From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You're listening to Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com. I'm John Gallagher. Returning to Herb Mentor Radio today is Kartapuruk Singh Khalsa. K.P. Khalsa has over forty years of experience in holistic medicine. He is the current president of the American Herbalist Guild, author of the book, The Way of Ayurvedic Herbs, has published thousands of health articles, a professor at many colleges, including Bastyr University and Massachusetts College of Pharmacy.
For thirty years, he was chief formulator at Yogi Tea, and I could go on and on. Learning Herbs was honored to release a course with KP called culinary herbalism, which will be back in twenty fifteen, and you can visit KP online any old time at KPKhalsacom. K.P. Khalsa, welcome back to Herb Mentor Radio.
Hi, John. So nice to be here again.
Great. And so how have you been since, the last time we spoke?
It's Everything's been going good, busy, healthy.
Everything's, on track. Thanks.
You know, since we last, since our last interview, you had soon after that, you'd taken on the the, the job as president of the American Herbalist Guild. And what I was wondering if you could do just talk about that a bit because a lot of times people think American Herbalist Guild is just like for professionals or for people who were, you know, a certain interested in certain things. So could you tell us about, like, the opportunities and really who the American Herbalist Guild serves?
Right. The American Herbalist Guild is the professional association for clinical herbalists in the United States, and the idea is to support and develop professional gardeners to urban enthusiasts to culinary gardeners to urban enthusiasts to culinary practitioners all the way up to people who practice, clinically. The American Herbalist Guild does have a professional credential registered herbalist, which is the ultimate goal of most members if they choose to pursue that. It's like being board certified in herbal medicine, and the emphasis of that is clinical. But the vast majority of our members are general members who are interested in the practice of herbalism at some level. So we offer an extensive bouquet of member benefits from, webinars, with the noted professionals.
The website is packed with, archives for members, for audio and video archives from past conferences, all free past, issues of our journal, which is the top journal of clinical herbalism in the United States. We have a, an annual symposium that, is always a great event and chance to get together. It's usually pretty cozy, and you get to hear the people who wrote your textbooks and even sit down to lunch with them. This year is our twenty fifth anniversary, so we have our conference coming up in October in Georgia, and we've invited all the founders, back. They're all, gray hairs now and, all the past presidents. So it's gonna be a real get together.
Oh, wow. That sounds like fun. And really, the, the classes that are offered there in conferences really for any really interest levels. It's not like you need to have any specific. Right? Because there's something for everybody, basically.
Well, that very much so. And in fact, everybody was a student once. And so the vast majority of people who attend are students at some level, whether you're just barely beginning to get interested or you're in Herb School now or a recent graduate all the way up to practicing professionals. And our intention is to have a very big tent where we bring people in who are interested in the practice of herbalism, in its many facets.
And american herbalists guild dot org. Correct? Or com?
It's american herbalist guild dot com.
Dot com. Okay. Okay. Great. And, or you could just Google that That's right. To find out more information.
So as president, what is a big challenge, like, one of your biggest challenges?
Well, the biggest challenge for me, just being an administrator and and trying to move herbalism ahead is the incredible variety of people's interactions with herbalism. It doesn't have a definition. There is no real good definition of herbalism. So anybody who's interested in herbs from, chefs to farmers to tea makers and consumers to first aid, people and just everything in between, all the way up to people who treat overt disease and promote wellness with herbs, plus all the different traditions. And we have, you know, the big three global traditions, Western, Ayurveda, and Chinese medicine. And then, of course, Native American medicine would be big here. Mhmm.
Diversity of training experience and, just trying to sort of corral all those people and get their, agendas consistent and all sort of going in one direction is very challenging. As opposed to something like that I know you're involved with John, acupuncture, that pretty much came here with a well defined understanding of what acupuncture is. Yes, there are different schools and lineages, but fundamentally, they have the same basic underlying paradigm. Herbal medicine is all over the place from things grandma taught to things that people studied in five thousand year old traditions.
Right. Right. Right. It varies on what level you're practicing on and so many things.
What was neat about the symposium when I was there once is that anyone who you it offers continuing education credits for a lot of different, types of professions. Right? So if you're acupuncturist or I think a nurse is too. Right?
Oh, yeah. There there will be a wide variety, nurses, pharmacists, acupuncturists.
If you're interested in CEUs, probably the CEUs that we offer will be accepted by your professional organization, but you should check that out first just to make sure if that's the reason that you're coming.
Which is excellent.
Great effort to give CEUs to anybody, everybody.
Because not every conference does that out there and that's a big that's a big thing that really helped me a lot. I was there going taking classes.
So yeah.
Well, everybody, yeah, everybody needs CEUs and they wanna they wanna come to a conference that is, you know, that they enjoy the subject matter.
Absolutely.
So, for this episode, I wanted to give members a chance to ask, ask you questions, KP, because not every day that we have one of those, you know, leading minds in herbal holistic medicine and herbal medicine on our on our show. So what was great is that we had a great variety of questions from herbmentor dot com members. And, so I just wanna jump right into these questions because there were just some great big picture ones and some specific ones. So are you ready? Ready to answer some?
Ready to go.
Alright. So, here we've got Cara from New Mexico, and she asked that, frequently people are driven toward herbal study because of serious illness in themselves or someone that they love. What advice would you give to a beginner in such a situation?
Well, that, in fact, was my situation. I got interested in these things because at age ten, I was diagnosed with a, degenerative disorder, from which I was supposed to be dead by age forty. So I live considerably longer than that and have no symptoms at all. So I I can empathize with, where you're coming from.
It's important to connect with very competent advice. If someone is really having a serious condition and they wanna treat it and they're not satisfied with conventional mainstream therapies, to confusion about what therapies really likely would work for any given condition in the general public. People are just bamboozled by doctor Oz talking about twelve different remedies a day, and then they have their naturopathic physician, their acupuncturist, their herbalist, all saying different things in different ways. So if you really wanna get serious about treating an actual condition and getting well, you need to find somebody who's experienced and competent.
And then if you're interested in going into the profession, you find competent mentors, whether that's a formal school like the one that I have, or, people that are will take you under their wing and begin to teach you. I had a mentor, so I got started in this whole thing, and I worked with my mentor for thirty two years in an apprenticeship kind of scenario.
So all kinds of ways to learn, but get serious about learning, and then find people who really can help you and then dig in. Just get started. Jump in with both feet and find out what resonates for you.
