This site's central theme is about growing your own culinary herbs and using them as part of your everyday cuisine, thus contributing to a healthy lifestyle of exercise and balanced nutrition. Balance is a central theme in my life; Too often we see a fashionable fad taken to an extreme by health zealots. I enjoy meat in limited quantities; our Stone Age ancestors (and our genes haven't changed much since then) were originally natural carnivores. I eat some carbohydrates- I think we need them - and, particularly, I enjoy homegrown fresh vegetables cooked as little as possible and find that prudent use of herbs, spices and dairy products (dare I say) add flavour, texture, colour and interest to my food, and hence to my life.

Regarding the use of herbal medicine (or herbal dietary supplements as it must be referred to in the USA) practiced successfully by every civilisation since the beginning of recorded history, I find it hard to understand the degree of zeal, sometimes venom, with which the 'conventional' medical and pharmaceutical drug establishment pursue the task of discrediting something that has worked so well for so long. Maybe vested interests of money, power and/or authority are being threatened.

We read the same warnings time and time again. Herbal medicines , euphemistically relabelled by the FDA of the US as “ dietary supplements” because they refuse, unlike European countries, seemingly to even recognise or acknowledge that herbs can have any medical benefit, we are told are dangerous because they can interact with prescription drugs, and that we can do ourselves a lot of harm by overdosing on them, and so on.

Well of course they can. But why single out herbal medicine for these obvious warnings, warnings which apply equally to the mix of any medicine or groups of medicines, including the plethora of over-the-counter pharmaceuticals you can pick up at any pharmacist, or even supermarket?

By refusing to acknowledge the therapeutic properties of herbs, and passing herbal medicines off as "herbal dietary supplements”, for which suppliers must emphatically deny, in print, any suggestion that the product might actually have some beneficial therapeutic value, consumers could be forgiven for assuming they, as mere food supplements, would not be expected to interact detrimentally with any " medications" they are taking. Otherwise your physician would be required to give you, with every prescription, a lecture on what foods you would need to exclude from your diet while you are on the medication. Would your physician take/have the time to do that with you?

Treating herbal medicine as dietary supplements diminishes the very consumer protection that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is there to protect.

The policy of the FDA creates a totally bizarre and nonsensical situation. It reduces an important issue to a matter of meaningless semantics. Surely every substance we consume has some effect on our wellbeing. How can you split them neatly into ‘dietary' substances and ‘medical' substances? Are they saying that herbs can produce harmful effects medically but no beneficial effects? I think that many of their much wiser medical predecessors, Hippocrates, Pliny and others, would take issue with that.

In Europe, the attitude toward herbal medicine is quite different. Herbs have long been recognised as having beneficial therapeutic properties and in 1978 the German government established an expert committee, the Commission E, to evaluate the safety and efficacy of over 300 herbs used in herbal medicine. The Commission E findings are published as official monographs providing invaluable information on approved uses, contraindications, side effects, dosage, drug interactions and other therapeutic data to which responsible herb users and practitioners have access and can refer to in their decisions to use herbs and phyto-medicines for health care purposes. (These data, as you can imagine, are wonderfully reliable resources for me in preparing and validating the information presented in this website).

I have no ethical problem, therefore, pointing you in the direction of suppliers of herbal supplements where I have satisfied myself that there is every reason to believe the truth of the many testimonials that testify to their efficacy. Of course, I have to, nonetheless, insert the obligatory disclaimers on each and every page that I place a link to and/or some text referring to any of these products.

Although more and more people in the Western World (people in the Eastern World are left wondering what all the fuss is about) are becoming disillusioned with the effectiveness of ‘conventional' medicine, and consequently taking greater personal responsibility for their health care, I sincerely urge you, and particularly if you have persistent symptoms, to consider a consultation with a fully qualified health care provider – by that I mean a fully certified Naturopathic Physician (an ND as opposed to an MD). Check here re what that means.

And please never, never, ever take any herbal supplements or dietary supplements, or course of vitamins, or over-the-counter pharmaceutical if you are currently on medication of any sort without referring to such a healthcare professional.

And....I don't want to insult your intelligence, but ... don't overdose. If you are not getting the result you hoped for by taking the recommended dose, taking more won't help and there is probably something else wrong. And, of course that applies to any form of medication.

I hope you find something that's useful to you.