{"id":2113,"date":"2024-01-12T23:30:54","date_gmt":"2024-01-13T07:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/?p=2113"},"modified":"2024-01-12T23:30:54","modified_gmt":"2024-01-13T07:30:54","slug":"pyrrolizidine-alkaloids-a-lesson-from-the-caterpillar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/blog\/2024\/01\/12\/pyrrolizidine-alkaloids-a-lesson-from-the-caterpillar\/","title":{"rendered":"Pyrrolizidine Alkaloids – a Lesson From the Caterpillar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally published over at Biblical Natural Health Coaching.<\/a><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s article takes the concept of \u201cOne Health\u201d, and turns it on it\u2019s head. The string pullers want you to be scared of zoonotic diseases, also known as diseases that spread from critter to human,\u00a0and they have plans to use these diseases to create pandemics<\/a>\u00a0to feed an agenda that turns up the heat on climate change while following established paranoia around depopulating the earth of mankind. However, it appears so far, that those who began working on \u201cOne Health\u201d over a decade ago, may have forgotten that while the animal kingdom does get sick from various ailments, medications exist in the wild to treat those ailments.<\/p>\n

\"cat\"The world of natural health isn\u2019t just for humans. Pet stores sell \u201ccat grass\u201d, a type of wild oat or barley that aids felines in digestive upsets. Dogs have been observed eating grass for similar reasons on occasion. We\u2019ve observed my daughter\u2019s horse eating prickly lettuce and white heath aster whenever she\u2019s experiencing pain and wanting to medicate herself. She will willingly eat yarrow when she needs an antibiotic, but won\u2019t eat it otherwise.<\/p>\n

Dr Mercola\u2019s writer: Tessa Lena,\u00a0found studies about various other birds, animals and insects that self-medicate for various ailments,<\/a>\u00a0and wrote about them back in June 2023.\u00a0 She ran across studies where animals have been known to medicate other animals.<\/p>\n

CTV ran an article January 3rd, t<\/a>alking about a particular ant that doesn\u2019t merely self-medicate, but administers first aid and wound treatment to other ants.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t agree with various viewpoints Tessa shares, particularly when she waxes hot against anything remotely to do with the Christian faith. Occasionally though, she\u2019ll share something useful. As she noted from various reports by others who have gone into traditional tribal medicine to learn about how their medicine developed, one of the ways mankind has learned about medicinal plants IS by observing what animals use to medicate themselves.<\/p>\n

Due to recent research ourselves, my daughter and I have learned over the past year that what some researchers claim is poisonous, is only so above certain thresholds and ratios, while below those thresholds, compounds and plants containing them, are actually medicinal in nature. One of those compounds was noted in Tessa\u2019s article:<\/p>\n

\u201cWoolly bear caterpillars (Grammia incorrupta) are sometimes lethally infected by tachinid flies. If infected, they ingest plant toxins called pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which confers resistance against the flies. Notably, parasitized caterpillars are more likely than non-parasitized caterpillars to specifically ingest large amounts of pyrrolizidine alkaloids, and excessive ingestion of these toxins reduces the survival of nonparasitized caterpillars.4\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pyrrolizidine alkaloids are found in plants local to our area known as Bugloss and Hound\u2019s Tongue. These two plants are quite similar in appearance, and not to be used as food! The reason is in the above-named alkaloid. However, when taken in small doses, the leaves from these plants can treat colds, flus, act as a sedative, and provide other benefits. Getting to the bottom of why researchers kept claiming these plants as poisonous sent my daughter in circles until finally she landed on a dosage problem. If you were to eat 2 cups of dried leaf matter, you\u2019d kill yourself inside 6 months! This is how long it takes for that much pyrrolizidine alkaloid to kill your liver and by extension, you! Some researchers say this is due to the fact that the damage being done to the liver often can\u2019t be picked up by current diagnostic tests, and by the time it does show on the read-out, the person is dead shortly after.<\/p>\n

The liver is responsible for two phases of blood cleansing, and if a given toxin can\u2019t be removed by the second phase, the liver stores it away for later removal. Some toxins can\u2019t be removed very well, and destroy the liver.<\/p>\n

Based on a cattle study,<\/a>\u00a0and assuming a\u00a0136lb calf is roughly 61kg in weight,<\/a>\u00a0the researchers fed calves 3mg\/kg of PA per day. If we take the above newborn calf weight, we get around 183mg which is a little under 20% of a gram, or .06 (1\/16th) of a teaspoon. Feeding this out for 182 days caused development of megalocytosis.<\/p>\n

If we take the above newborn calf\u2019s weight again, we move to the next test they did, which was to feed out a single dose of 60mg\/kg of bodyweight, or around 3,660 mg (roughly 3.6kg) which caused death within 48 hours.<\/p>\n