I find that that sometimes, people, like, even though there's, you know, many ways to learn, many many theories, many books, many sometimes it's good in in the beginning to keep it try to keep it simple for yourself and pick one, two, three at the most people that you might be learning from and then as you get a good grasp, right, on the beginning stuff and then you can just kinda start to to to explore because it's important to learn from different you don't wanna be overwhelmed. Right? But at the same time, you don't wanna find yourself pigeonholed into one way of thinking.
Well, exactly. America, herbalism in America, died out almost a hundred years ago, and we've been resurrecting it since the sixties. And we're there now. We have resurrected it, and we have excellent schools, and very good textbooks, and quite competent practitioners, and we have a professional association that grants a credential.
And, you know, we're we're we've reestablished it at a very high level of expertise. But during that period of seventy years of the dark ages, there was a lot of misinformation, confusion, and sort of unsophisticated, information being put out about herbal medicine. And so that's still out there. And so our literature is full of scrambled up ideas where somebody writing article in nineteen fifty didn't know the difference between one herb or another, or they just confused and misunderstood things.
So it takes a lot to to navigate your way through that, and it takes a guide to be able to do it. If you have too much input, in too many different ways, it does get confusing. Those methods might all be valid, but they all have a time and place that you have to learn. So Mhmm.
Yeah.
Checking into a particular paradigm, particular methodology, and getting your feet solidly on the ground, they all have common features. I mean, the things that work are the things that work, and everybody figures those out. And so, even though Western Ayurveda and Chinese medicine are superficially different, the core is ninety percent the same. If you start with any one of those, it's easy to layer knowledge on top of that.
Right. Right.
Okay. So and next question was, with this person would like to know, from Washington, like, what teas and fusions do you personally use regularly and why those particular ones? I think she and actually another another person that, asked question, like, looking they're kinda looking for that one a day regimen of herbs that might help them out.
Well, right. I could tell you a little bit about what I do. However, the one of the main tenants of natural medicine is that you adapt the things you're using to the needs of your body at the moment. So, I would be using different things at different stages of my life, at different seasons of the year, different weather conditions going on around me, different times of the day, my own level of vitality or health challenges that I might be facing. So there are some very general things that could pretty pretty much be used consistently.
And then it's not surprising that people who are at a a have a long term relationship with herbs that they change on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. So I make a point to consume onions, garlic, and ginger every day. That's called, Trinity herbs and Trinity roots in, Ayurveda. It's the basis of Ayurvedic, healing cuisine. So one way or another, I get those in whether it's tea or food or in some sort of convenient supplement form.
I also consume a beverage called Yogi tea, which is basically chai with a lot less black tea, a quarter teaspoon of black tea per cup, and increased levels of the other things, ginger, cinnamon, black pepper, etcetera. So I drink that every day as a general health beverage.
And one that I, consume almost every day as tea is a Chinese herb called He shou wu, polygonin multiflorum, which is a very broad spectrum, long term acting, stamina, tonic, much like ginseng. Let's we could call it a junior ginseng. It's much milder.
So I use an ounce a day, an ounce by dry herb weight of that herb brewed into tea and drink that every day for immune boost, stamina, sexual functioning, circulation, elimination, all those things very general.
Most can, herbal systems have one or two or three prized tonic remedies that people take every day. And usually, they're gender based. Toshio Wu happens to be taken by men or women. But very often, there'll be two or three main ones for women, two or three main ones for men. And every ancient healing system suggests that people take those every single day, much like using a multiple vitamin. It's a dietary supplement that if you take it every day, will help you maintain your stamina and have an anti aging type effect.
Do you also I mean, you pretty much keep it to these herbs. I mean, this is actually me wondering now, or do you ever, like, do you recommend people because you do so much consulting, take, like, like, if for circulatory system that they do, like, fish oil type of supplement? Or or do you not agree with that? Or do you, you know, rather use turmeric?
Well, absolutely. You know, I I no. Definitely. I take supplements, you know, whether they're herb, vitamin, mineral, enzyme, whatever they may be.
I'm a big believer in those things, and I have, we're on Herb Mentor Radio now, so we're talking more, you know, more herbal. But, yeah. I also teach nutrition classes, all over the country, and I'm very involved in nutrition, and am a credentialed, dietitian. So I'm very involved in suggesting those kinds of things and exactly the same kinds of things that you mentioned.
Essential fatty acids, turmeric. I'm known in the herb world as, Haldi Baba, which, in Ayurveda means sir turmeric or, you know, mister turmeric. So I've been talking about turmeric for thirty years, and now it it finally I feel justified because it's the most heavily researched substance on planet Earth, in two twenty fourteen for all of its benefits. So, yeah, I take turmeric.
I take three ounces, not three ounces. Sorry. That would be a little more overwhelming. Three tablespoons Mhmm.
Three tablespoons of turmeric powder, per day, which is a pretty high dose. But I, get a lot of benefit from it, and I take that by stirring it into a glass of water and slurping it up with a great big bubble tea straw, so that I can just suck up that entire three tablespoons in that, you know, eight ounces of water. So in one giant swallow and gulp it down. So it doesn't taste wonderful, and I wanna get it in.
But it just has so many great effects, and it's the leading substance being researched for Alzheimer's now. And so I I don't I wanna keep my marbles.
So Right.
Right.
I use that.
Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you. That's very that's awesome.
Okay.
So, Abby oh, no. Actually, first, we got Lee was wondering you might have even mentioned this already. Like, she she likes to know your your two your two favorite herbs, and I guess one of those is turmeric. Right?
Yep. It's my favorite herb, and the whole world knows it. Yep.
Well, another herb that I would throw out, it's really hard to that's sort of like Yeah. You have ten children and you try to pick your favorite one, you know. But I the other one that I would mention is the herb gotu kola, which, I take pretty regularly.
That's probably the most well known, nerve and brain support remedy in the world.
So it enhances cognitive function, anti aging for the brain, memory like that. But also, the second major use for it, which is just as, well known in Asian medicine is for connective tissue healing. So bruises, sprains, burns, fractures, any kind of corrupt skin disease, preventing and treating scars, that sort of thing. So you got something that treats the physical structure of your body and something that supports the functioning of your brain and nervous system.
Boy, what a fantastic one two punch. Doesn't taste too bad. In Asia, like, if you were going to lunch in Burma or Vietnam or Thailand today, go to cola salad would be on the menu of of the restaurant you eat in. But here, we don't it's a a tropical plant, so we don't have it where I live.
But you can use it as tea. And so I, use one ounce by dry weight of the herb, infused and drink that, many days, for that long term benefit. So that, you know, that Hoshu Wu, things like ginseng, ashwagandha, gotu kola, turmeric, those are long term health enhancing things that pretty much anybody could use and get benefit from.
