A viral post says frankincense kills cancer cells without hurting healthy ones. The lab results behind it are real, and so is the gap between a lab dish and a person. Here's what the studies found and how people use frankincense safely.
The tea plant was first grown in China thousands of years ago, and a Japanese monk wrote in 1211 that tea was a medicine for long life. Today green tea is one of the world's most-loved daily drinks, and its leaf and extracts are some of the most-studied plant compounds there are.
A knobbly green gourd that is everyday food from India and China to the Philippines, and the famously bitter "cerasee" bush tea of Jamaica and the Caribbean. Few plants are used in as many traditional kitchens and medicine systems at once.
A small golden seed that has flavoured curries and fed nursing mothers for thousands of years, from ancient Egypt to India. Its maple-syrup aroma is the same one that famously lingers on the skin of people who take it.
That 3 p.m. crash, the shaky hunger, the sugar cravings: they often trace back to how your meals hit your blood sugar. Here are the everyday habits and the herbs traditions have leaned on for centuries to smooth the ride, plus who needs to be careful.
The fragrant resin of the frankincense tree, burned in temples for thousands of years and used in Ayurveda for stiff, aching joints. Today it's one of the most-studied herbs for joint comfort.
A small woodland plant of eastern North America with a bright-yellow root, used by Cherokee, Iroquois and other Indigenous nations for sore eyes, wounds and as a yellow dye. It became one of the best-known remedies of 19th-century herbal medicine, and is now so heavily harvested that it's a protected, at-risk species, so where it comes from matters.
A bright yellow summer flower named after St. John, gathered around Midsummer and steeped in oil until it turns blood-red. Europe has used it for low spirits, nerves and skin for centuries, and today it's one of the most-studied herbs for mood. It also has more drug interactions than almost any other herb, so this page starts its Safety section there.
One of the oldest tree species on earth, long planted beside Buddhist temples in China and now grown on city streets across Canada. Its fan-shaped leaves became one of Europe's best-known herbal medicines for memory and circulation.
Food-grade diatomaceous earth is a fine white powder made from fossilized algae, sold for garden pests and stirred into water by some detoxers for "parasites" and "heavy metals". Members get the full entry: where the idea comes from, what the research actually shows (spoiler: very little in people), and the breathing risk that matters more than any claimed benefit.
