HERB - Fwd: hist-brewing: mint tea

[Jenne Heise]

On Sun, 31 Oct 1999, Kathleen H. Keeler wrote:
> So I looked up pennyroyal in the Physician's Desk Reference for Herbal
> Medicines: the dominant chemical is pulegone
> For peppermint the chief components are quite different, but down there in
> the "others" is pulegone.  So the active ingredient of pennyroyal is also
> naturally found in peppermint.
> It is not listed as occurring in any of the other mints in the
> book--spearmint, water mint, Japanese mint--however, so some mint teas will
> be pulegone free.

Except that peppermint oil is widely used as a flavorant in everything,
and only in teas are they seeing this. If unusually high pulegone levels
were a natural variation, we would definitely be seeing the problem in
other products, as the making of essential oils tends to concentrate
the active principles.

I suspect the problem is some kind of adulturation of the fresh or dried
mint going on, possibly unintentional, since pennyroyal and peppermint are
the only two mint species that are similar in appearance.

Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
Disclaimer: I don't speak for Eisental, and nobody in Eisental speaks for me. 

"But the world is cold. For me, the warm places are few and far between." 
	-- Charles DeLint, _Someplace to Be Flying_

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