The Prepper Broadcasting Network - ICFA: The Herbal Medic Sam Coffman on Fire Cider and Cold Remedies

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

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It came from the archives! It came from the archives! Transcription by CastingWords for disaster, also to help you live your life a little more fully, and to help you be the best possible person, even in the worst possible circumstances, should those befall us. I am a former Green Beret, or Special Forces medic in the U.S. Army. I have over 25 years' experience both living and teaching survival and survival concepts to civilian and military. I also have over 20 years' experience with plant medicine as an herbalist. In today's podcast, I would like to discuss a few subjects about the cold and flu season and dealing with that using herbs and nutrition and even lifestyle. Now, I know that I have discussed some of these subjects in the past.

If you go to my archives on Prepper Broadcasting, of course, you'll find there's a podcast on viruses and herbs. There's a podcast that kind of is more specific towards the cold and flu type stuff, upper respiratory type stuff. So I know that some of this will be a little bit of a repeat, but I'm going to add some stuff in here that you haven't heard before. One of the things I'm going to talk about is going to be the concept of fire cider and how good that is for the immune system, especially in cold and flu season, how warming it is and sort of the energetics behind it, the energetics behind working with cold and flu illnesses, acute viruses, especially of the upper respiratory tract,

coughs and runny nose, et cetera. I'm going to talk a little bit more about things I haven't talked about in the past relating to sinusitis. So you're going to get new material here. This isn't just a repeat of stuff I've done in the past. And I want to specifically talk about fire cider, too, because I think there's sort of a political storm that's brewed in the herbalist world about fire cider. And I think it's important to bring that out.

I'd like to share that, and I'd like to share some of my own personal, of course, opinions, not only on that matter, but also on the actual ingredients in fire cider itself, and share with you how to make your own fire cider. It's very easy to do, and many of you already may know this, know how to make it, but I want to share some ingredients that I use that you might not use and that most people don't. And then also a couple of fire cider makers who I think are really good. They just do a great job with some really good quality fire cider. And then I kind of want to do a hall of shame type of thing as well for another maker

that's really done something I think is very, they've really done a disservice, not just to the herbal community but to everybody by pulling sort of a Nestle corporation type thing where they try to trademark a concept or trademark something that's been around for thousands

of years and this is a similar thing to if you're familiar with Nestle trying to trademark the usage of nettle's leaf, for instance, and other herbs as well. Not the plant, because they can't get away with that, but they're trying to trademark the usage of it and say, you know what? Only we can use this herb in this particular way. You can't. So this is really kind of a similar concept, except it's a small company, relatively small company, and it's people that should know better. So I think it's fitting to do kind of a Hall of Shame thing on that as well.

I try not to get negative about things. Usually on my podcast I try not to talk smack about other people, but I think these people really need to hear it because as the general public, I want to tell you what my opinion is to warn you away from that product. Because I think that the strength in herbalism for all of us and the strength in herbal medicine that I'm trying to share with you, the reason it's strong is because we realize it's open source. It's nature's version of open source. It's for everybody.

There is no such thing as my herbs, not your herbs. Now, I make people pay me for my time because if I didn't, I couldn't do what I do. If I had to work full-time doing other things, I could never be anything close to what I'm able to do. So because of that, you get my information and you get as much as I can give you for free, but if you were to consult with me, you have to pay for my time. If you come to my school, of course you have to pay for my time. Granted, my costs, I try to keep them very affordable, and I try to be the lowest cost

of what anybody does. I'm right there. I'm right there. We calculate it by actual class hour per person, and it comes out usually ranging somewhere between $7 to $10 per class hour per person for all of our courses, depending on the materials fees and such. Not to get involved in the big cost thing, but my point to this, I don't want you to think, well, yeah, sure, Sam, it's free for everybody, but how come you're charging?

My answer to that is, well, I have free podcasts everywhere. I have free YouTube videos. I have free downloads that you wouldn't believe. If you go to the AHG, the American Herbalist Guild Herbal Medics chapter, free downloads. We have free webinars there. And these are classes by not just myself but by other professional herbalists, free. There's no charge whatsoever.

And it's not because we're trying to sell something, although I wouldn't have anything against you buying my book and buying my things. But what we're trying to do is make sure that this is an open, this is the medicine of the people. So as little as it takes for me to make sure that we survive and we're able to do this full time, that's how much it takes for me. Everything else is, you know, you've got my time. And this is all I do every day.

From the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed, and usually I dream about it, all I work with is the stuff we do at the school, whether it's survival, whether it's my courses, and most of the time it's all about herbal medicine because that's a lifetime of study. I'm always immersed in it, and I always have been, and I always will be. So that is the mentality, I think, of herbalism,

and that's what we all owe, I think, to each other. If it's the people's medicine, then it has to be that way. It can't be something that we categorize and say, only I'm allowed to call this my herbal concoction. This is my proprietary blend. You're not allowed to use those plants. If you look at even my herbal first aid kits, all the ingredients of my herbal first aid kits are open for anybody.