Great. And Abby in Massachusetts was wondering, if she, like, she saw that fresh turmeric root is sold at her local Indian grocery store. And is that preferable to dried?
Most of the research is done with dried material just before convenience. And so we know that the dried works extremely well.
That research all came out of the interest in doing that came out of noticing that people in India were using turmeric in every single meal literally, and then drawing conclusions about what it was doing. So people in India have a rate of Alzheimer's that's one eighth. Let me repeat that one eighth that of United States. The United States is in the top five, for Alzheimer's incidents, and India is number hundred and sixteen out of the hundred and fifty two countries, in the world. And so that that was what stimulated all that research.
And people there in India were using dried most of the time because it's seasonal and you harvest it when it's fresh and you have it available, you know, when it's available, but then the dried for most people. So the fresh will work just as well, tends to be expensive. Mhmm. Dried turmeric is is, very economical, but fresh turmeric, you know, like fresh any fresh produce is expensive.
And so you could juice that, you could shred it and put it in your, in your food, you could chop it up, dice it up, and use it like you would use ginger. It's tasty.
I don't know what the exact ratio is, but there between dried and fresh. But there's a fair amount of water, in the fresh turmeric. So in order to compare it, you'd have to, you know, I'm talking about using multi teaspoon or multi tablespoon doses a day to treat serious conditions. You'd have to take a lot of fresh turmeric. And It'll be tasty, but maybe not practical.
Doesn't seem like there's any I mean, Deborah, I don't know if there's any downsides to turmeric.
Like, does it cause kidney stones?
But it doesn't sound like a particular One of the most side effect free remedies we've ever come across.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. The the, rat studies are just using, huge amounts and so far so good. I mean, it seems to pretty much only do good. Anything would have some side effect at some Right. Level. We haven't seen, much turmeric. I mean, I just can't I can't think of anything really.
You know, anything might cause anything. So you just have to I'm a great believer in incremental dose increase. So even though I said I take three tablespoons of turmeric each and every day slurped up through a bubble tea straw, I didn't start with that dose. I started with a half a teaspoon and worked up in half teaspoon increments just to make sure I could tolerate it well and everything is gonna be okay. You never see problems with it, but it's always a good idea to do that.
Okay. You mentioned Ashwagandha before and, Abby had some growing in her garden. And have you ever grown it? Because she was, like, wondering if you knew any of the harvesting or processing or using the roots or or or or have you pretty much?
No. I don't. But, you know, yeah. Ashwagandha is, again, one of my favorite herbs and it's really catching on here. It's a fantastic, very slow acting long term stamina tonic for just a huge variety of things, including stress resistance and immune boosting. Let me say a word about, growing medicinal herbs in your garden.
Mhmm.
And on one hand, I, completely support that, and I think that people being self reliant is a wonderful idea and that you should do that. The thing is, with medicinal herbs, it's difficult to know whether that plant is really gonna give you the medicinal value that you expect from it unless you're experienced with using it. So I would suggest that you use some from a more traditional source for a while. Find out how it works for you, so you can compare your homegrown.
Ashwagandha grows in very very hot dry environments, almost deserty type environments in Asia. So when I see people growing it in Seattle, Washington where everything is covered with, you know, fungus and moss Mhmm. It's definitely anything but real hot and dry. So we just don't know.
Will that plant grown in your garden or in the in the bucket on your patio at a different latitude, a different growing season, different facing, of the sun, different growing zone, different nutrients in the soil. We don't know about compatible microorganisms in the soil that might be needed. All those things, you just don't know. So you might grow a great big beautiful lush plant that looks great or a big fat juicy root that may or may not have the medicinal constituents.
So I encourage people to experiment, but just understand that we can't know if we're duplicating the growing conditions in a way that produces an actual medicinal plant until we experiment with it.
Yeah. That's true. Like like, at least I don't think I have any in this garden, but the last place where I lived, you'd have these big yarrow leaves. And but if you tasted it and compared it to the yarrow that I could just harvest in the wild on the dry eastern side of the state I mean, it's not even like it's the same plant. I mean, the eastern dried grown yarrow is like, woo, potent when you, you know.
Well, that's exactly it, John. And I'm glad that you mentioned that because very often when we treat plants, when we baby them in our garden and give them plenty of water and fertilizer and do everything perfect, they don't have any stress resistance, and they just sort of grow fat and happy. But they don't produce those phytochemicals that they do when they have to fight off the elements out in the real world. Whether it's heat or bugs or, you you know, growing season issues or elevation or whatever it is.
And each of these plants has evolved to grow in a very specific niche ecologically, and the growers know to duplicate that. So you don't see people growing, you know, in Asia. They're not trying to grow, ashwagandha in high mountain Himalayan meadows. They're growing it down at at, in low elevation in the roasting hot environment.
So you want plants to grow in the real world.
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
None of these none of these none of these baby plants would stay at home till they're thirty.
Well, you know, when you go to when you go to Safeway, it doesn't the Safeway doesn't tell you the how much carotene is in your carrot. You eat it because you enjoy the taste, and you assume that it has some beneficial nutrients, and you're gonna eat large quantities of food. But we get down to herbal medicine where we're taking small amounts, we want the medicinal qualities to be concentrated. And so we do need to know those things about whether that particular way of growing it has proven to work. And maybe it will. I'm just raising a note of concern or not even concern, but just that you you investigate and just really make sure that you're it's working the way you think.
K. Now, Paula recently read Way of Ayurvedic herbs, your book with, Michael Tierra. And, she said it got me thinking about a choice I made several years ago to switch from sugar, white through all the so called healthy varieties to stevia. I have used, cal, stevia extract for ten years, and it's my preferred brand. Reading about the six tastes in the book made me realize that I sweeten about everything that could be sweetened, in including vegetable juice with stevia. So she is pittacapa, she says here.
Is there a painless way to undo this excess abuse to sweet?
Yeah. The antidote would be bitter. And basically, pungent, bitter, and astringent taste essentially would be would be to would offset sweet, but especially bitter. And so just airing a little bit more on the side of those three taste, pungent, bitter, and astringent, and especially, bitter.
Yeah. As we sort of fiddle with our diet and we start to do things like, add artificial sweeteners, we realize that those things don't have caloric content, but they do have stimulate the brain. So when you when your body tastes whatever it is, any kind of sweetener, it thinks that something sweet and caloric and tissue building and tonifying is coming, and it begins to prepare the body for those things. Numerous studies now have shown that people experience weight gain even using non caloric sweeteners from the sweet taste.
The body is preparing itself to with to move nutrients into storage, because of the sweet. So a little bit of extra bitter and just getting used to having things, not so excessively sweet.
