Summary

Food and herbal medicine are not two separate things. A lot of what is in your kitchen has a medicinal action, and a lot of what a herbalist prescribes started out as food. This post explains why I ask what you eat before I prescribe anything, what the everyday plants in your cooking actually do, and what herbal medicine adds when food is not enough.

Key takeaways

• What you eat is one of the first things I ask about, because it affects everything else.
• Ginger and turmeric have both lowered blood markers of inflammation in trials.
• Bitter foods like artichoke and chicory have been used for slow, heavy digestion for centuries.
• Eating shiitake mushrooms for four weeks changed immune measures in a trial. That was food, not an extract.
• Food lays the foundation, and herbs build on it.

People who know me well know that good food matters to me. When I was choosing a school for my daughters, the food on offer was one of the things that ruled certain schools out. My patients soon learn that I take an interest in what they eat, because it is one of the first things I ask about. If someone is chronically unwell and her diet is not supporting her, herbs on their own will only take her so far.

I ask everyone, and we go through a normal week together. You may have been told that what you eat makes no difference to whatever you are dealing with. That has not been my experience in more than twenty years of practice, and it is not what the research says either.

Why I ask about food first

There are five areas I look at with everyone: what you eat, how much you move, how you sleep, the people around you, and how you cope with pressure. They all matter, and they all affect each other.

Food is the one I ask about first because you decide on it three times a day. You can change it today without waiting for anything. It can also be the hardest of the five to change, because you are not changing one meal. You are changing the habits of a lifetime, and often everyone else’s in the house too.

So one of my first questions is not about food at all. It is about how ready you feel to make changes, because that tells me how much to suggest and how quickly. Small changes that last are worth more than a big change that does not, and we go at the pace that suits you.

What is already in your kitchen

The herbs a herbalist uses and the herbs you cook with overlap far more than most people realise. A good number of the plants in my dispensary are also in your spice rack, and you have probably been using them for years without thinking of them as medicine. Herbalists describe plants by what they do in the body, and those descriptions are older than any trial. A warming herb, a bitter herb, a herb that moves the circulation or soothes an irritated lining. Once you know the action, you start to see it in your own cooking.

The spices

Ginger is one of my favourite plants, and I find a use for it often. It is warming and stimulating, so it gets things moving, whether that is sluggish digestion, poor circulation to the hands and feet, or the heavy, stuck feeling that comes with a cold. It also settles nausea, which is why it has been given to travellers and pregnant women for centuries. And, because it calms inflammation, research has caught up with it: across 16 trials in over a thousand people, ginger lowered the inflammatory markers measured in a blood test. Grated into a stir fry, sliced into hot water or dried into a spice mix, it all counts.

Turmeric is a warming, bitter and anti-inflammatory root, used across Asia for joints, digestion and the liver for thousands of years. Most of the research on it has been done with curcumin capsules, which is one compound taken out of the root and concentrated, and in those trials inflammatory markers came down. The spice in your curry is the whole root with all of its compounds working together. Both have their place, and which one suits you depends on what is going on.

Rosemary and chilli are both circulatory stimulants. Rosemary is warming and aromatic, and it lifts the circulation to the head, which is why it has an old reputation for memory and for clearing a dull, heavy feeling. It also eases indigestion and gut spasm, and its European monograph records both of those uses, along with a rosemary bath for aching muscles and cold hands and feet. Chilli works on the nerves that carry pain when it is put on the skin, and its monograph lists it for muscle pain such as low back pain, in the stronger category a herb can hold, because the trials behind it were judged good enough.

Horseradish is a pungent, heating root, and anyone who has eaten a spoonful knows what it does to blocked sinuses. Herbalists use it for exactly that, to clear catarrh from the airways, and it has a long documented use across Europe for infections of the airways and the urinary tract. The compounds that give it its bite are the same ones that do the work.

The foods

Garlic and onions are warming, pungent and antimicrobial, and both have been used against infection for as long as there have been records. Garlic in particular also has a strong reputation for the heart and the circulation, and here the research is broad: across more than a hundred trials, garlic lowered cholesterol, triglycerides and blood sugar, and raised HDL. That is ordinary cooking doing that.

The bitter foods have largely dropped out of our diets, and they are unlikely to come back, because plant breeders have spent decades breeding the bitterness out of vegetables in favour of sweeter tasting varieties. Artichoke, chicory, dandelion leaves and rocket still taste bitter because the breeders have left them alone, and the bitterness is the action. A bitter taste on the tongue stimulates the whole digestive system, from saliva to stomach acid to bile, which is why bitters have been taken before meals for centuries and why the liver benefits from them. Artichoke leaf has a European monograph for bloating, wind and the heavy, slow feeling after a meal. The artichoke you eat is a milder form of the same plant.

Mushrooms support the immune system, and this is one of the few places where the evidence is at the amount you would actually cook with. Healthy adults who ate a modest daily portion of shiitake for four weeks showed a rise in immune cell activity and a fall in inflammation. That was food, not an extract.

Okra and aubergine are demulcents. They contain mucilage, the slippery substance that coats and soothes an irritated gut lining, which is the same reason herbalists use marshmallow root and slippery elm. Those plants simply contain more of it.

Where herbs come in

Food and herbs are not the same thing. Cooking herbs are mild enough to eat every day, while medicinal herbs contain constituents that food does not, so they are taken in much smaller amounts, often daily, in the way a supplement would be. Herbal medicine from a herbalist works by matching the plant, or more often the formula, to the person and to what is actually going on in her body. So when I work out a food plan with someone, I will often suggest appropriate herbs too.

Where this leaves you

As the saying goes, we are what we eat, and if what we eat has had the goodness taken out of it, your body has less to work with. A lot of what is sold as food now has been processed until very little of nutritional value is left. Anything made to last for months on a shelf has usually had the parts that spoil removed, and the parts that spoil are the nutrients.

So the question is not whether food matters, it is which foods you choose. A good deal of what is already in your kitchen has a medicinal action, and using more of the herbs and spices you already cook with is one of the easiest places to begin.