You want to download them, make your own, please do. That's why they're there. If you want to take my first, to buy my first aid kit, which is really not much over the cost it takes to make it, and you want to use it as a springboard to do your own learning, do it. If you never show up in a single class, I mean, that's fine. My only goal is to make sure that herbal medicine is used by everybody, and everybody has the free will. They have the right, the constitutional right as an American, and the human right as somebody who lives on the planet. They have the right to their own medicine and their own plant medicine,

their own relationship to the plant world. We have to have that or we're not going to survive as a species. We have to have that connection to the planet. So this is one part of it. But secondly, we also have to have that right to be able to use our medicine as we see fit. And in order to do that, you need to be informed. You have to have an informed, you need to be able to make informed decisions. So that's what I feel like is my little soapbox that I get on.

And whenever I'm doing a podcast, really that's at the heart of the matter for me. So it just really kind of goads me into being a little bit maybe politically incorrect to some degree, maybe not being quite as not as positive as I like to try to be. I try to keep it really positive on all my podcasts. Maybe I get a little bit off track on this time because this is something that really bothers me and I feel like I want to share that information with everybody. I'll share it right up to the point that I get a cease and desist letter from an attorney or something like that.

There's nothing I'm going to say that would qualify that to happen. But I'm just sharing my own opinions. So that's what we're going to do today. Mostly it's going to be information on cold and flu, and then going to be quite a bit of information as well about fire cider and fire cider tonic and how to make your own. Some of my favorite ingredients that aren't really ingredients you see in a lot of them. And then we'll go ahead and I'll talk about fire cider as a trademark brand versus some of the ones that are out there that I think you should buy. If you're going to buy somebody else's, what you should look for.

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See all the exciting things that Wonder Mill can do for you and what you eat at thewondermill.com. from some of the different energetic medicine disciplines around the world. And one of the places I like to go for this is, of course, as you probably already know, is to Chinese medicine. And I think where we can borrow something that's very useful from Chinese medicine would be in the area of the concept of seasonal change. When the seasons change, anytime the seasons change, you find that you're more vulnerable energetically to becoming sick. And what this means generally is, you know, of course, from spring to summer, summer to fall, fall to winter, winter to spring. But mainly where we really see it, I think, especially in our culture in America, is going

from the warm months into the cold months. So it can be, you know, fall to winter or even, you know, summer, the end of summer into fall or that portion where we start to get enough temperature change that we not only get a change in the temperature in the air, which can be part of this, but also in terms of our behavior culturally. So we find ourselves spending more time inside. We're not outside in the sun as much. There may not be as much sun, less vitamin D,

which is a very important and integral part of our immune system, not outside in the sun as much. There may not be as much sun, less vitamin D, which is a very important and integral part of our immune system. Not just getting the vitamin D through the sun, but also the fact that you not only get the sun in your skin, but you can't wash it off. This is one of the big problems we have in our culture, is we shower too often. And I mean, that's related to why we don't get vitamin D the way that we need to, along with sunscreen and other things that we've done. But if you, I mean, that's related to why we don't get vitamin D the way that we need to, along with sunscreen and other things that we've done. But if you, you know, vitamin D has become one of those things that's kind of a big buzzword in mainstream medicine now. So if you go in for a checkup with a doctor, more than likely he or she is going to ask you or do a check

or find out what your vitamin D levels are. But the funny thing of the matter of this is that we just don't get enough, and when we do get enough, we wash it off our skins. It takes about 24 to 48 hours for that vitamin D to metabolize through our skin that we get from sunlight. So this is one of the things we don't get as we go into the colder months. We're in more enclosed areas. We are more exposed to people who are coughing and sneezing,

so whenever there is a virus that's in the air, it's much more likely to be a higher concentration around the areas that we are. So it becomes something that spreads very rapidly usually. Usually they're respiratory. And so that's what we're going to focus on today really is the respiratory aspect of them. So how do we prevent this? How do we just keep our bodies strong? Let's talk about that first. And I think the standard things that you already are fairly aware of,

the fact that you need to have your body has to, you have to get some sort of exercise. And this is not just because you exercise to help your cardiovascular system and all the other things that we know about exercise, but also because of the fact we need to reduce the adaptogenic or the adrenal input or effect on our body through stress, uncompensated stress. So raised cortisol, raised adrenaline, raised norepinephrine-type influence on our body is going to lower our immune system. That's a fact.

It will lower our immune system. What do a fact. It will lower our immune system. What do we give to somebody who's having an autoimmune or an autoallergic type of attack? We give them some sort of a steroid, right? So cortisol would be an example of that. It helps lower inflammation. It also helps lower our immune system's response to something, especially over time.

