Podcast 246: Herbalists’ Views on the Top-Selling Herbs (Part 3): Wheatgrass, Beet Root, & Ginger

In part three of our series on the top-selling herbs in the United States, we cover wheatgrass, beet root, and ginger supplements.

As we share our opinions about these popular herbal supplements, our primary goal is to help you understand these herbs in their breadth and depth. They’re too often pigeon-holed into limited ranges of application – the usual answers to “what is it good for?” are too small! There’s plenty more to say about them than their most common selling points.

If you’re an herbalist, it’s good for you to be well-informed about herbal supplements which people take most often. You can learn what is popular, and why it is. You can understand how to answer questions about those plants, how to differentiate hype from health, how to help someone find a better alternative, and which supplements just aren’t worth the cost. This series is intended to help you do that!

If you’re new to herbalism, we’re happy that we get the first chance to form your thoughts around these herbs. At the same time, this will act as a guide to developing ‘marketing literacy’ as applied to herbal supplements – and some good old-fashioned materia medica study, too.

7. Wheatgrass / Barley grass – Triticum aestivum / Hordeum vulgare

• What to Do When You’ve Been Glutened

8. Beet root – Beta vulgaris

• Beetroot profile at Herbal Reality

9. Ginger – Zingiber off.

• HHP 227: Herbs A-Z: Zingiber
• Ginger: Herb of the Week

Find the previous episode of this series here:

• HHP 240: Herbalists’ Views on the Top-Selling Herbs (Part 1): Psyllium, Elderberry, Turmeric, Ashwagandha
• HHP 244: Herbalists’ Views on the Top-Selling Herbs (Part 2): Apple Cider Vinegar, Cranberry

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!

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

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. Today Katja’s hard at work on some material for the Business Skills course. And I’m making a podcast episode continuing my series here on the top-selling herbs in commercial products. So supplements, capsules, gummies, big brand tinctures that are sold in all the stores, that kind of stuff is what we’re talking about in this sequence. If you missed the earlier, this is part three in the series. Previously we addressed the first six top-selling herbs in the list. And that was psyllium, elderberry, turmeric, ashwagandha. And then after that it was apple cider vinegar and cranberry. So, those are the top six. Today, we’re going to get through seven, eight, and nine. Those are wheatgrass and also barley grass, beet root, and ginger. So, I’m going to be trying to give you the herbalists perspective on these things and help to see if we can break them out of their boxes a little bit or add some context. Essentially to give you the kind of response that I might give if a client of mine came and said hey, Ryn. Do you think this is a good supplement? Do you think it’s worth it? Do you think it’ll do what it claims to do, or what people say it will do? Those are the kind of ideas we’re trying to get across in this sequence.

Ryn (01:48):
So, without any further ado, let me just remind you that I’m not a doctor. I’m an herbalist and a holistic health educator. And so the ideas discussed in this podcast do not constitute medical advice. No state or federal authority licenses herbalist in the US. So, these discussions are for educational purposes only. I 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 I’m not attempting to present a single dogmatic right way that you must adhere to. Everyone’s body is different. So, the things that we’re talking about may or may not apply directly to you. But I hope that they’re going to give you some new information to think about, and some new ideas to research and to experiment with further. 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’s discussed on the internet or prescribed by a physician, that’s always your choice to make.