Probably, many of the of the folks listening have experimented not eating sugar for a day, a week, or a month. Same could be said of salt. And then they go back to having something, you know, they don't eat sugar for a month and they eat a cookie, and it's just unbelievably overwhelmingly sweet, and it's not even enjoyable. They got to the the place of their sugar tolerance by just living the American lifestyle and eating more and more and more. Mhmm. And you realize when you're not using it, what a more normal, set point for your for your senses is.
So, yeah, very, very good question. And, Ayurveda would say that, yes, the calories are important. Yes, the actual phytochemicals are important. But the taste is important in terms of what it does to your brain also.
Right. Right. Right. So maybe having some bitters before your meal or something help?
Very much so. That would stimulate digestion, would offset the the sweet, and very often, it would suppress that desire to have that extra sweet. So you eat some dandelion in your salad in the first, serving.
Hello?
Find yourself not wanting the Haagen Dazs afterward. Okay. Yes. Yes, John.
I just lost you there, for a second, but it's okay. I think we got the point there. Just for, like, a second.
Okay. Here we go.
Okay.
Thank you.
So next question here.
Some people use these, weird screen names on their questions, so I I don't even know how to pronounce some of these. But anyway, the question is, what herbs or plants could be consumed to help raise the magnesium level in the body?
Magnesium is the element that causes green vegetables to be green. So the first thing is, green vegetables and the greener the better. So the darker green, the more magnesium. It's a really interesting question because may if if we don't call vitamin d a vitamin, vitamin d is a pro hormone that you make in your skin.
It's not really we're not really designed to consume it as a food. We're designed to make it. If we if we allow, leave that out of the picture. Magnesium is the most common nutrient deficiency in, America, and numerous studies have shown that Americans average somewhere typically between eighty five to ninety five percent with a deficiency.
It's just drastic.
So the challenge is actually getting in enough magnesium to make the difference. Our soil soils are down to about fifty percent of the magnesium that they used to contain fifty years ago when the USDA began keeping records. So they we just get a the trifecta of not having enough magnesium in the soils, farming in a way that doesn't extract the magnesium from the soils well by using hybridized plants and other different chemical farming methods, and then not actually eating those things to begin with. So it's magnesium is rich in, whole grains and then green vegetables, the exact things that people don't eat.
There's no magnesium in a doughnut in doughnuts and coffee. Right. Just, you know, we've tried this experiment for three generations of living on donuts and coffee, and I think we would all agree it doesn't work very well. So the challenge is getting the magnesium in, and probably the reality is that people are going to have to supplement at least for a while to bring their magnesium level up.
It's easily testable. You use a test called the red blood cell magnesium test. Don't just test straight magnesium level in the blood. That's not reliable.
But you can use a red blood cell magnesium test, easy to get. And, and then supplement.
You could try eating the green vegetables, for, you know, six months and then recheck and see where it's where it's going to go. But it's just every magnesium expert today is now saying it's it seems to be almost impossible to replenish your magnesium stores from food. I think you could do it with green vegetable juice probably because it's concentrated if you drank enough of that consistently over time. And maybe you could maintain it with the with the green vegetables and whole grains, Mhmm. But it's pretty doggone challenging.
Well, my uncle my my question then would be, if you're supplementing, I've done some research here trying to figure that out. And then I see, like, magnesium citrate, I see magnesium, l three zero eight or three three zero eight three I guess that's called or t.
That's right. Yep. Yep.
Yep. So which one or one or two or third you have like and your average person might supplement what six months for a year until they're got their levels up or that's a little confusing to me this supplement. Yeah.
That would be tip. No. You're right. You're it's, that would be typical.
And the only way to really know, when you think about the the symptoms that people have in daily life, insomnia, muscle pain Mhmm.
Heart issues including arrhythmia, anxiety, all our symptoms of magnesium deficiency. And if we go down the top twenty symptoms people experience, it's just check, check, check, one one after another with magnesium deficiency.
So you can't you could just, supplement magnesium until those things went away, those symptoms went away, or you could do the blood test.
So for most people, about a year would be good. Most magnesium will do the job in the body, most kinds, like you just described, when it actually gets to the cells. The problem is that magnesium is stool loosening. So when you swallow it and it goes into your digestive tract, it attracts water and gives you loose stool. So the form of magnesium that's the least stool loosening is magnesium glycinate.
Magnesium glycinate, which is the form that I pretty much use exclusively.
Because it just allows us to get more magnesium into the person. That's all. It's not any better in certain the sense of providing magnesium loose stool, then you could, let's say, Magnesium citrate, which is the most stool loosening. You mentioned magnesium threonate, that's a pretty new, form. And the theory there is that that's an amino acid chelated, but it's created in such a way that it's more able to go into the nervous system. And, of course, the nervous system is uses magnesium for just those things we talked about, things like sleep and relaxation.
Okay. So but it could be more stool loosening?
It could be a little bit. It it typically is not real stool loosening. It that would be an acceptable substitute compared to the glycinate. It glycinate wins in every study in terms of being able to for people to take more without having uncomfortably loose stool, but threonine is pretty close.
Mhmm. Mhmm. And then from then on, just keep eating your greens. Alright.
So Yeah. Speaking of the opposite of loose stools, Karen from New Jersey works in a health food store, notices there's a lot of people coming in with constipation. So what have you to say there?
Well, we're back to the donuts and coffee. Right? And these people eat, white eat white flour and sugar all day long, wonder why they're constipated, and then drink coffee to offset that. So, having adequate fiber is necessary. Well, the three things we wanna look at for constipation, and we have to assess them carefully because each person is different. It's, peristalsis that is the, actual wave of muscle contraction in your large intestine that squirts out the stool. Moisture, which is what we're just talking about, is the stool liquefied enough that it's slippery and can slide out properly.
And then fiber, which gives structure to the stool, so that the large intestine has something to grab. Each one of those is a different issue. And while we use the term constipation kinda generically to describe all those things, you have to determine which is which. If a person is lacking moisture and you give them a pair of salsa enhancing herb, like say, cascara sagrada, which increases squeezing, now you're trying to squeeze dry crusty school. Now you can move chunks of concrete through a garden hose, but it's not gonna be very comfortable.
So that person actually needs slippery wet kinds of things, like magnesium we just talked about. So we have to assess those things. So we talked about cascara as a peristalsis enhancer. We talked about magnesium as a moisture enhancer, and then things like psyllium would be things that would increase fiber.
Our grandparents didn't have to go out to the health food store to buy specials, you know, psyllium comes from India. Special foods from clear around the globe to be able to have a good bowel movement because they were eating whole foods that had the fiber in them to begin with. Right. And they were working hard in the clean air and, you know, it was much less of an issue than it is now.