So if we're constantly under stress and we have no outlet for that stress and it's uncompensated, and by uncompensated I mean there's no physical activity to compensate for that stress. If we have a fight or flight type of reaction to something, then the stress is happening a couple of different ways. The physiology of it is that it starts in the hypothalamus and either through our central nervous system directly down to our adrenal glands, we get a nervous response, we get a nerve system response, a CNS response, or through hormones from our hypothalamus to our pituitary and

then down to our adrenal glands, we get a hormonal response. We get both of these things. Both of these things affect the amount of cortisol in our body that's going to be moving through our bloodstreams and affecting every cell in our body. They affect the amount of adrenaline, the amount of norepinephrine. So basically, what we would consider a sympathetic fight or flight response to stress. It's going to happen on a constant basis if we are constantly under stress. And so what happens is our adrenals become fatigued after a while. Our body becomes tolerant, more and more tolerant of the hormonal stress,

the hormonal presence throughout the bloodstream, similar to another issue we have. And just for a second, this seems like a tangent, but it's not. But another similar analog to this is the presence of insulin, constantly presence of insulin in our bloodstream if we overeat all the time. We're overeating all the time because we don't get enough nutrition, because our food is not nutrient-dense anymore, because we grow it in absolutely idiotic manners,

and so we really have 30% to 40% less nutrient density in our food now, which means we need more of it. And also because of stress, we eat more. I think also because we're emotionally dependent on food, because we're disconnected from the planet, we eat more. And our body continually needs more insulin. As we eat, we raise our blood sugar, right, in our blood. And what happens?

Our insulin has to kick in. We have to excrete more insulin through our pancreas as a hormone, as an endocrine hormone, and we have to excrete more of that in order to be able to act on the raised glucose levels in our blood so that our cells can take in the glucose and use them to do the things that our cells need to do to keep us alive. So the problem is that we build up a tolerance to that over time. And this is what type 2 diabetes eventually becomes.

As our body keeps releasing more insulin, we become hyperinsulinemic. That means too much insulin in our blood on a consistent basis. And we become tolerant. Well, I think the same thing happens in stress hormones. We get too many stress hormones consistently because we're always under stress and our body starts to become tolerant to it. And pretty soon, we build up sort of a resistance almost to the adrenal hormones or to other hormones in our body as well that are related to stress.

And so by doing so, we no longer have the kind of pulsatile, you know, pulsing-type patterns that we need to be healthy in our body, whereas where hormones go up, hormones go down, right? Hormones go up and our body uses, you know, whether it's the way that our adrenal glands affect the way that we use our blood sugar, which that is part of it too, or whether it's the way that our pancreas responds. All of these different hormones are pulsatile. They're cycles.

And so what happens is instead of a pulsatile up and down and patterns that are what we would consider normal cyclic patterns that we have to go through, just like anything else in our life, we sleep, we're awake, we eat, we do all these things in different patterns that are cycles. Instead of that, we get more of a flat line. It's just a constant hormone constantly out there. So this is what I mean by uncompensated stress. This affects our immune system greatly.

It weakens our immune system. So this is one thing. So this is one of. So this is one of the reasons that we need to exercise. Another reason we need to exercise is because it affects our lymph system. What drives our lymph, in other words, the lymph that's flowing through our, you know, basically flowing through our lymph into our lymph nodes and all of the things that are related to lymph and our immune system, which is our innate immune system, our macrophages and dendritic cells and neutrophils, all the way to our T cells and B cells and lymph nodes.

So the actual flow, the movement, is necessary to be healthy. I always say this now. I always say static, and this is not just me. say static, and this is not just me, this is a theory across the board in many different approaches to healing, Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine and the old traditional Greek medicine, all would say the same thing. When you have a static system that's not moving, that is when you start to have dis-ease, something other than health. That is when you start to have a stagnancy, you get sick. If you have constant flow and movement through these systems, whether it's your blood moving through the vessels in your body,

whether it is your lymph moving through the lymph vessels in your body, whether it is extracellular fluid and pulses of that, whether it's your fluid in your spinal cord, you know, with this moving. It has a cycle as well. All of these different fluids move in and out and through the same compartment, in and out of other compartments, and all of this movement is very important. Your urinary tract, if you were to stop the flow of urine that comes from your kidneys down to your bladder through your ureter, I'm not saying stop not after it's already in your bladder, but even before it gets to your bladder.

If you were to stop the flow of urine for even a short period of time, you're very likely to start getting an infection in that region. So you have to have that movement. That's how we keep things clean. That's how we detoxify. So we take things in and we excrete them. And through that process, we metabolize and use some energy, and we detoxify or get rid of other things that are not supposed to be there,

that are waste products. That constant flow has to be there, that ebb and flow. So if that ebb and flow is gone, then we're going to start getting sick. So that's what I mean by seasonal stuff. We have an ebb and flow of seasons as well that we have to be aware of. And then the lymph, when we're talking about exercise for the lymph, we have an ebb and flow and a movement of lymph that is related to the movement of what we would call our voluntary or striated muscle.

