HERB - Fwd: hist-brewing: mint tea

Walter J. Wakefield wjwakefield at juno.com
Mon Nov 1 18:15:29 PST 1999


A couple of comments on the below:
1) Much of the peppermint oil that is used commercially for flavorings is
not derived from the plant itself, but is synthesized chemically.  In
this case there would be no contaminants.  So this may or may not address
the issue of whether the problem is in the peppermint.  Grieve, in "A
Modern Herbal" only mentions pulegone in pennyroyal, not in peppermint,
but her information is not current. 

2) My pennyroyal and peppermint never looked enough alike for me to
confuse them.  Now spearmint, orange mint, lemon balm and sometimes
catnip were a different story.... I could only tell them apart by smell.

3) The original article cited 2 substances as problems, and no one has
mentioned the possibility of the second compound occurring in peppermint.
 So we still have not determined if crossing between mint plants could
have occured, or if the mint tea actually contained pennyroyal.  There
was not enough information in the original citation to determine the
composition of the tea, and there may not have been sufficient
information in the original article.  If the attending physicians were
not familiar with herbal practice, they might not have asked this kind of
question.

4) Pennyroyal is frequently recommended for stomach upsets, and has been
safely used that way for many years, so it might have been included in a
tea for stomach problems.  Most books do recommend against its use during
pregnancy.  Part of the difficulty in the cited case is the very young
age of the infants.  Usage in very small children may not always be as
safe as in older children or adults.  

Suzanna, the herbalist


>> 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.
>	      

___________________________________________________________________
Get the Internet just the way you want it.
Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month!
Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.
============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.



More information about the Herbalist mailing list