K.
So we have Cheryl from Burlington, Washington.
We'd like to hear your approach and experiences in helping people with multiple food sensitivities.
Any missing elements that he's seeing out there in the world in natural health care providers and key aspects of treating? What do you what do you think?
Yeah. Well, this was the my practice was ninety five percent multiple food sensitivities in for ten years.
I stumbled into it and just kept getting more and more and more referrals. And so I waited up to my chest in the the waters of multiple food sensitivities for a long, long time. Got to know it very, very well. Let me encourage people that this is something that is almost exclusively one hundred percent completely, treatable. I've seen so many people, that were down to, you know, three foods, five foods, eight foods that they could eat without having reactions.
And within a year, those folks were back to being able to eat a normal diet. But it's not a quick and easy process. You have to start with the things that you can find that are out of balance and slowly work on them. And massive subclinical nutritional deficiencies, like we were just talking about with magnesium, is an example of that. So those sensitivity reactions are largely inflammatory.
And when we look at the two main, micronutrients that people are deficient in, vitamin d and magnesium, those are both dramatically anti inflammatory.
So you could get a vitamin d test and bring your vitamin d level up to, the high end of the normal range. And then you could use you could same thing we just talked about with magnesium, and that would make a huge difference. You have to work on your digestive tract and make sure that your digestive juices are completely breaking down all the food eating, which is the kind of main underlying cause of why people have these sensitivities.
It's a long complicated story, and, those are kind of the key issues to control inflammation.
And matter of fact, I just did a, a webinar on inflammation where we talked about a lot of these issues, and people could just check that out on my website. It's still available. People wanna watch that.
So inflammation and then kp casa dot com?
Kp casa dot com. You could go there and check things out.
The, yeah. So inflammation and digestive functioning, is the the key beginning stages for all of this. But I would encourage the questioner to keep pursuing this because it's an increasing problem in our culture just because our diets have been very bad for a long time. We do we live non health supporting lifestyles, and we have these massive, subclinical nutritional deficiencies. And again, you have that, you know, perfect storm of things coming together where people's bodies begin to reject things that otherwise should be healthy.
Can you know and and you had mentioned your website, earlier, you talked about the, your yogi tea that you have every day, and I I did know I did notice that you have a a video that you and I did on that that people can watch to learn how to make that. If you're anybody was wondering about yogi tea, you can make your own. You don't have to buy it in the store.
Well, that's KP's recipe.
Exactly right, John. And, yeah. This is a recipe from my mentor who brought it here, you know, forty five years ago. John, that video that we did, I'm quite sure is available on your website, so people could go there. What what is that? What is it there?
Well, I I believe I I should be on maybe our YouTube channel at youtube dot com slash herb mentor, but it was part of the culinary herbalism course, which will be back next year. And, it would it'll be there too, which will be available all the time. But if you needed to just watch it now, you could find it somewhere. Just Google it. Okay, KP. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna just get into some more, this is a really interesting question and will lead us into a more discussion on some chronic stuff going on because there are so many questions about that. But this this Elizabeth here writes, conventional medicine typically treats the symptoms and not the body systemically.
Herbalism also often falls into this method of treatment using herbs for specific problems. How can I look at my symptoms as a whole and treat them accordingly? For example, I have the following problems as a fifty eight year old female.
I don't want to treat the edema by simply taking diuretic herbs, but wanna look at the cause, or or treat the fatigue by stimulating herbs. So how do I determine what part of her body to treat and are where are these, issues a problem with the blood, liver, immune system, or something else? So for example, she has fatigue and arthritis and edema and weight gain and some other stuff.
This is a never ending debate in professional herbalism about where to start and how what to emphasize. And the problem is that exactly as she's suggesting, our culture has thrown in its lot with conventional medicine which treats symptoms, but treats symptoms as things that sort of accidentally fallen you out of the sky and that nobody knows why you've developed any of these things. And then you take a drug to make it temporarily go away. But of course, it comes back worse or you develop other things. So, traditional medicine would like to look at treating from the root to the branch and figuring out why these fundamental underlying imbalances are there. And then any given branch, any given root might branch into ten different symptoms. If you take you'll end up taking ten different drugs to treat symptoms of inflammation, or of dryness, or neurological disorganization, or lack of digestion.
So it's challenging to, you know, in this format to go into figuring out how all her particular things are related. And you'd have to study that, and you could study that by, reading books, by taking classes on Herb Mentor, or at my website or with my school or you could, you know, take any other Herb school.
Gradually develop your expertise in how these things go together. So John, I know that you're well versed in Chinese medicine, and, you know, I use all the big three, but my main kind of core competence is in Ayurveda. And both of those systems look for these patterns, But they don't look for them in physiology, they look for them in what we would call energetic. So things like are people wet or dry or hot or cold, speed of their metabolism, their body's ability to get water out of the out of the body through the limited mechanisms, the ability to digest food as it comes in, break it down properly, those kinds of things.
And any or all of those dysfunctions can cause a whole host of symptoms that branch off from that. So it takes some study, you know, to do that. So example, things that seem as diverse as failing eyesight, skin rash, hemorrhoids, heartburn are all symptoms symptoms of underlying inflammation or a metabolism that's burning too many calories too quickly. It's too hot.
It's running too fast.
So we would say rather than dance around trying to deal with all of those things, how about if we help the person reduce their secretion of hot chemicals in their body, that's hormones and acid in the stomach and things like that, and slow their body down. We would do that with cooling remedy. So I mentioned earlier Gotu Kola. That's an example of a cooling, remedy.
Whereas I mentioned Ginseng, which is a warming remedy. So you have to get into a paradigm like this and figure it out. But it's it's very, very encouraging to hear someone asking about that because that's what you need to do rather than change chasing symptoms. I will say though that, all the big three natural healing systems support the idea of helping people with their symptoms out of compassion.
A person has horrible gastritis, heartburn, and they can't sleep at night because of that. We're not gonna just say, well, we're gonna treat from the roots to the branch, and it'll be five years before you can feel better. We're gonna say it maybe five years until we've completely dug out all the issues that we need to deal with. But we we will help you treat your gastritis today, so that you can get a good sleep tonight just out of compassion. But it's not a great long term strategy to just blink at one symptom after another. They say if you don't carry for the root, they all, the symptoms all just come back and, get worse.