That's our muscle tissue that we actually have control over. Not smooth muscle, not cardiac muscle, but striated muscle, that's our muscle tissue that we actually have control over. Not smooth muscle, not cardiac muscle, but striated muscle, our muscle like our biceps. If we pick something up and we're doing curls with something, for instance, that particular motion, that would be biceps. We're doing pull-ups, biceps and triceps and traps and all the different smooth muscle. I'm sorry, striated muscle, all our different voluntary muscle groups around the body. One of the ones that is most affected, that most affects our lymph is the diaphragm. So breathing, deep breathing that we get when we exercise, for instance. Nice, full, deep breathing.

Full body exercise. Swimming, I always say, is very good. Grappling. Things that use your whole body. Yoga, stretching. all of these things are things that are very important to do on a consistent basis when you start to get through seasonal changes. You should do them anyway, but especially when you start to get into seasonal change. So exercise and getting enough sleep, getting enough rest throughout the day, if that

means being able to take a nap or two throughout the day, as well as getting enough sleep and good sleep at night, getting rid of all the lights in your room so you're not sleeping with lights that are on, blue light, in other words, computer type light or phone lights or clock, digital readouts. You want to get rid of that light. You'll sleep a lot better for that. Eight hours of sleep if you can, hopefully. Eight hours of sleep is really what you need to be healthy, really even more, but eight hours of sleep if you can, hopefully. Eight hours of sleep is really what you need to be healthy. Really even more, but eight hours of sleep.

And then, of course, nutrition. So when we get up in the morning, our breakfast, when we break the fast, that is some kind of whole food nutrition. I'm not going to get into nutrition in this talk because it's an entire talk on its own

and more. It's many podcasts on its own. But basic whole food, common sense stuff. You don't get up and eat junk food. Do not get up and eat donuts. Don't get up and go buy yourself a McDonald's breakfast and drink a Coke. These are things that are absolutely going to be destructive to your immune system. things that are going to, they're absolutely going to be destructive to your immune system. And if you're on the borderline of getting sick, you're going to get sick. If you can tell your body, you have to be aware of your body. You have to, you know, if you're going to use herbs and you're going to be into holistic health, you have to be more aware of your body. Now, if you're in a situation where you feel like you're getting sick, and we all should know what that feels like,

you should be able to just say, oh, to yourself, wow, I feel like I'm getting sick. I know that feeling. So try this out the next time that happens. Ask yourself when you're starting to get sick and you're really starting to feel sick, how your body you think would feel if you went and you bought a candy bar or you just went out and ate something that had almost pure refined sugar. And by candy bar, I'm not talking like quality chocolate. I'm talking Hershey's or Snickers bar or something that's basically crap, to put it mildly. Something that's refined sugar, almost pure refined sugar.

Ask yourself, how would I feel if I ate that? And see how your body responds. You should be able to feel this. You should be able to feel your body reject that concept and say, no way. Now, if you're absolutely starving because you didn't eat any breakfast, you didn't eat any lunch, and now you're succumbing to the propaganda of a television commercial you saw that said, hey, you should eat a Snickers bar, right? It fills you up. Yeah. Then you're in that point where you have forced yourself into a situation where you're so hungry, you'll eat anything. It doesn't matter. You'll eat any

kind of junk to satisfy that hunger craving. So don't put yourself in that situation. Eat high protein. If you're trying to lose weight, eat high protein. Don't get those huge glycemic spikes. I'm not saying you have to go on an Atkins diet or anything, but just have more protein in your diet and have less of the sugar craving and don't eat the desserts right after you eat food. You've got to get that sugar rush. You've got to get that hyperglycemia.

What happens is we become addicted to the hyperinsulinemia. We need that. We feel like we need that. We're addicted to starches. We're addicted to breads and pastries and those kinds of things. We have to have the dessert after the meal. Those are the addictive things that you get into. So those are the unhealthy habits that you have to get rid of to try to stay healthy, especially if you're being exposed to disease like cold or

flu, and especially during the change of seasons. Okay. So that's sort of the basis. Now let's talk about the herbs. Herbs in general, anything that's going to help your circulation is good. Anything that's going to help what I call your skin eliminative channel, which we call diaphoretics in orthodox pharmaceutical terms, even though it's much more than just a diaphoretic. It's not just an herb that makes you sweat, although it will do that too. It's an herb that increases the, remember I just talked about how you need to get rid of toxins out of your body, right? You need herbs that help your body do that. The herbs that do that are herbs that heat you.

Herbs that heat you are herbs like ginger, horseradish, anything heating. Cayenne obviously would do that, of course. Prickly ash is a beautiful one. That's an excellent one. Yarrow will do that. It's a very good herb for that. These are herbs that you can use to do that if you can take internally to do that, or you can actually put them in a bath and take them in a bath.

