Dear Mr. Boris,
I accidentally discovered your very interesting sites (even though I think nothing happens in my life) and after reading the basic information I immediately ordered a test dose of ginseng. I do not suffer from any more serious health ailments, but with relatively frequent fatigue and lack of energy and lighter digestive problems . I am inclined to a healthy lifestyle including nutrition and I am actively interested in medicinal plants, ecosystems and permaculture. But that's a minor one. I would like to ask you how to proceed with the production of alcoholic tincture. I wonder if it affects the result or subsequent dosage of 40% or 70% alcohol and what you would recommend. Alternatively, you think the layman would have mastered the preparation through your Soxhlet extractor. I still have the dried root of eleuterokoku - should it be used in the same way? I was also very interested in the article on the rhythm of sleep and waking! Beata
Hello, Beato.
I see that you are as healthy as I am about health. I do not have digestive problems , but I suffer from occasional depressions . Lack of energy is actually the main reason why I sometimes enjoy ginseng and myself, a healthy person. (Another reason is his cardio-vascular and neuroprotective effects .)
To ecocards ...
Regarding your interest in ecosystems and permaculture, you are like Prof. Ing. Pavel Valíček, DrSc. This former professor of tropical agriculture today is devoted to setting up gardens of healing plants - one founded in Martinekka near Moravske Budejovice (the Sadek winery), where he currently lives. Another helped to establish near the first, at St. Basil's Cathedral. Prokop in Třebíč. In these gardens, more than 50 species of medicinal plants are successfully breeding.
Such gardens are likely to become important in our country. Self-help gardens are now in fashion, for example, in South America, which suffers from a lack of fertilizers, and in urban agglomerations also lack of soil. These gardens, the so-called "oganoponicos," are located directly in the city, even on the roofs of their homes, and offer fresh and inexpensive vegetables to their surroundings. The problem of the Czech Republic and indeed of the whole EU is different - we are facing an official, central prohibition of medicinal plants. This statement is not overwhelmed. It is no coincidence that the anti-albino directives come from Brussels today, when medicinal plants are experiencing renaissance and phytoplexes are re-scientifically acknowledged as directly usable drugs and preventatives, especially against civilization diseases.
In cooperation with prof. We are preparing the " Do not get nature " initiative, which is against the current institutionalization and prohibition of medicinal nature. On the other hand, it is important to start growing less-known and highly-effective medicinal plants, the overwhelming majority of which is now forbidden in the EU for distribution, to grow in self-help gardens. Nobody can sell these herbs to the consumer, but we have the right to have them in the garden (so far). Otherwise, I personally think that the limitation of medicinal plants is particularly damaging to the Czech Republic. Already when I did the Biological Olympiad, I noticed how participants from the Czech Republic and the Netherlands excelled in practical botanical knowledge, not just us Slovaks but also competitors from most other countries in the world. Not in zoology, not in molecular biology, but in botany. I would like to say that it would be better for the Czech Republic not to forbid tropical medicinal plants but to develop as a sector. But I turned it off, so back to the tincture ...
Simply leaching counter Soxhlet's extractor
Its production is described on the page " Ginseng tincture (alcohol extract) ". For domestic use, you will also need regular louhování. The main advantage of using Soxhlet's extractor is that it is possible to make tincture more concentrated than when it is bottled in the bottle. For tinctures made by liquefaction in the bottle, the dosage should be increased accordingly. If you crumble after extraction or use it in soups, you eliminate the second disadvantage of batch leaching: imperfect extraction. Your digestive system of ginseng splashes of the remaining substance will extract as well as soxhlet, polysaccharides even better.
The use of the laboratory soxhlet , which has been handed to us by an active reader, also has two other smaller advantages: tincture has a cleaner look and its preparation is a bigger adventure. It is irrelevant whether we have graduated in the chemical field. Academic titles are devastating. If it is true that working with poisons and explosions is what distinguishes true chemistry from performing Maillard's reaction on a kitchen plate, then work with soxhletes is done by a laic chemist - the danger of explosion is really threatening. True, native chemists attract this danger. Chemists at the Faculty of Science of the Charles University always knew exactly how much cyanide they can eat demonstratively in practice. And they said that the explosion is only a matter of time when running chemistry. If our other active reader, Petr, persevered in his intention to extract the soxhlete from different plants in alcohol and petrol , he will have something to tell about it for ten years.
(More seriously: Using Soxhlet's extractor is just a bit more complicated than cooking, but every self-taught laboratory practitioner will greatly benefit from the opportunity to see how it works in a proper chemical lab.)
(Note 2: Soxhlet's extractor is a laboratory apparatus and industrial extraction is not suitable, and the Czech environment does not want small business, so for most people, soxhlet will remain largely a toy.)
To next: Choose alcohol concentration according to your own judgment. You can go from liqueur concentrations to those of 70%. For panaxosides there will be no difference in solubility. Ginseng polysaccharides could, but I do not have enough information to know exactly what the effect of changing concentration on their solubility is. You can extract the root of eleuterokok as well as ginseng, the only difference is that eleuterokok is woody and can not be eaten.
To the rhythm of sleep and waking
At the end of your letter, you also mention an article about the rhythm of sleep and waking . He gives generally little-known but simple instructions on how to set up his own internal clock. I am glad that somebody finds it and reads it - this information is usually missing in the manuals of healthy lifestyles. Regular, hearty, eight-hour night sleep is also one of the keys to managing today's epidemic obesity .
Regards,
-boris-