#7: Wheatgrass & Barley Grass, Chlorophyl & Gluten

Ryn (02:54):
Okay. And let’s have it be an informed choice. That’s kind of the subtext of that reclaimer leading into an informational, educational type of a podcast. So, I think you knew that though, right? That was clear to begin with. All right, so let’s get into it. We’re looking at number seven on the bestselling list. And recall, these are the numbers from the year 2023. We won’t have data for 2024 until probably October of 2025. That’s usually when this report comes out with the data for the preceding year. So, this is the most current data we’ve got to work with, all right? But in that span of time, wheatgrass and also barley grass were hitting at number seven on the bestseller list. And remember, this is all still in the mainstream channel. We’ll come to the so-called natural channel towards the tail end of this series. But mainstream channel, we’re trying to look at the maximum possible view here, the widest type of sales. And that is what you call the mainstream, you know? So, just to give a little grounding on that. So yeah, so number seven: wheatgrass and barley grass. Now, these two are combined. They are separate plants. But combining them makes sense because they’re recommended, and perceived, and consumed in essentially the same way by anybody who’s preparing them, or selling them, or buying them. In essentially all circumstances that I’ve ever encountered, that’s an identity relation. So, wheat here we’re talking about Triticum aestivum and related Triticum species as well. And then barley, that’s Hordeum vulgare.

Ryn (04:40):
So, with these ones, there was an increase in sales. Sales were up about 104% of these from the prior year’s data, which essentially means a doubling in sales, right? So, that’s pretty good for the people who make it. But what’s the deal with this? Like why are people into it? When you look at some of the claims about wheatgrass or barley grass, some of them are a little over promising as far as I can see, right? You’ll see claims about this amping up detox functions in the body or providing some profound kind of nutrition that you can’t get anywhere else. And that’s not exactly the truth as I understand it, okay? So, when I look at wheatgrass and barley grass, the benefits that I see present there, there are some that exist, right? They are primarily derived from the chlorophyll that they provide. When you take a dark green plant material, and you blenderized it. Because usually these are consumed as a juice or maybe as a powder that you’re going to mix with water and slug back as a drink, right? Anything that has that deep green color from chlorophyll has chlorophyll in it. And chlorophyll is helpful. Chlorophyll itself serves a broad array of functions in human physiology, including some anti-inflammatory action and some effects to help to normalize blood sugar levels or especially to reduce unhealthy spikes and crashes in blood sugar. And I like to comment on that about chlorophyll whenever it comes up. In our course on Phytochemistry, I spend a while in there talking about chlorophyll, and how there’s a very close structural similarity between chlorophyll in plants and hemoglobin in humans. And we think that that’s meaningful. We think that there’s some interesting parallels going on there.

Ryn (06:42):
But that’s not to say that chlorophyll is replacement hemoglobin, or you can turn your blood green if you eat enough veggies. It is though to say that this is something that humans have consumed for our entire evolutionary history. Often in very large amounts because we would be forging on wild greens. And then later of course, growing and cultivating green leafy veggies and eating them as a staple part of most diets throughout most of the world, throughout most of history, right? And of course we all understand that it’s healthy to eat green leafy veggies and to get not just the chlorophyll, but also the fiber and other minerals, and nutrients, and vitamins, and stuff that they provide, right? And so all of that is true. And that’s one of the many good reasons to eat green leafy veggies, right? But it also means that when we’re looking at wheatgrass, the perspective that I’ve come to is if you eat green leafy vegetables with any kind of regularity, any kind of significant quantity, then you don’t need to drink grass juice. And that in fact it’s healthier for your body to eat green leafy veggies than it is to drink grass juice. So, if you enjoy drinking grass juice. If it just tastes good to you, and you like how it feels. And you squeeze some lemon in there and make a little grass juice cocktail. Cool, go for it. That’s fine, as long as you don’t have a gluten sensitivity. I’ll say more about that in a moment. But I would not regard this as being a uniquely potent source of nutrition. Honestly, if we were to line the nutrient numbers for wheatgrass and barley grass up against those for something like nettle, I still find that the nettle comes out on top, right? And the other element is that these are not like nettle in the context of having a variety of other interesting and potent phytoconstituents at play. With nettle we’re getting not just a high representation of quercetin, a nice anti-inflammatory, anti-allergenic histamine-modulating friend. But also a lot of activity that’s centered on kidney function, and diuretic effects, and anti-inflammatory power through the kidney in particular. And so for most of our green herbs that we regard as being nutritive agents in addition to having more specific medicinal activity, again, I find that the wheatgrass and barley grass isn’t super impressive by comparison.