This is because pyrrolixidine alkaloids oxidize into\u00a0nitric oxide<\/a>\u00a0when they get processed by the liver. As beneficial as nitric oxide is, too much of a good thing turns bad and must be kept in check or damage occurs. Antioxidants are able to help protect the liver and prevent the alkaloids from oxidizing and causing damage. Ancient medicinal texts always tell the reader to take Hounds Tongue with a strong anti-oxidant such as blended in wine for example. Lethal dosages of Bugloss and Hound\u2019s Tongue observed in cattle take place over a 48 hour time span.<\/p>\n

The first question then, is why anyone would sit down to eat 2 cups of dried leaf matter, or the equivalent of a large salad serving bowl, and eat it in one sitting?! This visual comes from the fact that it takes ingesting 5% of average human body weight to get enough toxin into your body to kill you! So. . . why would you eat that much of a single food to begin with, at one meal?!<\/p>\n

Secondly, if it seriously takes that much to be lethally toxic, what does that say for amounts less than that? This is a saner question to ask, because it is important to understand that pyrrolizidine alkaloids don\u2019t leave the body easily and can build up over time. You would need to eat a decent amount of the toxin several days a week to eventually kill your liver and yourself within 6 months.<\/p>\n

So is there a safe level at which pyrrolizidine alkaloids can be ingested? The caterpillar would seem to say so, as do various historical writings on using Bugloss and Hound\u2019s Tongue to treat various ailments. What\u2019s important is to know when a plant is food and medicine, and when a plant is just medicine! St. John\u2019s Wort for example is not a food, it\u2019s a medicine. Horsetail is a medicine, not a food, and there are other herbs out there in this category as well.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

One of the things people will talk about, and mostly for personal tastebud preference or some religious observance guiding food harvesting practices, is the idea of what time of year being best to harvest a given plant for food or medicine.\u00a0 Occasionally, a reason that isn\u2019t guided by religious observance or personal preference arrives, and in the case of Hound\u2019s Tongue and PA concentrations,\u00a0time of year is very important for lowering levels<\/a>\u00a0of harmful PA\u2019s in the plant matter you harvest.<\/p>\n

When you start looking at studies done looking at PA concentrations in foods consumed every day by people around the world, the lists get eye-popping!\u00a0 PA\u2019s show up in many foods we eat on a regular basis, but mostly at levels so low that we\u2019d have to eat quite a bit each day to reach low-level poisoning levels that caused trouble for calves in the cattle study mentioned earlier.\u00a0 I\u2019ll show you another chart now, and I want you to look at the listings under the Herbal tea blends section.<\/a>\u00a0 Ashtree wildcrafting creates wildcrafted herbal tea blends from wild plants growing around the Central Okanagan area.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing to discover that herbal tea blends have far less PA\u2019s present than Green tea, which has a huge following out there.\u00a0 Many encourage the drinking of green tea every single day!\u00a0 The tannins in the tea plant are strong enough that technically-speaking, such teas should have warnings that drinking such teas daily could cause kidney damage, but most of the time, such warnings don\u2019t show up on commercial packaging.\u00a0 After looking at this chart below, potential liver damage should also be on the packaging, because many like their black and green teas several times per day.<\/p>\n

\"pa<\/a><\/p>\n

\"medicines\"Returning to the discussion around medications, of which Hound\u2019s Tongue should firmly be classified, medicines are to be taken in certain doses for certain conditions, at certain frequencies for certain lengths of time and no more. Even the very common oil infusion everyone loves, Oil of Oregano, when taken at medicinal doses of 3 to 4 times per day for up to 7 days, requires you to take a break after that 7 day period to allow your gut to rebuild it\u2019s bacteria colonies and prevent the development of ulcers. Carvacrol (also present in Thyme) doesn\u2019t kill off as many good bacteria has synthetic antibiotics do, but there is enough attrition that the user should take a break for a while to allow for rebuilding in the gut. This is especially true if you had your appendix removed and you populate your gut with pre and probiotics.<\/p>\n

Note that even for the caterpillar, excessive intake of pyrrolizidine alkaloids can be lethal to them too if they try to eat it when they are not fighting parasites.<\/p>\n

