Green Medicine: Harnessing Herbal Secrets for Long-Term Health

Hi, everybody. I'm Dr. Sandhya Moldovan, periodontist and nutritionist. Welcome to the Holistic Dentistry Podcast, the show that gives you the tips and tools to detoxify your mouth for a healthier body as we explore together the root cause of disease. Remember, you're not healthy until your mouth is healthy, so take care of it in the most natural way. Welcome to today's show, everyone. I'm very excited to talk about slightly different topic, but I. I feel this is so important in the holistic aspect of health, to use mother nature as. As healing. So with me Today, I have Dr. Saeed Mashta from Canada. Welcome, Dr. Saeed.

Thank you.

So I want to tell people about you a little bit before we go into tinctures and pine pollen and all this. You started actually as a naturopathic doctor. You studied at University of Toronto. You went into studied mental health, addiction, neurological diseases, and then you did your postgraduate studies at the Canadian College of naturopathic medicine in 2006. So what, did you go from there after 2006?

Yeah, after 2006 when I graduated, the climate of naturopathic medicine in Canada was that there were a couple of provinces that were regulated. So Ontario and B.C. were regulated, but the Alberta was in the process, and the rest of them weren't regulated. So there was this big push to take naturopathic medicine to the frontiers. And I thought, where else better than like, north? Let's go as far north as we can and as far north as we can. Yellowknife was a city of 20,000, so there weren't any naturopathic doctors there. It was the governing city of the Northwest Territories. So I went there north of the 60th parallel, set up my office, hung my sign in front of the building, and I was painting it, actually, and I got my first patient.

As you were painting?

Yeah, as I was. I was put. Like, I was, you know, like I actually made my own sign. Northwest Naturopathic Clinic called Northwest Territory. And I was, yeah, like, it was a green sign with like wood cut out and stuff. And she was like, I want to see you. I'm, you know, I. I'm from one of the other communities. We flew in to Yellowknife and I heard there's a naturopath here now, and I want to see you. I was like, well, I can't. I'm not set up to see you just yet. No. She's like, no, no, I gotta see. I'm like, okay, well, can you come tomorrow at least? Can I get change Easy to more professional clothes. So that's how my practice started. And for the first, you know, nine years, which I was there for, I was there for nine years. For the first five or six years, it was a general practice. You know, I started working and I, I got really busy really quickly and I was seeing everything. I was seeing, you know, gut issues, hormone issues, patients with like, ms, Alzheimer's, like, everything. Because there wasn't any.

Small town. Yeah, in a small town you get to see everything.

Yeah. So that was really good. Like, deep dive into, like straight into the deep end for me in terms of naturopathic medicine. And from there, one of the things you recognize being in medicine for a while is that you just can't separate the mind from the rest of the body. Just, it just. There's no such a thing. Like, if, if you look at causation and we have this mechanistic way of like, what is causing the disease, right? Is it, is it the bug? Is it the neurotransmitter? Is it the hormone? Is it, you know, what is that? Well, all of these are connected, right? The emotion is. Well, it's a mixed slew of things. So one of the modalities we started studying naturopathic medicine is homeopathy. So I became really versed in that because the idea with that is trying to figure out what is that emotional repetitive pattern the person is unable to free themselves from. Like, what is it that needs to heal? Like, is it. What is that? In Chinese medicine they say, what is that virtue that needs to be acquired to overcome the emotional blockage? Right. And I had my own personal history with mental health, you know, physical health. I've been very lucky, but I've had my share of concussions. I had, you know, some behavioral issues growing up. I wasn't aggressive or anything, but I was a crybaby a lot of times, you know, and then, and then immigration and the stress of that and a lot of issues, right? Like, I dealt with depression throughout my university ages and I wasn't aware that there could ever be a connection between these, like, falls that I took from walls or, you know, like the rocks that, that hit my head, you know.

It's not talked about. Yeah, Mental. Mental health, you know, especially, it's. It's such one of those things that we don't talk about. So thank you for being vulnerable and expressing that and really talking about it because it is a big topic and yeah, there's a lot of people that need help with us.

It definitely is, is in the Dark side. So because of my own journey, like, I took an interest in mental health and as a naturopathic medicine doctor, the beauty of our field is that we have a lot of things we can decide to go into. Right. The field is open to us. So then I went into studying neurofeedback and EEGs and quantitative EEGs and whatnot. Because when I came down to Vancouver, one of the things over these years of practice, what I realized was I'd become really good at figuring out that emotional change and giving a homeopathic remedy. But I still would get kids coming in that had a combination of attention disorder and emotional dysregulation, and their emotions would become better, but the attention wouldn't change. And then that's where I. It was a conference, actually. I remember it was a functional medicine conference. And I first heard about QEGs, brain maps and neurofeedback and Loretta Neurofeedback. And I was like, whoa, how come I didn't know about this? You know? So I got into that. Yeah. And then. And then this is where I am today. Like, about 60, 70% of patients I see have some kind of head injury, concussion and whatnot. But the thing is, it doesn't change my practice because a head injury spills into hormones, it spills into mood, it spells into attention, it spells into gut changes. Right. Don't get the run of the slew, you know, like naturopathic. Hey, I. I keep burping, and I got gas, and I got this and I got that. But I also mostly focus on brain health and this company that we started.

