Thyme
The kitchen herb behind many old-fashioned cough syrups and mouthwashes. Thyme has been used for chesty coughs, sore throats and digestion since ancient Greece, and it's still an approved traditional cough remedy in Europe.
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Calendula
The bright orange "pot marigold" of cottage gardens, used for centuries to soothe sore skin and dress wounds. Today it's one of the best-known herbs in creams, salves and baby balms.
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Bitter Melon
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.
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Goldenseal
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.
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Maca
A hardy root from the high Peruvian Andes, grown at around 4,000 metres for up to 2,000 years. Andean families have long eaten it as a staple food and an energizing tonic, and today it's one of the most popular "superfood" roots for energy and vitality.
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Colloidal Silver
Colloidal silver is one of the most talked-about "natural antibiotics" online. Before you buy it, read why health regulators in Canada and the US warn against taking it, and what silver's real history in medicine looks like.
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Quercetin
Quercetin is the most common flavonoid in the human diet, the yellow pigment behind onion skins and apple peels. Here's how naturopaths use it, the traditional herbs that are rich in it, and what the research shows.
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Omega-3 Fish Oil
Fish oil carries EPA and DHA, the long-chain omega-3 fats found in oily fish. Here's how folk medicine and naturopaths have used it, from cod liver oil for "aches and pains" to heart and brain support, and what the big trials found.
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Zinc
Zinc is a trace mineral your body uses in hundreds of enzymes, from immune cells to skin repair. Here's how traditional medicine and naturopaths use it, what the research shows, and why more isn't better.
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Vitamin D3 + K2
A hundred years ago, doctors found that cod liver oil and sunshine could straighten the bowed legs of children with rickets. Twenty years later a dentist found a mysterious "Activator X" in spring butter. Here's why people now take vitamin D3 and K2 together, what the studies actually show, and the one medicine that makes K2 a serious matter.