Ryn (09:15):
So, the note about gluten, right? Now a gluten is a general term for a protein found in a seed or a grain. And so when people grow wheatgrass, you are harvesting it before it can form the grain or the seed, right? So, technically speaking, there shouldn’t be gluten in wheatgrass or in barley grass. However, there are always issues of cross-contamination, especially if this is more of a mass-produced product or something you’re going to buy that’s already made. It is entirely possible that there could be some cross-contamination, or that there could be some very early formed bits of seed that got thrown into the mix. And so particularly if you have a significant, a strong gluten sensitivity. You’re on the celiac end of the spectrum, as opposed to the no discernible symptoms end of the sensitivity spectrum, right? The closer you are to that end of it, the less good idea it is for you to consume wheatgrass or barley grass. Because there can be reactions. And we have indeed had feedback from clients and students with strong gluten sensitivity who found that they had a negative reaction to consuming these things. So, just in the same way that we steer people away from working with oat straw or milky oats when they have a gluten sensitivity, same thing over here. I would steer that person away from taking wheat grass or barley grass shots.

#8: Beetroot, Nitrates, & Exercise

Ryn (10:44):
Okay, there we go. Number eight on the bestseller list was beetroot, Beta vulgaris, all right? A noteworthy element here for beetroot in terms of sales over that period of time. Out of all of the items that they tracked in this investigation, this market study, beetroot supplements had the highest level of percentage sales growth. So, compared to their prior sales, they had the biggest leap forward, right? And out of everything on all of the lists, this was the biggest jump in that given year. When you look back through the prior publications, what you’ll actually observe is that beetroot supplements have been rapidly climbing the charts in the past five years. Since like 2018 on forward it’s been like beetroot shows up. And then it jumps a few places and then a few more. And now it’s all the way up here at number eight. So, that’s all to say that there’s been a trend of increasing interests and increasing sales for these products over that course of time. People are hyped about beets. People are like ah, yes, beets. It’s a good red food. And also we can do supplements with it. We can make these concentrated juice shots. We can make these isolated tablets and capsules and stuff for people to swallow. I’ve seen beetroot extract gummies out there now because there’s a gummy for everything these days. And so what’s going on? What’s the deal with this?

Ryn (12:16):
When you check into it, what you’ll find is often centered around blood circulation, really if we step back. So, beetroot is a rich source of these compounds called nitrates. And those are metabolized in our bodies to something called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide, or it’s written NO, capital n, capital o, nitric oxide. So, nitrates are supportive to… And these are like from product claims, right? Supports muscle health, supports metabolic health, supports vascular function, right? So, specifically what’s going on here is that nitric oxide serves a vasodilatory function. So, if you think of a vein or a blood vessel like a tube. If you dilate that tube, you expand it. That reduces the pressure on the fluid inside of the tube, okay? So, this is going to allow blood flow to areas where it had been restricted. Blood flow can be restricted when those tubes are too small. They’re too squeezed down. They’re too tense, right? Hypertension is a medical term for high blood pressure resulting from tension, too much tightness in the blood vessels. When they dilate, when they open up, then the blood pressure goes down. But also you get better blood flow to the periphery of your body, to the inner organs. To places that need to have that movement in the circulation in order to be fed with blood to clear away waste products and toxins that may be generated as part of normal metabolism.