Yeah. So very exciting, the company you started and how did you go from your practice, you're probably very busy to now harvest things in the wild.

Yeah. That's the blessing of having a business partner. Yeah. So my current business partner, Burgess, he's actually in the field managing the pickers. So he was, I don't know, like, maybe my third patient in Yellowknife, or second patient, one of those, like, the first, you know, first digits of the hand. Patient. And over time. It's a small town, right. Like, 20,000 is not a whole lot. We became close, close friends through. I was single at the time, so I was. I had a roommate, and my roommate was a carpenter, and he had done some work for Burgess, and all of that became connection. So Burgess became my, you know, friends, patients. We played catan and, you know, all that. So he would come to me once in a while with ideas and questions. Like, he had a lot of questions. Good questions, right? So he would say, you know, see, like, what do you think of chlorella? You know, like, I discovered this, and I'm taking that. And what do you think of. Back in the day when Shilajit wasn't a thing? She's like, what do you think of that? And one day he came to me with pine pollen, you know, and then when I first. When I heard about it, I. I was actually, you know, I was clueless, first of all, what it was. And, you know, this is that mind, body, connection. Emotionally, I was outraged that I didn't know about it.

Like, a lot of people still don't know about pine pollen, actually. And how is it different from, let's say, wildflower pollen, you know, which we can find all unusually, you know, at the natural store, but what's the difference with pine pollen?

So pine pollen, pine trees, every year, for a period of two weeks, at the tip of their growth, new growths, they make these flower, like very fleshy, small cones. But they're fleshy cones. They're not the woody cone that everybody knows. The woody cone is the source of the seed or the female germ off the pine tree, and then that's where we get the pine seeds. But then these. These male cones, little tiny things, they look like flowers, a bunch of flowers at the tip, and they're on the tree, and they pollinate, and then boom, they fall. So most people don't see them unless, like, you have a pine tree right in your backyard, and you're paying attention to it all the time, and you're catching it in that. In that early spring period of time. So the pollen of them is a sort of source of phyto androgens, testosterone, and progesterone, which is really. Which is like. Which when you look at, like, the pharmacopeia of herbs, there isn't a whole lot of things like that, right? There's. There's two herbs that do that. So when I heard from Burgess about it, I was like, whoa. Like, I want to know, like, how come, first of all, how come they didn't teach me this in naturopathic medicine, Right? Books, man. And the reason later I found out was that because of a scarcity of it, right? It's not. It's not there all the time. So in Chinese medicine, even though there were references to just back in the day, we couldn't buy it. When I went through the school, you couldn't buy pine pollen. It was only in the recent years that the Chinese figured out how to harvest it, preserve it and package it in a way that doesn't spoil because it spoils really fast. It's not like bee pollen, right? Bee pollen, the pollen. The bee processes that pollen with their saliva and with their, you know, secretions. So that's preserved already. Whereas pine pollen will grow if it's not processed well, it's, it will grow mold and it will grow yeast and the yeast will just like chew away at it and you'll see like this yellow powder still. But it's like, is used up powder. Right. So it needs to be processed properly. So, yeah, like. So when I heard about that pine pollen, I was like, okay, well let's go get it. Let's. Because, you know, phyto androgens, that's not, that's, that's a, you know, that's. Even that oven itself is like new to medicine because mostly we talk about phytoestrogens, right?

Absolutely. But androgens, that's very rare. Yeah. So how did you learn to process it? So you take the pine pollen and what do you mean by processing? Because I know a lot of people are worried about processing things and using chemicals. So how is, you know, your company?

Yeah, our processing is mimicking nature. You know, it's. It. This thing comes up and it grows on the tip and within two weeks it dries up and the pollen starts, you know, the wind starts blowing it out. So we basically, like our processing is, is. Is a form of controlled siloing where we lay them out on racks in temperatures that are controlled for, drying fast so that nothing grows. And then we use sifters and vacuums to separate the pollen, which has got a specific grain size from the buds and the button. And we keep it wholesale. So unlike everything else in the market from China that crack the cells, we keep it whole. So it's like however the nature provides it. And so the word processing is in the nature of separating the pollen. So not much processing goes into it.

Yeah, very nice. And you use it in a form of powder and tincture.