A yarrow bath will heat up your body like nothing else. So if you're in that state where you're feeling like you're getting a cold, or let's say a flu rather, you have poor circulation, you're just kind of chilled all the time, you're feeling chilled. By all the time, let's say you were at work, everybody's sick or has been sick, and you just suddenly feel like you got it. And you're feeling chilled and you just can't get warm and you're feeling like your skin is kind of cool and clammy, you

know, you probably know what I'm talking about. If you've ever had the flu, that you've felt that feeling. A yarrow bath. You don't even have to submerge yourself in it, really. Just even halfway up your body, it will open up those channels of elimination like nothing else. It will get everything flowing. This is good for people, too, who have chronic cold and feet type of syndromes,

even Renald's syndrome, things that are a lack of circulation. For whatever reason, a lack of circulation in the extremities. That's a good way to do that, too. And then, of course, drinking as a tea, as a hot tea especially. So any of these skin eliminatives or what we would call your heating herbs

are more heating if you can take them hot. So a hot tea is a really good way to take that. Now I know I usually use tinctures and that's because of the convenience of it in a first aid standpoint but from home if you can take the time to make a tea out of it, whether you make a tea out of a tincture or whether you make a tea preferably out of the herb itself, great way to take it.

So you can put these herbs, and these are herbs that all really go well together. Great ginger tea is one of my favorites. If you want a hot ginger tea, you just take some ginger root. You don't have to, you know, nothing fancy, just some ginger root that you bought from the store. Okay, take it and put it on, grate it on a cheese grater. Give yourself about a tablespoon full of that, nice and packed in. Put that in the bottom of a glass. Pour some boiling water on top of it.

Let it simmer. Put in about another tablespoon of honey and a couple slices of lemon squeeze in there for the lemon, fresh lemon. And stir that up. Let it cool enough to drink it. But drink it hot. And that's going to be a great way to get a good skin eliminative that tastes good. You could put any number of other herbs in there that are heating herbs that we just talked about.

Prickly ash is arguably one of the better ones in yarrow. Another one that's not a heating herb, per se, you wouldn't think of it. It doesn't heat. It's not a hot herb, but it is a great skin eliminative for flu and for viral infections, and it also tastes good, is elder. Elder flower. Now, you can use elder

berry as well, but elder flower, in my opinion, is even better. I also like bilberry, which is the vaccinia myrtillis. It's a cousin to blueberry. It's called wortelberry. It's a European. It's in England. You find it in England and Europe more, but you can grow it here.

It's like typical blueberry. It likes really acidic soil, but you can grow it here. The berries are smaller than blueberries but they're really packed with their nutrient dense there i use the i use the berry and that's kind of a heating herb too that will that'll heat you up when you drink a bilberry tea and you can buy the bilberries dry they're kind of expensive but um if you're not growing them which i don't even try anymore just because it's so hard to i can't even water them with the water from you know on our city tap it's like the ph is almost at eight you know so i can't even try anymore just because it's so hard to, I can't even water them with the water on our city tap.

It's like the pH is almost at 8. So I have to use rainwater, which it's hard to keep the rainwater here too because we're constantly in drought, or acidify the water in order to just even be able to raise blueberries. But if you can, if you're at the advantage to where you can grow bilberries, then you're in luck. Otherwise, you can can buy them but they are kind of expensive buy them dried like from star wars botanicals or from mountain rose or wherever pacific botanicals might sell them to i'm not sure but that's a good heating herb too the berry itself um you know so you can throw in other

other herbs or you could throw in adaptogens that kind of help along with that, like your ginseng, along with something like your ginger. So ginger, ginseng, it goes well together. Prickly ash and Siberian ginseng go together really well. Yarrow and elderberry go really well. Another really good skin eliminative, but it's not very tasty, but it's on the bitter side, but it's really, really good, skin eliminative, is your Boneset. That's your Eupatorium perfoleatum. And that is phenomenal, phenomenal cold and flu type herb to help heat you up as well.

Plus, Boneset does something that Echinacea does also, which is it raises your white blood cell count. So it raises your innate immunity, which is really good to have. It helps stimulate your immune system. And prickly ash does the same thing, by the way. So prickly ash, bone-set elderberry, for instance, is a great combination.

Elderberry yarrow is a great combination. But keeping in mind here what we were talking about originally, that we want something to help heat us up with. Now, I'm going to come back to that in a second because we're going to talk about fire cider, which is really the ultimate way to do what we just talked about. But before we do that, let's just talk briefly about the mucosal tissue. By that, I mean the mucosa of your upper respiratory tract. That would be the lining inside your mouth, inside your nose,

your nasopharynx back in the back, you know, behind, in the throat behind your nose, your oropharynx behind your, you know, the throat behind your, your, your mouth, all the way down into your respiratory tract, all the way down into your lungs. That's your mucosal, your respiratory mucosa. Now, when we have a, when we get a respiratory illness, like a virus, some kind of respiratory virus, like a illness like a virus, some kind of respiratory virus like a cold or a flu, the first place that attacks is the mucosa. That attacks the mucosa of our throat or our sinuses, somewhere in our mucosal tract. So what we need to do aside from the heating side of things,

we also need to have something that's really what we would consider cooling and not so much, not because it's cooling, but just by the nature of the types of plants that work really well with the mucosa, they tend to be cooling and sweet. Those would be, for instance, your marshmallow root or common mallow root. That would be Althea officinalis or common mallow vulgaris. It's Malva vulgaris, in the marshmallow, in the malo family, basically. All of the malos really are good, very good demulsants

