir up the fluids in the body, distribute them more evenly, and take away those spots where things are getting stagnant and pooling or congealing. So, diuretics can be helpful for lots of different reasons when that’s part of our overall goal. And cranberry is a quite effective one. Both the berry and also the leaf of cranberry and its relatives – like blueberry, like bilberry, like lingonberry, and then beyond the Vaccinium genus into other berry types as well like raspberry, and blackberry, and strawberry. In all of these cases, we find over and over again that both the berry as a food and a source for other things you prepare like fruit leather, stuff like that. But then also the leaves of all of those plants have found some benefits for blood sugar regulation. This shouldn’t really surprise us from a traditional perspective. Because the fruits have sweetness, but also a pretty significant amount of sourness. And the leaves have a touch of sourness and a discernible astringency to them. The reason I say that this doesn’t make anybody surprised that it could be helpful for blood sugar dysregulation issues, is that those issues manifest with fluid retention. They manifest with dampness. They manifest with a development of heat that accumulates as a follow on to the damp stagnation. So, these remedies are cooling, and drying, and draining.

Ryn (35:32):
And I should note I am talking here specifically about what would progress into Type II diabetes, right? Type I diabetes is a bit different. There still may be some benefits from these in that case because of improvements in insulin sensitivity. But primarily when we talk about these as remedies, both current and traditional for blood sugar problems and diabetic progressions, we are talking about Type II. Too much sugar in the blood, right? These are really reliable for that kind of thing, and we’re often combining several of them together. It could be several of these leaves of berry. That could be mulberry leaf is a really nice one along with cranberry leaf, along with blackberry leaf. And then maybe together with tulsi, maybe together with cinnamon. These other herbs that have different methods or pathways to improving blood sugar balance or regulation inside of the body. So, that is a place where we found something very helpful to do with the leaves of these plants. And again, we like to look beyond the shiny red fruit. Or at least to look with that together with its beautiful green leaves. Yes, yes. All right.

Ryn (36:46):
I’ve got a couple of other episodes of our podcast to refer to you to. Those are in the show notes. One was just recently number 224. That was in our herbs A-to-Z series, and we profiled Vaccinium species there, including cranberry. And then way back at the very beginning of our podcast journey, episode six we had a topic there where we discussed cranberries and a few different methods to work with them. So, you can check both of those out in the show notes and learn a bit more about cranberry. All right. Cranberry is also one of the herbs that we cover in our Materia Medica course. And it does turn up in our Urinary Health course as well. Apple, the apple cider vinegar gets a good long discussion, its own chapter on herb infused vinegars in our Medicine Making course. And we mention apple cider vinegar, and apple leaf, and things like that in a sprinkling of other courses throughout our program. If you don’t know, in addition to doing the Holistic Herbalism podcast, we run a whole herbal school online. It’s Commonwealth Holistic Herbalism, and you can find us at commonwealthherbs.com. You can find our course offerings specifically at online.commonwealthherbs.com. And of course, there will be links to all of this in the show notes. But I really do encourage you to check out some of our courses. They’re all self-paced, they’re all video learning focused. You can progress at your own pace. You can take as much time as you need to complete the courses. Your access doesn’t go away once you sign up with us. There’s no ticking timer for you to learn everything as fast as you can and cram it all in. We love it when students learn slow. But you can keep the pace that you like. You can proceed through that as quickly or as leisurely as you want to.

Ryn (38:34):
And you get support with us all along the way through twice weekly live Q&A sessions and also access to the entire archive of a couple hundred of those that we’ve recorded for our students already. You have in every lesson, in every course, you can open up a discussion thread up in the corner. And you can type in questions for us and get an answer within a day. We have our active student community where you can chat with others about what they’re learning and doing and what you’re up to. And all of the other good stuff that comes along with all of our courses is available to you. So, I do encourage you to check those out. If you’re a podcast person, then I would really appreciate it if you would subscribe to our show if you’re not already. If you would rate our show on whatever platform you use. Maybe even leave a review for us. That does, you know, every podcast says it, right? But that does help us to reach more people and get the word out there. So, I would very much appreciate that. All right, that’s it for today. I hope you learned a new thing or two about apple and about cranberry. I’ll continue on this series a bit later. The next one’s up are going to involve discussions of wheatgrass, and barley grass, and beetroot, and ginger, and green tea. So, some cool stuff to get to when we continue on the Herbalists’ Views on the Top-Selling Herbs. And I hope that you’ll be with us when we come to those. For now, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Drink some tea. And we’ll be back soon. Bye.