Yeah. So traditional Chinese medicine, when you look at the powder form of it, the cool thing about pollen in general, like whether it's pine pollen or bee pollen, is that now they have studied and found out that it has testosterone particularly. So the phytohydrogen, it has testosterone in nanogram amounts. It falls under a whole class of molecules called brassino steroids or plant based steroids that are the plants use them through their signaling and growth shoots and things like that. So every growing germ cell of any plant is going to have these. Pine pollen tends to have the highest amount because it's the greatest, the largest grain of pollen compared to all the other pollen, flowers and trees and whatnot. Pine trees just make the biggest pollen size. So as a result it packs a lot more of these signaling, signaling molecules to, to be able to germinate and grow itself when it's in a way fertilizing an egg or a seed, pine seed. So that's the beauty of it. So the Chinese in the 70s put a lot of, a lot of money into like reviving this and bringing this up. And it took us quite a number of years in Canada to get Health Canada actually recognize the two species. It took us four years despite like, you know, all the Chinese references this, that the other. But the beauty of it is that it was used traditionally as food and it was used as a source of supplements and nutrients. So it's like a functional food. Like the way you think about it is kind of like your saffron, right? Saffron is now big because everybody is like, saffron helps hormones, saffron helps mood. Saffron is anti inflammatory, it does a lot of good things. So but you can use it as her or you can say, hey, here is the specific dose you need to take on a daily basis for this amount of time. And that becomes a supplement, right? So pine bone, functional food. We sell it as powder. The powder is more of a food component. That's something that, you know, it's really not age restricted. But because we have a dose of recommended dose, we have to also put an age restriction of use it after the age of 18. But you know, like North Koreans use it in something called dasic, which is these little tiny pine pollen cookies that you can eat and everybody eats, right? It's not. Yeah, exactly. It's a delicacy. And then we also make it in an extract in a tincture. And the beauty of a tincture is that it makes it easy, easy to take and easy to absorb.

Now, is your tincture made with alcohol or without alcohol?

That is the downside of tinctures. It needs a solvent and the solvent often tends to be alcohol or glycerin. In the case of pine pollen, you've had to use both because there are some compounds that are more glycerin soluble in it and there's some compounds that are more alcohol soluble. So the phyto androgens come out better in alcohol. It's got these other enzymes, plant enzymes called gibberlins those are also, like, they trigger stem cells. That's the cool thing. But they come out better in glycerin. So we've used the two of them to make our tincture.

So what kind of cell studies are there on pine pollen? Or like, what are the benefits for health?

Okay, well, you know, maybe the first thing I'll touch is the benefits in terms of the oral health. You know, I was happy about that.

We need to talk about oral health. Yes.

That's in terms of holistic dentistry. Like you would, you would notice there, there is, there is a bunch of studies that show, like, low testosterone is associated with lower dental, the density of bones and teeth, as well as the rest of the body. Low testosterone ends up causing more tooth loss in terms of its, you know, attachments to. To the gums. And then the other thing about it is it also associates an association with low testosterone in the process of aging and periodontal disease, which is kind of like, we know that testosterone impacts microbiome. We know progesterone and estrogen impact bowel movements and microbiome, and an excess of progesterone, estrogen. So as you age, usually, typically microbiome changes because bowel movements become slower, but that's because you're going into an estrogen dominance. So there's a lot of evidence that hormones have an impact. And the question is, well, how do you regulate hormones? How do you. How do you improve all of that, especially in the face of aging? Right. As you 50s and 60s and you go further, invariably you're going to be a lower hormonal status. And that's directly connected with all sorts of disease outcomes, but in particular, bone and mood. Now, energy, sexual health, all of that falls under testosterone. Right. Pine pollen's beauty is that in supporting that in terms of one of the herbs, if you look at. Okay, well, how can this support. It's a yin tonic. Traditionally, it's used to support the organs of the lung and the heart. And in terms of clinical studies, direct clinical studies with it, they have studied it in human trials for cardiovascular health and blood pressures. So in Chinese medicine, if something impacts the lungs, obviously heart, you obviously study it for that. And it reduces. That reduces blood pressure, reduces ldl, it reduces blood sugar. So it's a blood sugar regulator. They have studied along with metformin, they've compared it to on metformin versus off metformin with pine pollen. And it's. The group on pine pollen and metformin perform better than just metformin. So that's they have studied it for prostate health. That's another one. So it improves benign prostatic hyperplasia. Those are the human trials. And then in terms of animal trials. Oh, and then it has a lot of human trials for skin conditions, so, like eczema and bed sores and diaper rash and this and that.

Because typically, is that applying it topically or actually ingesting it? No topic topical application. Well, if it's good for those kind of skin conditions, it's probably good for periodontal disease, because you get inflammation and redness.

