...Have A Poisonous Nature To Them! The aforementioned foxglove is a spendorlishous cardiac failure inducing plant...Hyacinth, Narcissus, Daffodil bulbs if you are talking the household variety these are excellent for bringing on bouts of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and in the proper volume can prove fatal. When I host a lavish dinner party or night of bridge I like to toss in a handful or two of Rosary Pea seeds and castor bean pods into the nut bowls and sprinkle a few into the dinner salads. Delightful to watch the insuing retching and convulsions of those unlucky to have consumed these devilish morsels! A single Rosary Pea seed has caused irreversable central nervous system shutdowns and death. And of course it only takes but one or two Castor Bean seeds to prove lethal for adults.-Ahhhh...How I do love The Bad Plants and The Bad Things You Can Do With Them!
MOOO-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!

Evil_Bob

... and remind me to turn down invitations to your poker parties. I'm out of souls to sell, and if you play strip and I lose, the sight will scare the demons back to Paradise.

:)

It is brimming over with the extracted juice of Bleeding Heart roots.Yum Yum In The Tum-Tum!
I know what are are thinking; "EB, those have been shown to be deadly if consumed"... and you are correct....bad for livestock, delicious in a tall smoothie. To You Good Sir, Cheers!

Evil_Bob

Lol. I knew the names of all the plants (except kelp, which when used medicinally is referred to by its cute medieval name- bladderwrack). I was giving the quickie version for anyone skimming my response to see whether there was anything worth reading. lol

Stevia, I was thinking one thing and typing another. Stevia is supposed to be 30 sweeter than SUGAR, not honey. I don't know what the conversion rate between sugar and honey is, but I always figured that honey was sweeter. Maybe not. Also, I only slightly comprehend "science speak". Was the article claiming that stevia is being used to TREAT diabetes, either as a treatment or a cure? Because if so, this is definitely new to me. I have been out of the herb business for a few years now, and all I knew was that stevia will not cause problems for diabetics. For example, my father was diabetic, and he could sweeten his tea with stevia without a problem. If that is what the article is getting at, that's fascinating. My favorite consipracy theory involves stevia, BTW. lol

Yes, there's a reason the plant stores sell foxglove with a tag that says it is deer resistant.

For what it's worth, "bladderwrack" is strictly a rockweed, not a kelp. There's a reason, but that's more pedantry than I can manage right now when I'm supposed to be proofreading DNA sequences.

What I saw was that one of the purified Stevia extracts is ca. 250 times sweeter than sucrose. Table sugar is sucrose, honey is glucose. Sucrose is sweeter, but I'd have to look it up to say how much. The "30 times sweeter than sugar" might refer to the plant itself, not one of its extracts.

Was the article claiming that stevia is being used to TREAT diabetes

It was suggesting that Stevia extracts should be investigated as a treatment for at least some forms of diabetes, because they are able to stimulate insulin production and lower blood glucose levels in mice. That's more than being diabetic-safe, and less than being the latest miracule pill from Pfizer.

I'm going to have to blog about the disconnect between the public conception of scientific studies touted in the media as "definitive miracles" and the realities of the research ... :)

Interesting to know about bladderwrack. In the herbal community, there is sometimes a bit of confusion because so many names were assigned to the same herb, and some herbs have similar names that have nothing to do with each other. For example, there is boneset, which is Eupatorium perfoliatum. It also has the name "Thoroughwort". But there is a resin which comes from China, and occasionally people call it "boneset" as well. But this one is from Calamus Draco. So, it would not surprise me to hear that this is not a kelp, and that though the term is used in the herbal community to refer to any kind of greenish thing that comes from wet areas, that in ACTUALITY, it comes from only one plant. Confusing, I know.

Now it makes more sense. The extracts would be more concentrated. And even then, it would matter what method of extraction they used. Tinctures, essential oils, etc. And yes, the 30 times sweeter than sugar would be based on a standardized version of the raw plant. When herbs are standardized, they have the levels of different chemicals checked within the plant, and they grow it under controllable conditions so that the amounts of the chemicals do not change. Otherwise, you are subject to bad crops.

That's what I figured the article was saying, but I wanted to make sure. This is fascinating news, and no doubt it needs tested much more before they can count on it, but this sounds very promising.

Yes, blog about it sometime. I'll read. :D (You'll find that I am the most hesitant herbalist in existence. Several years ago, EVERYBODY heard that St. John's Wort can cure depression. So I started selling a lot of St. John's Wort. Frankly, there are a lot better treatments for depression, and if you MUST go the herbal route, then there are even better herbs, although I can't recall what they are now. Yet people were still depressed. It was frantic almost, the way they bought it.)

The birders have a consistent and reliable system of common names. Almost no one else does. For example, I would tell classes about bracken fern (a true fern), asparagus fern (a flowering plant - which actually are species of Asparagus), and air fern (dried and dyed red seaweed). Herbalist bladderwrack is almost certainly Ascophyllum nodosum, though it might also contain species of Fucus.

There's a lot of promising stuff that doesn't pan out. Reports in the 70s suggested that at least some of the stevosides are mildly mutagenic.

Don't get me started on depression and the various ways in which corporate America has exploited it. One way of looking at it: the American obsession with personal liberty has made us all into little boxes that have lost the ability to interact with each other without ducking into holes, or exploding. No wonder we're depressed ...

... about 137, maybe.

:)