and very good for the mucosa to help the mucosa regenerate, to strengthen it, to tone it, and to stimulate the lymph beneath the mucosa in what we would consider the basement membrane beneath the mucosa itself. These are polysaccharides or mucopolysaccharides that stimulate lymph movement beneath the mucosa. They stimulate lymph, tonify the lymph, and give the lymph polysaccharides to help rebuild as well. They help that tissue itself. Because if you think about it, if you were to look at it in a microscope,

if you were to see where a virus, for instance, attacks your mucosa, if you had, let's say, a sore throat, and you were able to somehow, well, if you could take that live tissue, which you really can't, but if you could take that live tissue, which you really can't, but if you could take that live tissue out and put it underneath a microscope and look at what's going on in your body, in vivo, not in a test tube and not on a slide, but if you could look at it in your body, you would see that the mucosal cells are damaged. They're being attacked. Their damage is causing what we would consider almost a lesion.

It would be similar to almost the way an abrasion would look on your arm. And indeed, you can see that if it gets bad enough to where it hurts you. If you say, ah, and look in the flashlight in the mirror down your throat, you'll see that there's a big red patch or red patches in your throat. And those are areas of tissue that are highly inflamed because they're under attack and because if you were to look at them under a microscope, those cells are damaged. They're being damaged. What we're trying to do here with the mucosal vulnerary like marshmallow is we're trying to repair that.

And we're giving it an herb that really helps it repair. So some of those herbs, again, would be anything in the mallow family. Cida is another good one. Our wireweed and our cida species. That's our cida acuta, cida rhombifolia, cida butifolia.

They're considered almost a weed. And it's really difficult, unless this is something you're not going to probably find online. You're not going to find anybody who's selling cida. Well, you might, but it's unlikely. It's not a common weed, but it is a common weed everywhere around us. I guess I meant it's not a common herb of commerce,

but it is very much a common herb all over the place. It grows as a wild weed in a lot of places. It's more of a tropical in southern U.S. is where you're going to see it more, but it does grow all over the place. Now, this is a good one. It's in the mallow family as well. But another good one for our mucosa is, of course, licorice root. We always be aware of the fact that we don't give that to somebody who's got a real problem, a severe problem with high blood pressure.

But in general, the licorice root is very good for the upper respiratory tract as well. Very soothing, very toning. Slippery elm or any of the elms as well will do the same thing. They're very, very soothing to the upper respiratory tract. These are all what we would consider demulsants, demulsant herbs. Very good for that. There are others. Another one that's also a respiratory herb but is also a good demulcent, actually, is

a pleurisy root or butterfly weed, it's also called. That would be Asclepias tuberosa. Very good one as well. Those are just things that we're going to use to take care of as much as we can. Also, I should mention

prickly pear cactus. Now, we could use the actual slimy part of the inside of the cactus, which is really very demulcent, but the best part of this is really the flower, the prickly pear flower, the part that comes out on top of the tuna, on top of the fruit, when it blooms in the spring. That's what we want there. So these are really good demulsants for the respiratory tract.

Excuse me. I think I need one myself right now. I just need a glass of water. That's the second thing I wanted to talk about. Now let's go and talk about, finally, I'd like to finish off by talking about the concept of fire cider and where that can help with your immune system as well because it's really a great thing to make.

This is something you can make at home. You can make all by yourself. You don't have to have it. you can get online and look up recipes. You can go off of what I'm telling you here and use my recipe, recipes, you know, whatever you want to do, or you can buy it as well. But let me first describe how you can make your own fire cider. Now, fire cider might be called something else by most herbalists, which would be an oxymel, O-X-Y-M-E-L.

An oxymel would be-X-Y-M-E-L. An oxymel would be a mixture of sweet and sour. It is a cross between honey, usually, and apple cider vinegar on the other side. And this doesn't have to necessarily be what is in fire cider, but it usually is. Bear in mind that the recipes for fire cider are they're legion there are as many recipes for fire cider as the number of years it's been around which is probably well over a thousand I mean this probably dates back to Hippocrates

it was called during the Middle Ages during the plague it was called thieves vinegar which people would use they would drink and put on their body as well because they would claim that it helped keep them from getting infected by the plague.