Because we there were just so many questions here that, you know, we could never do on one call, but I just noticed a commonality that we had someone ask for advice for fibromyalgia, for lupus, impetigo, Graves' disease, hypothyroid hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, erectile dysfunction, all kinds of, uterine fibroids. You know, like, we got all these questions in and, you know, any one of those, right, KP? Could be a week long workshop with you.
And, but I just wonder I have this compassion for everybody because because they're just so I can understand where you're just like, gosh, I just need where do I turn so could like, yes, they can study and they can learn, but I mean, who who can they turn to to give them maybe some coaching advice to maybe get them on their way to start to deal with some of these chronic condition or or or at least also and also just like how to look at it and and because because I because what we do get a lot of KPI on our site, for example, is like someone the first time they get on, they're just new to herbs and they and they say something like this, like, oh, I I I my husband has fibromyalgia. What herbs should I take?
Take? Right.
And so there there just there you go. Just I'll just stop talking and you can take it from here.
Yeah. That that's because that's what they've been trained to do. They they've gone to the medical doctor every single time they've had a problem, and they've gotten one pill at a time, almost always to take. You got you know, they write a prescription, you go home, you take it, and either your symptom is suppressed or it's not. If it's not, you go back again or you go to another specialist and you take another pill.
Every single thing that you mentioned there is something that is not amenable to short term symptomatic magic bullet, treatment. So let me back up for a second and just say, this is what I was talking about, American herbalism is still, in the process of maturing. We've created a system now where we have everything that we need, but we just don't have the general public signed on to those ideas yet. But in every other culture most places, natural healing has naturally segmented itself into basically three tiers.
And the first tier is grandma. She knows about ten different herbs, and she can treat simple headaches, constipation, tummy aches, and, you know, when little Johnny comes downstairs with a fever. That she treats ninety percent of what, the family is gonna experience because that's mostly what people have. Cuts and scrapes.
Mhmm.
Digestive stuff.
The next level is the herbalist for the clan, and that's someone who trained with her grandma, who trained with her grandma, and she knows maybe a hundred herbs, and she treats another, you know, nine percent of what people experience. And those might be things like, you know, migraines or chronic sinusitis or chronic ear infections. Things that are not amenable to sort of quick first aid from grandma.
So now we're left with one percent, and those are treated by the academically or traditionally systematically trained professional, like you and I are, John, and like many people on that you've interviewed on your site, who have taken training, many year training.
My training with my mentor was thirty two years. Mhmm.
So it takes a long time to develop these things.
Now that said, that doesn't mean that you can't be that you can't become grandma, and, you know, in very short time you could learn ten herbs and twenty uses for each of those, and you could be treating your kids and your family very effectively. But that level of treatment isn't going to treat fibromyalgia. For that, you're gonna, turn to a professional, and you could begin to learn some self knowledge about those things. So we're talking about magnesium earlier, for example.
If I had to go to a desert island with a hundred people fibromyalgia and I could only take one thing, it would be magnesium. That has been shown numerous times in many studies to have the most profound effect on fibromyalgia of anything else. So there's those are long term chronic clinical manifestations of underlying metabolic characteristics. So you mentioned fibromyalgia and lupus.
Fibromyalgia is a cold disease that occurs in direct proportion to how far you live from the equator. So the colder and cloudier your climate, the more likely you are to have, fibromyalgia. Almost none of it at the equator. And as you just go further north, you more and more and more and more.
And so you see the greatest incidence in places like Scandinavia and, you know, North America, Canada. Lupus, on the other hand, is a disease of inflammation. It's a hot disease, and it's one manifestation that we happen to give a name. Lupus and fibromyalgia are not things that, you know, we were born with.
It's not like having a thumb that everybody has that you can give a name to, or a disease like tuberculosis that either you have or you don't. It's a syndrome of a bunch of symptoms that when put together, we give it a name.
Hard to diagnose both lupus and fibromyalgia are hard to find the textbook case where you absolutely know someone has that exact thing. So lupus is a situation where the body is unable to control its own inflammation well, and we have to support the functions that do that.
Essential fatty acids, you mentioned fish oil earlier, body uses those to produce chemicals in the body that control inflammation. The adrenal cortex produces anti inflammatory substances that control those things. Everything is being regulated by the homeostasis of the body, the vital energy of the body, the vital intelligence, like the conductor of the symphony. So fibromyalgia is like a a symphony with no conductor, where each instrument is trying to do its job and trying to play its part, but they can't figure out where they are in the symphony and what they're supposed to do.
And everybody's screaming at everybody else, you know, you play your part. No. You play your part. And it and they end up sliding off in the direction of cold dry physiology where people have a certain group of symptoms that we've given a name to.
But fundamentally, there it's nervous dysregulation.
And, you know, the people that have it are people with this cold and dry physiology.
So that's where we go is looking for these big trends. And in natural medicine, we normally don't name diseases.
Conventional medicine does, and I understand that people may or may not have a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. But we're not concerned about the name, we're concerned about how is this person manifesting that. So we treat people that have diseases, not diseases that happen to be in people.
Right. Right. And then, of course, if you choose to go to Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic I mean, do you you'd probably recommend going to somebody who treats a constitutional style medicine. Right? I mean, if you wanna get to the core patterns.
Yes. And any of the big three, have techniques to be able to do this. It's not that anyone is any better than another. They all look at the the they have a holistic overview of what where did your body get off track, and how can we bring it back into, into balance and not focusing on the symptoms.
Fibromyalgia is very difficult and likewise lupus to treat symptoms. People tend to feel better fairly quickly. Within a few weeks, usually, people are from either of those disorders are beginning to feel better and better, and we can bring people back to a place of stability, you know, relatively quickly. I mean, you're talking about a year, maybe a little longer, something like that to get back to the point where people are symptom free.
But we're not giving them twenty different things to control twenty different symptoms. We've looked at the reason their body has slipped off the tracks and veered off and gone down into the canyon of cold or heat or wetness or dryness.
So any of those would, would do the job and to have this constitutional, approach. It has to be a long term perspective. They're just that question of what herb can I take for disease x?
Yes. If you have gastritis, you could you could take licorice, and that would probably make you feel better in five minutes. And you could take licorice two, three times a day, and you probably wouldn't feel the symptoms of your gastritis. But then and we might do that and just say out of compassion, you know, we take this licorice and that'll help you feel better.
But what we'd like to do is to dig into why your body created that heartburn Mhmm. And get it fixed once and for all. You shouldn't have to take licorice every meal for the rest of your life to have to feel good. You should be able to, you know, eat good food, have exercise, have, you know, good relationships, breathe clean air, and, and be healthy.