There is a time and place for various plants and foods that God has given us. While it is true that what animals eat, we sometimes can\u2019t, and that what we eat can even kill critters (chocolate\/chillies anyone?), if we are careful, we can learn what is safe for them and us and use the information wisely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published over at Biblical Natural Health Coaching. Today\u2019s article takes the concept of \u201cOne Health\u201d, and turns it on it\u2019s head. The string pullers want you to be scared of zoonotic diseases, also known as diseases that spread from critter to human,\u00a0and they have plans to use these diseases to create pandemics\u00a0to feed an agenda that turns up the heat on climate change while following established paranoia around depopulating the earth of mankind. However, it appears so far, that those who began working on \u201cOne Health\u201d over a decade ago, may have forgotten that while the animal kingdom does get sick from various ailments, medications exist in the wild to treat those ailments. The world of natural health isn\u2019t just for humans. Pet stores sell \u201ccat grass\u201d, a type of wild oat or barley that aids felines in digestive upsets. Dogs have been observed eating grass for similar reasons on occasion. We\u2019ve observed my daughter\u2019s horse eating prickly lettuce and white heath aster whenever she\u2019s experiencing pain and wanting to medicate herself. She will willingly eat yarrow when she needs an antibiotic, but won\u2019t eat it otherwise. Dr Mercola\u2019s writer: Tessa Lena,\u00a0found studies about various other birds, animals and insects that self-medicate for various ailments,\u00a0and wrote about them back in June 2023.\u00a0 She ran across studies where animals have been known to medicate other animals. CTV ran an article January 3rd, talking about a particular ant that doesn\u2019t merely self-medicate, but administers first aid and wound treatment to other ants. I don\u2019t agree with various viewpoints Tessa shares, particularly when she waxes hot against anything remotely to do with the Christian faith. Occasionally though, she\u2019ll share something useful. As she noted from various reports by others who have gone into traditional tribal medicine to learn about how their medicine developed, one of the ways mankind has learned about medicinal plants IS by observing what animals use to medicate themselves. Due to recent research ourselves, my daughter and I have learned over the past year that what some researchers claim is poisonous, is only so above certain thresholds and ratios, while below those thresholds, compounds and plants containing them, are actually medicinal in nature. One of those compounds was noted in Tessa\u2019s article: \u201cWoolly bear caterpillars (Grammia incorrupta) are sometimes lethally infected by tachinid flies. If infected, they ingest plant toxins called pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which confers resistance against the flies. Notably, parasitized caterpillars are more likely than non-parasitized caterpillars to specifically ingest large amounts of pyrrolizidine alkaloids, and excessive ingestion of these toxins reduces the survival of nonparasitized caterpillars.4\u201d Pyrrolizidine alkaloids are found in plants local to our area known as Bugloss and Hound\u2019s Tongue. These two plants are quite similar in appearance, and not to be used as food! The reason is in the above-named alkaloid. However, when taken in small doses, the leaves from these plants can treat colds, flus, act as a sedative, and provide other benefits. Getting to the bottom of why researchers kept claiming these plants as poisonous sent my daughter in circles until finally she landed on a dosage problem. If you were to eat 2 cups of dried leaf matter, you\u2019d kill yourself inside 6 months! This is how long it takes for that much pyrrolizidine alkaloid to kill your liver and by extension, you! Some researchers say this is due to the fact that the damage being done to the liver often can\u2019t be picked up by current diagnostic tests, and by the time it does show on the read-out, the person is dead shortly after. The liver is responsible for two phases of blood cleansing, and if a given toxin can\u2019t be removed by the second phase, the liver stores it away for later removal. Some toxins can\u2019t be removed very well, and destroy the liver. Based on a cattle study,\u00a0and assuming a\u00a0136lb calf is roughly 61kg in weight,\u00a0the researchers fed calves 3mg\/kg of PA per day. If we take the above newborn calf weight, we get around 183mg which is a little under 20% of a gram, or .06 (1\/16th) of a teaspoon. Feeding this out for 182 days caused development of megalocytosis. If we take the above newborn calf\u2019s weight again, we move to the next test they did, which was to feed out a single dose of 60mg\/kg of bodyweight, or around 3,660 mg (roughly 3.6kg) which caused death within 48 hours. This is because pyrrolixidine alkaloids oxidize into\u00a0nitric oxide\u00a0when they get processed by the liver. As beneficial as nitric oxide is, too much of a good thing turns bad and must be kept in check or damage occurs. Antioxidants are able to help protect the liver and prevent the alkaloids from oxidizing and causing damage. Ancient medicinal texts always tell the reader to take Hounds Tongue with a strong anti-oxidant such as blended in wine for example. Lethal dosages of Bugloss and Hound\u2019s Tongue observed in cattle take place over a 48 hour time span. The first question then, is why anyone would sit down to eat 2 cups of dried leaf matter, or the equivalent of a large salad serving bowl, and eat it in one sitting?! This visual comes from the fact that it takes ingesting 5% of average human body weight to get enough toxin into your body to kill you! So. . . why would you eat that much of a single food to begin with, at one meal?! Secondly, if it seriously takes that much to be lethally toxic, what does that say for amounts less than that? This is a saner question to ask, because it is important to understand