Ryn (13:57):
So, this is indeed a good thing. Nitric oxide effects on blood flow, and circulation, and blood movement, those can really account for much of the observed benefits of beetroot as a food and also as a supplement. Nitrates have this other interesting thing. And this is where we get into more of the sports element and the workout element. It’s that when you have more nitrates in your system more available to you, they reduce oxygen consumption in the muscles when they are working, when they’re under load, when you’re doing something with your muscles. A way to say this is that it lowers the energy cost of your body. So, when you work your muscles, it’s burning fuel. You burn sugars. What you really do is you burn this thing called ATP down at the cellular level, right? But that can be created from various substrates. Sugars, and fats, and proteins, and ketones can all be transformed into ATP and then utilized, right? When we have more nitrate available, we’re able to run that fire more efficiently. And at the same time as that’s going on, we’re having that increase in blood circulation, right? And so we’re not getting restricted blood flow to a working muscle, which is never a good thing. That’s where we get cramps. That’s where we get spasms. That’s one way to describe a heart attack, actually: restricted blood flow to a muscle that’s working over time. So anyway, nitrates good, blood circulation good. Lowered energy costs at the muscles and the metabolic level good, right?

Ryn (15:42):
Just as a little side note, another thing that boosts nitric oxide production is sun exposure. Healthy sun exposure, of course, right? I’m not saying go out and burn yourself until you’re beet red, and then suddenly your nitric oxide powers will be mighty and amazing. But some sun exposure does in fact cause this reaction. And this is one more reason if we need another one to exercise outside as much as possible and as much as your climate and your latitude allows. All right. So, all of this taken into account we can understand why beetroot was kind of popularized first starting five or even seven years back as something like an energy support supplement. Something that’s going to be marketed for performance benefits towards athletes, and people who exercise, and people who work out. Okay. Some beneficial effects of beet have also been established even in healthy young people now focusing on endurance and post-workout recovery. So, we get to you on a treadmill, see how long you can go. Have you rest for a while. We supplement you with beetroot for a while. We bring you back in, treadmill tests of your endurance. We see an improvement. We have you do a hard workout. We give some people placebo, some people beetroot supplement. People who took the beetroot, they’re able to bounce back, or they feel less pain, and soreness, and discomfort after their workout or resulting from it.

Why & Ways to Take Beets

Ryn (17:12):
And then beetroot has been tested in different types of workouts as well including endurance type workouts. Ones that are focused on explosive power like rapid power generation. Like lift something heavy as fast as you can and throw it as far as you can. That’s explosive power, right? Or even like striking power. If you’re hitting a bag, or you have something that can measure the Newtons of force you exert with each punch. We can see improvements in that kind of thing. But also in high intensity interval training or just straight high intensity training, there’s been improvements found there. So, the point to take away is that this does actually seem to be a supplement. Or a food as well because you can get most if not all of the benefits of beet from eating them as a food in sufficient quantity as you can get from taking a supplement. But it’s helpful for multiple different types of exercise, not just one. There are some supposed workout boosters or performance-enhancing supplements that might be helpful for endurance but not have much impact on explosive power generation, or sprint type workouts, or things like that and vice versa. But beet does seem to be pretty general, so that’s cool. That’s cool. What we’re seeing more recently with beetroot supplements is that they’re reaching the general population.

Ryn (18:39):
So, not just athletes, and workout freaks, and that kind of thing, right? Who I’m right there with you, right? But we’re seeing this marketed now for more generalized cardiovascular support and even for cognitive support. And this is not off-base, right? Again, if we just look at that basic function of providing nitrates, boosting nitric oxide production, we’re going to get that vasodilation effect. That does lower blood pressure. And since the most common expression of cardiovascular trouble is going to include elevated blood pressure, that makes sense to go ahead and call that a cardiovascular support herb. Cool. By the way, there is a question to ask as always. Well, if this is something that can take high blood pressure and bring it down, should you avoid it if you have low blood pressure? And the answer to that is actually no. Because the things that tend to be forcing your blood pressure low are not an overabundance of nitric oxide activity or something that this is going to exacerbate or multiply. So, I wouldn’t look at someone with low blood pressure and say you should never touch a beet again. I don’t think that that’s required. I don’t think that’s necessary. And as far as cognitive support goes, again, just to say increased blood flow includes better blood flow to your brain. And like it or not, your brain is a physical organ that requires good circulation of fluids in order to function well. A surprising amount of brain fog and other discomforts can be mitigated and therefore explained by improving blood flow, indicating that poor blood flow was a major issue there. We don’t want to leave out other factors, of course, right? There could be a deeper problem. It could be that your CO2 levels are getting up into the two thousands range. There’s lots of things that can give you a cognitive issue, but poor blood flow is certainly among them. And to the extent that beetroot is going to improve circulation, we could see a beneficial change there.