You know, there's some there was a question or two as well about it's just the surge of, of of books and all that you see out there about, this cleanse diet or this detox diet. What do you, what are your opinion on some of those books? Or do you ever tell people to do that or, you know, what's a safe way to detox if it is a safe thing to do? Like, some it's so such confusion because you hear all these varying opinions, and plus there's all these books and everyone seems to have their own twelve day cleanse book out there.
Right.
Well, it's a detoxification is a fundamental, technique used in natural medicine, and it's one of the two fundamental techniques, which are basically detoxify and rebuild.
You know, get rid of the waste material and rebuild strong tissue. And fundamentally, you can't rebuild strong tissue until you've done some detoxification. Mhmm. But the problem with most Americans is that their eliminative mechanisms are not ready to efficiently detoxify them. So you you go from, you know, eating burgers and fries three meals a day to a twelve day juice cleanse, and the body's just not ready to be able to do it, and usually they're very inefficient.
So we tend to go you know, these these things go in cycles, and we had this detoxification frenzy twenty five years ago. I thought we were over it, but it's it's it's back again. So nothing about detox nothing bad about detoxification. I I totally use it, relate to it, and have done it myself many times.
But it's just a question of, you know, who and when.
So this whole idea again comes from traditional systems. All of the big three have extensive procedures for detoxification when your body is ready. So Ayurveda would recommend in particular doing, stepping your way into it. So rather than going on a twelve day juice fast, feeling horrible every day, having aching muscles, fatigue, horrible headache, and all of that, and basically getting almost nothing actually accomplished, and just waiting for the day that day twelve is over so you can finally go back to eating a burger.
What works better is to do something very minimal for, let's say, a day. Like, eat you know, spend a day eating nothing but steamed vegetables or steamed vegetables and rice, something like that. Something with some caloric content that's not real aggressive. See how it goes, then go back to eating a healthy but balanced diet.
Then a week later, go two days on the steamed vegetables. See how that goes. That's okay. And then you just stair step your way in over many weeks or months until maybe, you know, at the end of the year, you are doing a twelve day juice cleanse.
It works really well.
It rids your body of the signs of the need for detoxification, which we know very well and can teach people.
And, then when you're detoxified, you're done. There you know, you have to rebuild your tissue as well, and so you wanna do this kind of alternating thing. It just depends on how robust you are, how much you can tolerate, that sort of thing. Most people who are detoxifying now are not ready to do it.
They might feel a little better temporarily. They might not. It's kind of variable.
And it sounds like a good idea because beautiful women like Gwyneth Paltrow do it.
But it's not suitable for everybody at all times. And people, especially, who are already depleted, most of the diseases that we just talked about like fibromyalgia are diseases of depletion. We don't yes, they eventually, they're gonna require some detoxification. But if we put the average fibromyte on a twelve day juice fast, their their body's already cold and slow. They're constipated and insomniac and anxious. We put them on a twelve day juice fast, everything gets worse.
Right.
Just not appropriate for them at that time. So again, that question of reading up, you know, reading books, going to competent sources on the Internet, going to your website, my website, taking courses, figuring it out. You don't have to become a you dedicate your life to natural medicine like you and I have, but you have to get some basics down to know how to kinda work your way through, you know, through life.
Well, thank you. That's very sound advice.
Gosh, there were so many more questions. We could go on and on to that. There was one one last question I'll ask from, from from Kimber because she's on the forums a lot, so I wanna get to her question is, she wanted to know exactly what yin deficiency with heat signs means.
Wow, John. That's a whopper as a last question.
Let's see if I can give you a thirty second wrap up of It's okay.
We got time.
It's just that I realized, I'm like, oh, I was gonna leave it off. And I was like, oh, but Kimber, you know, she gets she she participates all the time.
Yeah. No kidding. Well, Chinese medicine has two basic, energies that, are balanced in the body. Yin, which is cool and wet and nourishing, and yang, which is dry and hot and active. So when you're running around accomplishing things, you're yang you're using yang energy. When you're sitting quietly and digesting your food and rebuilding your tissues, you're using your yin energy.
Yin is basically it's called the storehouse of nutrients in Chinese medicine, and it's the the sum total of all of the vitamins, minerals, enzymes, proteins, you know, all those chemicals in your body that your body uses for growth and repair.
And that that's what makes up the yin. So in our culture, yin deficiency is the thing that it's the disease of Americans, and it's a disease of lack of fundamental nutritional stability.
So not only do we have, lack of things like vitamin d and magnesium, but just go down the list. And so Americans, are as a whole, it's just epidemic that they have these chronic subclinical nutrient deficiencies. So there's just no no gas in the tank. Yin is the fuel that you're gonna use to run the car. The the engine is the yang. Yin is the gasoline that your body is gonna burn to to turn into heat.
Moist, nourishing, stabilizing nutrients.
So when you live on donuts and coffee, there's nothing there. Those are things that are digested very rapidly.
It gives you a blast of energy.
Coffee is a young nutrient that gives you it's hot. When you drink it, you feel hot. You have a lot of energy. It makes your face red, all that stuff, that's all yang stuff. So when you've subsisted on that for a while, there's no foundation to your energy, so that's yin deficiency.
What happens is when you don't have enough cool, moist energy in your body, your body starts to feel and look hot. And so people will complain about being hot, but they're not truly hot. We call it false heat.
Mhmm.
And it's yin deficiency heat. It's that yin, there's not enough cold to offset the body's natural tendency to try to keep itself warm. And so you end up with people who seem hot, but if we give them cooling herbs, they get worse. They feel worse.
They have more fatigue. They're hot, but fatigue. So the main thing the main difference for Kimber, so you wanna look at it specifically, is that yin, heat caused by yin deficiency is when a person is tired but hot. When it's caused by yang excess, which is would be the mistake that you would make if you diagnosed it, people are, over energized but hot.
Mhmm. So fatigue plus heat is yin deficiency. Fatigue manifesting as heat is yin deficiency.
Yang excess is heat, with x too much yang, too much energy. So people are just bursting at the seams and have a loud voice and a a big robust muscular body and they're they're, you know, productive and active and determined. And they they work late into the night because they have so much energy and like that. That's all young energy.
And those people appear hot. They have hot hot red skin and like that. But a person who is sweating at night or maybe sweating in the middle of the day and just says I just can't make it through the day, but I feel so hot. That's the yin deficiency.
Okay. And, she was wondering if it was okay for a person with the yin deficiency to drink, golden milk with turmeric. And I'm gonna you think you're probably saying gonna say yes to that.
Yeah. And well, this is another slightly complicated answer. The milk would be, would be yin supporting.
Mhmm.
So milk is nourishing, cooling, slimy. So that's all yin.