And especially thieves, vinegar, grave robbers and thieves because there were so many dead that some people would try to make a living robbing. There was no chance to bury every individual dead person so it was easy to rob the dead. So thieves, vinegar was one way that they would protect themselves. And it may very well be. It may very well be that it is, even some of the recipes we have today,

would be somewhat repellent to fleas, which is, of course, how bubonic plague was spread. So let's talk about the general ingredients and how you go about making this. So first of all, the ingredients you need to begin with. Here's the base ingredients, our honey, as I mentioned, and then apple cider vinegar, preferably organic apple cider vinegar, like the brands that even still have the mother that you can make more vinegar from that are very much as pure as possible, as organic as possible. One of the people who makes this that I would highly recommend,

they use organic apple cider vinegar from the oldest organic apple farm in the United States. They're up in Maine. The people who make it are up in Maine. But we'll talk about that in a second. But first, let's just say, so apple cider vinegar and then honey are going to be necessary in there. Now, you can do a couple different things. You can do all of this together, or you could infuse honey by itself, and you could infuse vinegar by itself, and then you could strain, and you could mix the two together. But let's just do it the way that I would normally do it, which is about, I like about a one-to-one ratio. It can be a little less honey than vinegar, but normally about a one-to-one or about half of each.

It gives you a pretty sweet version of it, as opposed to being really more on the vinegary side. Now, the ingredients that you're going to want in this are going to be things that are usually fairly spicy and hot. So onions, garlic, horseradish, ginger, turmeric, jalapeno, even a little bit of cloves is okay. You want to have things that are very spicy. Cayenne, things that are going to definitely make you sweat. They're going to open up that skin channel of elimination. It's very important. So those are things I just talked about earlier in terms of herbs. Any of those herbs could go

in there. You can put any herbs you want in there. You can put any herbs you want in this. You can put any food you want in this. And so what we were going to do is we're going to chop that up. Chop up those herbs, grind them up, slice them up. You can put them in the blender with the vinegar if you want to. And we're going to put them in the vinegar. This is generally what I'll do is I'll do the vinegars first, and then I'll add the honey afterwards.

But you don't have to do it that way. This is just one way to do it. So we put these into the vinegar. Now, things that I would add in there, I like to put in rosemary, fresh rosemary. I like to put in thyme, especially because of its expectorant properties and it's a very good flavor.

I like to put in oregano, also a little bit of an expectorant and also somewhat antimicrobial. I like to put in echinacea, echinacea and gustafolia especially, but purpurea and gustafolia. I like to put in astragalus, which is a little more on the sweet side. It helps sweeten it. I like to put in demulcents as well sometimes.

Like I'll put in a little bit of marshmallow root, and I'll put in a little bit of licorice, which will also help sweeten it. And then I put in a lot of the spicy stuff. Horseradish is one of my favorites, for instance. I'll put in a lot of ginger. I love to put ginger in there. I'll put in prickly ash. I'll put in spelanthes.

Spelanthes is also a very, very good kind of, not so much spicy, but very, will definitely make your tongue tingle, sort of like the way the prickly ash does. And it's somewhat heating as well. Put in that. And I grow that, so I put that in fresh when I do this. Put all of these into your vinegar. Put it in a blender for a couple minutes. Blend it up really good. And then let it sit.

And so you want to pretty much, you want to super saturate the solids in there just barely. So it's going to look like when you have it, so if you put all this together in a mason jar, for instance, a quart mason jar, you put in just enough vinegar to cover it in a quart mason jar, so it's really going to be strong. You know, blend it up, make sure that it's covered,

that it's completely covered. Shake it up a couple times a day, just like you would a tincture, okay, a maceration tincture. Shake it up a couple of times a day, and then after a couple of weeks of doing that a couple of times a day, just like you would a tincture, a maceration tincture. Shake it up a couple of times a day, and then after a couple of weeks of doing that a couple of times a day, you strain it off, and that's your vinegar. Now what you can do is you can just heat it just barely, and you can add in some honey. So you stir in the honey, and then that's your final

product. So about a one-to-one mix. You can just do it to taste. Some people like less honey than one-to-one, than 50% honey, 50% vinegar, but I liked about 50% each. You can do that. You could put the honey in first if you want to make less. You wouldn't have as much when you're done, but you can put the honey and vinegar in half and half, and you can put the herbs in there. It's going to be thicker, of course, but you can do the same thing.

You can infuse the honey separately with herbs that you like to infuse in honey. You can do that with, and that's very easy to do. It's basically the same thing. You put the herbs in the honey and just turn the honey jar upside down a couple times a day just so that you've got movement through there with your herbs and keep it in the windowsill where it gets some sun. You just want to warm it. You want it to warm. You never want to get it over about 110 degrees, but you want to try to keep it warm. You could put it in the attic.

Even if you wanted to, you could put it in an electric blanket, you know, to keep it kind of warm. And you want to do that for a couple of weeks. So most people do this during the summer, do it in the windowsill, and just warm it that way. So you can do that, and then you can either strain the honey, which is a little hard to do because it's thicker, but you can put it into a metal colander and strain it,

or you can just use powder in there and then just let it sit in the herb. That's fine. If you do strain it, and you need to strain it, and you end up with the leaves, and let it sit overnight, and let it just drip, and get all the honey out that you can through the colander, through a strainer, then you're going to end up with the leaves, and they're still going to have some honey, of course, on them

in the metal strainer that you use, or whatever kind of strainer that you use. What you can do is scrape those leaves out, put them in just a little bit of water, and heat it up pretty good. Just bring it just barely to a boil, and then what you can do is you can strain that again, and that will get all the honey out of those leaves. And what you strained out is going to be a little bit watery, but you put that into the final mix of the honey too.