that pyrrolizidine alkaloids don\u2019t leave the body easily and can build up over time. You would need to eat a decent amount of the toxin several days a week to eventually kill your liver and yourself within 6 months. So is there a safe level at which pyrrolizidine alkaloids can be ingested? The caterpillar would seem to say so, as do various historical writings on using Bugloss and Hound\u2019s Tongue to treat various ailments. What\u2019s important is to know when a plant is food and medicine, and when a plant is just medicine! St. John\u2019s Wort for example is not a food, it\u2019s a medicine. Horsetail is a medicine, not a food, and there are other herbs out there in this category as well. One of the things people will talk about, and mostly for personal tastebud preference or some religious observance guiding food harvesting practices, is the idea of what time of year being best to harvest a given plant for food or medicine.\u00a0 Occasionally, a reason that isn\u2019t guided by religious observance or personal preference arrives, and in the case of Hound\u2019s Tongue and PA concentrations,\u00a0time of year is very important for lowering levels\u00a0of harmful PA\u2019s in the plant matter you harvest. When you start looking at studies done looking at PA concentrations in foods consumed every day by people around the world, the lists get eye-popping!\u00a0 PA\u2019s show up in many foods we eat on a regular basis, but mostly at levels so low that we\u2019d have to eat quite a bit each day to reach low-level poisoning levels that caused trouble for calves in the cattle study mentioned earlier.\u00a0 I\u2019ll show you another chart now, and I want you to look at the listings under the Herbal tea blends section.\u00a0 Ashtree wildcrafting creates wildcrafted herbal tea blends from wild plants growing around the Central Okanagan area.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing to discover that herbal tea blends have far less PA\u2019s present than Green tea, which has a huge following out there.\u00a0 Many encourage the drinking of green tea every single day!\u00a0 The tannins in the tea plant are strong enough that technically-speaking, such teas should have warnings that drinking such teas daily could cause kidney damage, but most of the time, such warnings don\u2019t show up on commercial packaging.\u00a0 After looking at this chart below, potential liver damage should also be on the packaging, because many like their black and green teas several times per day. Returning to the discussion around medications, of which Hound\u2019s Tongue should firmly be classified, medicines are to be taken in certain doses for certain conditions, at certain frequencies for certain lengths of time and no more. Even the very common oil infusion everyone loves, Oil of Oregano, when taken at medicinal doses of 3 to 4 times per day for up to 7 days, requires you to take a break after that 7 day period to allow your gut to rebuild it\u2019s bacteria colonies and prevent the development of ulcers. Carvacrol (also present in Thyme) doesn\u2019t kill off as many good bacteria has synthetic antibiotics do, but there is enough attrition that the user should take a break for a while to allow for rebuilding in the gut. This is especially true if you had your appendix removed and you populate your gut with pre and probiotics. Note that even for the caterpillar, excessive intake of pyrrolizidine alkaloids can be lethal to them too if they try to eat it when they are not fighting parasites. There is a time and place for various plants and foods that God has given us. While it is true that what animals eat, we sometimes can\u2019t, and that what we eat can even kill critters (chocolate\/chillies anyone?), if we are careful, we can learn what is safe for them and us and use the information wisely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":300,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[97,89,86,85,96,90,94,91,95,92,87,84,88,98,49,93],"class_list":["post-2113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-ailments","tag-alkaloids","tag-animal-kingdom","tag-animals","tag-bugloss","tag-caterpillar","tag-certain-doxes","tag-historical","tag-hound-s-tongue","tag-liver","tag-medication","tag-one-health","tag-plants","tag-pyrrolizidine-alkaloids","tag-toxic","tag-toxin"],"rttpg_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip.jpg",2576,1932,false],"landscape":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip.jpg",2576,1932,false],"portraits":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip.jpg",2576,1932,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip-300x225.jpg",300,225,true],"large":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip-1024x768.jpg",960,720,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip.jpg",1536,1152,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip.jpg",2048,1536,false],"graceful-post-column-thumbnail":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip.jpg",700,525,false],"graceful-slider-full-thumbnail":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip.jpg",1024,768,false],"graceful-full-thumbnail":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip.jpg",1140,855,false],"graceful-column-thumbnail":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip.jpg",440,330,false],"graceful-small-thumbnail":["https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/catnip.jpg",75,56,false]},"rttpg_author":{"display_name":"TeaMaster","author_link":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/blog\/author\/atwadmin\/"},"rttpg_comment":0,"rttpg_category":"General<\/a>","rttpg_excerpt":"Originally published over at Biblical Natural Health Coaching. Today\u2019s article takes the concept of \u201cOne Health\u201d, and turns it on it\u2019s head. The string pullers want you to be scared of zoonotic diseases, also known as diseases that spread from critter to human,\u00a0and they have plans to use these diseases to create pandemics\u00a0to feed an…","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashtreewildcrafting.ca\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}