Setting aside any concern about milk allergy or anything like that, but assuming that the person tolerates that. Turmeric, however, is this this is a good point to make is that Ayurveda for for these different energetic characteristics only gives you two choices for either one. So any given it doesn't have a neutral. Any given herb will be listed in the textbook as hot or cold. Those are the only choices. Mhmm.
And this is a real problem these days with people learning this because people learn these things with kind of a black and white mindset.
And so herbs are either hot or cold. But they're not either hot or cold. There's a tremendous variation. So something like cayenne on a scale of ten for heat would be a ten.
Something like cucumber would on a scale of one to ten for cold would be a ten. There's a whole range of one to ten. So turmeric in the textbooks is listed as being hot.
That's a little bit hard to understand because it's also anti inflammatory. Mhmm. But it's not so it's short term anti inflammatory, long term potentially warming.
But it's on a scale of one to ten, it's about a point five. It's about as close to neutral as you could get. But Ayurveda doesn't have a neutral. So this really confuses people because they they read in books that turmeric is is warm, and they think, well, warming things are things like ginger, garlic, and chilies.
And those make me sweat and not feel good and give me skin rashes. So turmeric is must be in the same category. But it's not. It's drastically less warming.
In in Ayurveda, everything has to be on one or the other side of neutral.
So turmeric is, you know, just barely on the warming side. Mhmm. But it's essentially neutral. So it is a little bit drying, however.
So again, it's not very drying, but a little bit. So it would be contraindicated for someone with heme deficiency in the sense that it's drying. But if you took it with the milk, the milk is moisturizing, and that's the whole purpose. So golden milk is a recipe that includes milk, oil, and turmeric.
So the milk and the oil are yin supporting, and then the turmeric is, anti inflammatory and joint supporting.
But theoretically is very, very slightly warming. Not so much that would even make any difference, and it's again slightly drying, which, you know, technically wouldn't be an issue with wouldn't be good for yin. But when you take it with milk, it offsets that. And that's how Ayurveda and Chinese medicine get around these problems is to combine things to take advantage of the characteristics of all of them and get a a balance.
And, and if people didn't know golden milk, you can just, you know, Google that. Probably, probably KP Kalsman golden milk, you can probably come up with, probably a, recipe or two out there.
Oh, boy. That's for sure. Yeah. It's all over the place. Oh, I'm gonna do it.
Yeah. Absolutely. My the web the content on my website site rotates a bit. So at any given time, I don't always know exactly which videos and articles we have posted, but you could go there.
Otherwise, John and I did a video which I'm sure someone has snitched and posted on, you know, on YouTube somewhere, or it might be on John's YouTube channel. But you can watch us, you know, making and drinking golden milk, or you can find it somewhere. Yeah. It's a very well known recipe.
Speaking of your website, Katie, courses that you have coming up, could you tell people about your intensive study, how that works, and all that sort of stuff?
Sure. Well, the first thing we have coming up that I'd like to invite people to is an Ayurvedic detox retreat, which is the weekend of September fifth, the weekend after Labor Day. It's at a retreat location on the coast of Washington, a very nice resort facility there. And we're gonna spend three days together as a group, experiencing Ayurvedic detox, speaking of detox.
Exactly.
And so we're gonna eat, detoxifying food. We're gonna learn how to prepare it. We're gonna do some body work, some breath work, numerous other things. So that'll be nice.
We did it last year, got it great, was really successful, so So you're welcome to come to that. We also have a new program starting this fall, our clinical program, where we actually treat real people in the real world. We actually bring real sick people in and as a class learn how to treat them. That's, six weekends long and that we're doing it online for the first time.
So that'll be interesting. So people in Nebraska can actually, you know, sit in their pajamas at their desk with their webcam. Mhmm. Gonna do it with with cameras and microphones.
And so you'll you know, each of our students will bring sick people in and put them in front of the camera, and we'll work on them as a class virtually. Very cool. So yeah. That's for that's for people with, experience with clinical herbalism.
They wanna actually take the next step. And then we have our professional herbalist training course, which is a a program that, is intended to give you, hours toward the professional credential of the American Herbalist Guild, and we have that online and also at, three other different locations, Southern California, Phoenix, Arizona, and Seattle. So those are all listed on my website, kp kalsa dot com. Feel free to go there.
And if you wanna email us or call us from there, we'd love to hear from you.
And and everyone listening on Herb Mentor knows Rosalie from the forums and articles that she does and recipes. And, KP, everyone knows, is one of her main herbal mentors and she learned a ton from. So that's why at Learning Herbs, we highly recommend KP's programs for those wanting to delve deep and especially if you wanna go in that direction, the professional herbalism and and all.
So please, you know, check it out.
Well, speaking of Rosalie, you know, that would be just a getting to know her would just be of such she's a tremendous person and a very talented healer, and it would be a great model for people to really understand because she started essentially from nothing. She was interested in these ideas. She wanted to work on herself. She wanted to work with people.
She started taking courses at a beginner level and just worked her way up and up and up and up and up. And we worked together in a mentor relationship for quite some time, as John said. And she's just really a star student who took it, seriously and certainly not a student anymore, any more than we're all all always students. But, you know, a very competent professional.
And you can just look at the arc of her career and be inspired to see what you could do. Because she just took it from nothing and really just ran with it and made something great out of it. And you can see how much, you know, how skillful she is just from the kinds of posts she puts out on, her website and on Herbenter.
Yeah. That wasn't even ten years ago that, or maybe it was only seven six, seven years ago that, she met met Kimberly and I met her at a at a conference, a herbal event, and, and she was just starting her herbal journey doing some wild foods classes. And that wasn't that long ago, and she just really took the, you know, the passion driven and just, made it happen.
Yep. Exactly.
She shows the possibilities for everyone listening. And as I said earlier, culinary herbalism with KP will be back, next year. We're just doing some lot of renovations on learning herbs and rethinking things there. And you can get way of Ayurvedic herbs, KP's book.
Get that through kp kalsa dot com. Right? Because you have other products there. And that way, you know, you can click on the link there and that, I think, probably goes towards your Amazon thing and right? Sure. Sure.
Yeah. Feel free to get it right from our website. Absolutely.
Mhmm. Mhmm. So, I think that's, pretty much it. And, and again, the American Herbalists Guild, you can, Google that, American Herbalists Guild dot com. You can go check out the upcoming, symposium, which we highly recommend.
So KP Khalsa, thanks so much for joining us today on
John, it's always a pleasure always a pleasure to spend time with you and, my pleasure again to be here with you and your folks.
Thank you so much. And thanks everyone for the awesome questions. See you soon.
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