Medicine Makers ...

Have you been curious about Poke (Phytolacca americana) berries? This Native North American herb has toxic constituents in the seeds ... but the rest of the berry has many desirable actions! There's a way to use them safely by making a traditional succus: a low-alcohol tincture of the berry juice and skins.

Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana, formerly known as Phytolacca decandra) is a stunningly beautiful indigenous North American herbaceous perennial. It can grow huge - I've seen a 12-footer propped up against a barn in North Carolina - and the root can be pretty massive too. Although Poke root can be used as a low-dose botanical by more experienced herbalists, today we're going to focus on the berries. We made this free 20-minute video to walk you through the process of removing the seeds to get that frothing magenta juice in the pic below. Then we tincture the juice to make a low-ethanol succus.

Poke berries have a dark purple skin that looks almost black when they are ripe. Unlike the Aronia berries we explored in our last newsletter, Poke berries are not colored by anthocyanins - instead they feature an unusual group of pigments called betalain alkaloids. Betalain alkaloids are non-toxic, water-soluble, strongly antioxidant, and very anti-inflammatory. They also occur in Beets, Red Orach, Spinach, Rainbow Chard, purple varieties of Lambs' Quarters, Purslane, and Prickly Pear cactus fruits and flowers. But Pokeberries have a super high concentration of these potent pigments!

Betalain alkaloids are not the only active constituents in Pokeberries. They also contain saponins, which are anti-inflammatory in lower doses, but will sting your tongue if you get too much - and can temporarily erode your GI mucosa if you get way too much. That's one reason why the berries are a low-dose botanical!

Another reason to be cautious with Pokeberries - and why we remove the seeds - is that the seeds contain a serious toxin called Pokeweed Antiviral Protein or PAP. Note that this is NOT a useful antiviral constituent. It is in fact poisonous to humans. Inside a cell, PAP puts the little organelles called ribosomes out of commission. Ribosomes are necessary for reading the genetic instructions in the cell's DNA and translating them into the various proteins that the cell needs to function. Without ribosomes, the cell dies. So please don't make the mistake of thinking of Pokeberries as directly "antiviral." The misleading name comes from the fact that the toxic protein can kill certain viruses in vitro - in the laboratory.

That being said, Pokeberries are also anti-inflammatory, immunostimulant, lymphagogue, alterative, and deobstruent - so in that sense they can support healing when we have an acute viral infection as well as when we are addressing chronic conditions.

The renowned Physio-Medicalist Dr. William Cook (who strongly disliked potentially toxic herbs) declined to use Poke root, but he thought highly of the berries. In his 1896 work A Compend of the New Materia Medica, he wrote "Phytolacca berries have at times been suspected of having narcotic [toxic] properties; but I have used them extensively for many years, and have never seen any narcotic or other undesirable action from them. They are an almost pure relaxant, slowly influencing the glandular system and serous tissues, and are admirable in subacute and chronic rheumatism, scrofula, and most cutaneous diseases ..." Gotta love that archaic medical terminology! This is Cook's way of saying they're alterative and lymphagogic.

So what can we make with Poke berries? Since they're not food, we usually tincture them - but we want to remove the toxic seeds first, so we are going to tincture only the juice and skins of the berries to make a low-ethanol (30%) succus! Watch our free video to learn how! SAFETY NOTE: Don't put these berries in a blender, food processor, or other machine that might crack open the seeds. There is one reported case of a fatal poisoning from somebody who did this and drank an entire glass of what they misidentified as "wild Grape juice." In the video we show you how to safely remove the seeds so that you can tincture only the juice and skins.

Now that we've harvested this year's Poke berries and made our beautiful succus, we'll get back to working on the next class in our Make Better Medicine series, Extraordinary Elixirs! Thanks to the talented Ben Lehman, we've finished shooting the videos and are madly editing and putting together the class content for this exciting new adventure in medicine-making ... stay tuned for updates!