So you could do that separately and then have infused honey. You could infuse your vinegar separately and strain it, and you could mix those two together. So you have infused honey, infused vinegar. And if you do that that way, then you're going to have honey that is separate, that you can use separately too. For instance, one of the things I like to make

is I like to make a garlic honey. So I'll take garlic, and like I just talked about, I'll crush the garlic up real good and let it sit in the air for about 10 minutes because what that does is that helps the allantinone come out. The allantinone is one of the really heavily antibacterial constituents of the garlic. Put that in with the honey, okay?

And then do the same thing that I just talked about. You can do that with honey. I usually will put in an echinacea with that as well. I'll put in bone set with that as well, because even though it's a bitter, it'll be sweetened by the honey to a great degree. You can put in any kind of a good antibacterial herb if you want to in that. So you could do that again and mix it back in with your vinegar when you're done.

So there's a couple of different ways to make this just in terms of the actual, you know, the process of making it. In terms of the herbs you're putting in there, those are my favorites that I just gave you. All the spicy ones and then plus astragalus I like to have in there as well as a good immune stimulant, as well as being a little bit of sweetener, and of course echinacea as well. Now, if you want to buy this, let me tell you a place that I would go to buy it. I would go to Herbal Revolution and buy their fire tonic. They call it their fire tonic number nine. And they are just, they have a great and absolutely awesome set of herbs. Not just this.

I mean, they make a lot of very cool mixtures. And you'd find them at HerbalRevolutionMaine.com. They're up in Maine, the state of Maine. So HerbalRevolutionMaine.com. So Herbal Revolution Fire Tonic is really, really good. They're the ones I was talking about that use the oldest apple cider vinegar farm in the U.S. for their base apple cider, and they get it straight from this guy. They're good friends with him.

They have horseradish and onions and garlic, hot peppers, burdock root, dandelion root, hyssop, which is a very good respectorant, thyme, rosemary, and then raw Maine honey. They also use all organic ginger in there, they use turmeric, and they use lemon in there. So that's their recipe. And they have the recipe online. If you go to their site, I think they've got a couple other recipes as well. Now let me just tell you who not to buy this from.

Do not buy this from Shire City Herbals. S-H-I-R-E City. Shire City Herbals. If you do, you're supporting a group of people who are trying to trademark the term fire cider. And they're giving grief to every other herbalist out there who's been making fire cider for years. Rosemary Gladstar, arguably one of the most, who has been doing this arguably longer than anybody else out there. She was doing this before the people, the kids at Shire City Herbals who were 30-something.

She was doing it before they were born. She was making fire cider. But they say that it was passed down to them from their grandparents, and they put out a trademark thing, and nobody even knew it was happening, so nobody disputed it. So they've managed to trademark the term, and they put out a trademark thing, and nobody even knew it was happening, so nobody disputed it. So they've managed to trademark the term,

and they've had a lawyer whispering in their ear this whole time. Now, this is a term, fire cider, and this is an actual concoction, again, that has been around for thousands of years. So the term that's been used since Rosemary Gladstar and earlier than that, since the 50s, since the 60s,

is something that they're trying to say is all theirs. And so they're not herbalists. Not a single one of them is what I would consider to be an herbalist. They're just their business folks who have marketed or managed to get good success and good distribution off this particular product. However, not a single one of them has any clinical experience in herbalism. Not a single one of them has any kind of respect of any herbalist that I've ever heard of or I've ever known of.

So this is where I'm putting in kind of my plug. So what I'd suggest is the first thing is just to make this for yourself. Go and get some from the health food store. Get yourself some good organic apple cider vinegar and follow this recipe that I talked about. If you have any questions, feel free to email me, sam at thehumanpath.com. If I had time, I'd put a recipe page up myself. I used to have one. I may still have one on my blog.

If I do, I'll make sure it's up as a link on this podcast. I'm not sure that I do, though. So I may check in, actually, too, when this podcast is being aired tomorrow because I'm not teaching tomorrow night. So if I do and I find one, I may check in in the chat and actually post it, too. But I need to go find them and see if I do. But that would be your first choice. Second choice, if you're going to buy it,

buy it from anybody that's out there, except for Shire City Herbals, if I could recommend that. And I highly recommend, again, the folks at Herbal Revolution, and that's herbalrevolutionmain.com. I know those folks, and I think they're just absolutely awesome.

And so if you have any questions again, feel free to email me. This has been, I'm running out of time here but hopefully this was useful for you in terms of working with herbs and nutrition and basic health ideas to help stave off and prevent yourself from

catching a cold or flu and do the same for your family. Stay safe, stay sound, stay healthy. And until next week, this has been Sam Kaufman. Goodbye. Goodbye. Hey, want to get the best deals possible on preparedness items locally and online? Check out the American Preppers Network Buyer's Club Membership, APN Gold.

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