Ryn (20:45):
All right. So, beetroot supplements are fairly new, but beet itself as a food is very, very old, right? This is a traditional food in large swaths of the world for long stretches of time. And that includes both as a cooked vegetable and even in a lot of circumstances can be consumed raw but also fermented. And so fermented foods with beet, like if you go to some grocery stores today, you can find a jar of sliced beets that have been fermented. And you can eat those up. That’s a great way to take them. Now, you’re getting all the good stuff we just said about beet plus some probiotics. Great, fantastic. This is really good. Also fermented drinks like kvass is like a beet juice that’s been fermented, sometimes even a little fizzy. But beets have a lot of appeal to them because they’re a bit sweet. And then of course there are the sugar beets, which are selectively bred to have more and more sugar content, and they are a source for sugar directly. But I’m talking more about the food beets, the ones with the dark red color. Red is critical here. So, red isn’t an exact indicator for the amount of nitrate in your beets. But it is the presence of betalain alkaloids, which are present in beets as well and contribute a fair amount to some of their medicinal impacts. Primarily in the anti-inflammatory range, but that’s complementary to the effects of the nitrates. And so I wouldn’t want to leave that out. And I’d say the redder your beets the better. Yeah. There are gold beets. I believe that those are more of a carotenoid presentation, but they’re lovely. They’re just fine. And they do have a good strong representation of the nitric oxide content or the nitrite content, the precursor. So, we can get into that too. Very good. So, that was beet.

#9: Ginger, Anti-inflammatory, Foundational, Polycrest Herb

Ryn (22:55):
And then here we go with number nine, ginger. Boy, there is a lot to say about ginger, and in fact we have said a lot about ginger. So, I would point you back to episode 227. That was our herbs A-to-Z series. And the whole episode was all about Zingiber. It was the last one in the sequence and really closed it out with a bang there. So, for the herbalist’s perspective on ginger, we took a good chunk of it there. I think it was an hour or more where we were just talking about that herb and all the different ways you can work with it. But for our purposes in this series today, let’s just note that ginger is very similar to turmeric, one of those top four herbs, turmeric. Ginger is also what I would call a digestive-first, systemic-second anti-inflammatory herb. So, by that I mean that when you work with ginger, the primary effect, the dominant effect, the first effect you’re going to find is going to be relieving inflammation, and also relieving tension, and warming and activating the movement and the metabolism. First in the GI tract, and then there’s some effects that spill out from there and get into your muscles, and other organs, and to your joints, and connective tissues, and so on. So, you can, and I think should regard ginger as just as potent, just as multifactorial, just as beautiful of an anti-inflammatory herb as turmeric. Because that’s what we find it to be.

Ryn (24:37):
Now, most commercial products are going to advertise ginger simply for digestive support. And that is the way people tend to know this herb best. Its capacity to relieve nausea is fairly common knowledge, even if people only know that about ginger ale. And when I was a kid, it was like well, if you’re sick with nausea, then you have to open the ginger ale, and pour it out, and let it get flat. And then go ahead and drink it. And there was some special magic in letting it get flat. It’s really just not having the carbon dioxide bubbles irritate an already irritated stomach lining. But when I was a kid, it was some kind of magic spell, right? But ginger can be taken in lots of different ways to relieve nausea. And I think that’s a key thing to keep in mind when considering ginger. Don’t only identify it with the capsules or a little bit of spice powder that goes into meals, right? Ginger can be effective as tincture. A few drops might be sufficient. And tincture can be really good when there’s nausea, but you don’t want to swallow a whole lot all at once. Like you don’t want to be taking big sips of tea. A drop or two of ginger on your tongue. Give it 10 or 20 minutes and see what we get, right? That can be really good. But tea can also be very effective for nausea. Ginger powder mixed with honey into an electuary preparation. Ginger candy or candied ginger, chunks or slices of ginger that have been soaked in honey or sugar syrup and dried out. You can prepare your own ginger-infused honey. You’ve got the ginger flavored honey first. And then you have your kind of like homemade candied ginger towards the end. Lots of different ways to work with this plant. Really, really handy.

Ryn (26:26):
A lot of people are familiar with it already from culinary traditions, from cooking, from family recipes and things like that. But again, we can take it in lots of ways, and we can work with it for a lot of different things. Ginger,, I would consider it a foundational herb. And for me that doesn’t just mean an herb that is very powerful, or an herb that is very special in what it does. Actually for me it more often means herbs that are really abundant. I would consider garlic another foundational remedy. I would consider peppermint one. I would consider chamomile one. And one thing that these all share in addition to being widely available, very accessible, generally very affordable as well. And those are all extremely valuable qualities in an herb. Is that this is what we call a polycrest herb. It can do many different things. So, beyond being just oh, take this when you have nausea, ginger is deeply, deeply warming and releasing of tension. Relaxant and also anti-inflammatory to your viscera, to your blood, to your muscles, to your mind even, right? Don’t neglect ginger for patterns of mental cold, any more than you would neglect ginger for patterns of digestive cold. Because It can affect both of them. And then if you fold in topical remedies as well as ingested remedies, the applications for ginger are just really extensive, really varied.

Ryn (28:04):
It’s one of the best herbs to learn in my opinion because of all these aspects of it that I’ve just listed off to you. So, I think it’s great that ginger is very popular. And I’m always happy to see it on these lists, and doing well, and being well-known in lots of different formats out there amongst the everybody. Yeah. Okay. So again, for a little deeper dive into ginger, follow the link in the show notes over to episode 227, and we’ll get a lot more there. We also have an hour-long profile, a different one, about ginger in our Materia Medica course. And in fact on the page for the Materia Medica course, there’s a preview. And the preview is that video all about ginger. So, even if you don’t go ahead and buy the Materia Medica course and dive right in, you can get that entry on ginger. You can check that out. But I hope that you will consider the Materia Medica course because it’s always really helpful to study the herbs in depth. To study one herb and say I want to know everything that I can do with that plant. I want to know all of its actions, really get nuanced about its flavor, different ways we can apply it and work with it, different reasons we might have for calling on it. To just really dive in. Because It helps you to see an herb not only in one of those boxes, but to break out and to expand that vision. So, we find this to be a really, really helpful practice. The Materia Medica course has detailed profiles of a hundred medicinal plants.

Ryn (29:38):
And like all of the things we offer, this is a self-paced video course primarily. You can also just get the audio files and download those. Put them on your phone. Take a walk in the forest or chop some ginger as you prepare that into your own honey infusion while you listen and learn about it. All of our courses also come with access to twice weekly live Q&A sessions with me and Katja. Lifetime access to the current material and any material we add to the course in the future. We’ve got discussion threads in each course. You ask your questions right as you learn. We’ve got an active student community, which is like Facebook, but better because it’s herbal. And it’s a separate app on your phone and everything. We’ve got study guides for you. We’ve got quizzes. We’ve got a capstone assignment at the end of each major course. So, lots of different ways to enhance and to deepen your learning. That’s really our goal with the online program is to make it easy for you to learn. To reach people who learn in different ways. To provide material in a variety of formats. And to be available to you to answer your questions directly and to help you out so you can advance here. So anyway, there will be a link to that in the show notes, and I do hope that you check it out. All right, everybody. That’s it for this episode. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Drink some tea. Eat some beets. And enjoy all of the wonders that ginger can bring. And we’ll be back soon.