Yeah. The cool thing about it is that it's got some probiotics in it, too. Like, the powder has some probiotics. There is. So in terms of animal studies, they have looked at it in terms of chickens to the fed, chickens on it to improve the quality of their eggs, and it shows that it changes the microbiome. They have studied in experimental Crohn's disease for microbiome changes experimental arthritis in animals, experimental hot flashes in rat models. So everything that resolves dampness in a way, in Chinese medicine, which is secondary to, hey, I don't have enough Yang. I don't have enough hormones. I don't have enough of those kind of, like, boosts for the rest of my body. So everything becomes damp and slow and stagnant. So it's essentially the aging process. So it's. It's been studied for a lot of those things. It hasn't been studied per se in. In dental health or in, you know, oral health. However, it's, you know, the fact that it supports testosterone, and knowing that connection, everybody can support their testosterone with the aging process. That's. And that's where pine pollen comes in. That's where another herb like maca comes in, or another herb, saffron, which I mentioned, right?

Yeah. Can you overdose on this? Like, can you, like, shoot up the testosterone? Like, if you were to take, like, testosterone pills or injections?

Yeah. So that's the conventional way of helping testosterone, which is, like, you would use a testosterone patch or you would use a testosterone injection. The downside of those methods is that the gonads become dependent on that testosterone that's coming in, which means that the hpa, the hypothalamus, will tell the pituitary, the adrenals, and the gonads to, hey, slow down your natural production. So the downside of pharmaceutical testosterone is that over time, you will have less natural production of testosterone. But with pollen, you don't get that a. The dose of testosterone is in nanogram Amounts B. The testosterone is just one of the phyto androgens. So, you know, you get a slew of plant androgens. And it just so happens that the pine trees have the same genes as us to make testosterone, but the other phyto androgens they make that we don't make in the process of making that testosterone or in the process of degrading that testosterone. They all have phyto activity on testosterone receptors. So they have more of a balancing effect. If someone's testosterone is high. Let's say, you know, even in prostate cancer, when you want to, like, reduce the testosterone, pine pollen as a phyto testosterone would have the same impact as a phytoestrogen. Would have forgotten breast cancer. Right. It would have that balancing effect as opposed to a more of a stimulation.

Because traditionally, yeah, traditional medicine, more of an adaptogen. It adapts.

It's an adaptive condition.

Yeah.

Medicine, they call it a yin tonic. So it supports. It supports substance and. And it supports qi, which is energy.

Yeah. So how do you recommend people take these tinctures, like, straight up, or do you mix them in something? You know, what's your recommendation for the.

Person who's not so attentive? Like, you know, it's drop dosing. Right. So our recommended dose is 2 mils, and it can go up to 4 times a day, depending on where you are. So 2 meals, 1 to 4 times a day. If you're someone who's got like 5 or 6 different supplements, or 10 or 20 if you're like me, where, you know, you open my drawer, I got so many, I have to cycle through them. I typically say, okay, well, you know, stack it up. So, like, if you're making. Taking maca already and you're taking tribulus and other herbs for testosterone, then I would stack this up. But if you're taking it as a standalone, the standalone dose, for anyone to notice a change, it really depends on their starting state. So if it's a person that's already andropausal or menopausal, meaning that they're feeling the impacts of low testosterone. So, like, libido is low, stamina is low, recovery is low, and perhaps there's some hot flashes or sleep changes. Right. So if you're noticing any of those, then you want to go higher doses. You want to do that two meals, four times a day, three times a day to get that impact within the first couple of weeks. But it's. But if you. You're like, let's say, hey, I'm healthy. I'm. I'm 25 and I'm hitting the gym. While you can do it as a pre and post workout. Right. We've had a lot of. A lot of different people respond to us. The recommended dose on the label is take 2 mils and just put it directly under your tongue.

Twice what I do typically when I take it. Yeah, yeah. But I got to try it before workout. I never thought about that.

Mm. Yeah, that's. That's another thing we've had. It's kind of like, you know, they're. They're pumping more iron when. When they're in the gym, which is cool.

One of the things you mentioned, Saeed, is a lot of women's symptoms, you know, like hot flashes. I didn't realize. This is good actually, for premenopausal women.

That's, you know, that's where it shines even. Even more than men. What happens in women is a lot of menopausal symptoms are the result of low estrogen. Obviously low estrogen, all the hormones. But what happens is the amount of decline you get in the estrogen versus the amount of decline you get in the testosterone creates a estrogen dominant state. So at premenopausal and menopausal stages, where you have this estrogen dominance on top of a lowest. So which is kind of like, well, hey, if my estrogen is low, how is. My estrogen is like I got too much estrogen now? Well, no, like, you have the other ones too little. So the little bit of testosterone that comes into play from pine pollen has that balancing impact on the. On the dominance of estrogen. So it's. Women notice a much quicker, much more noticeable change in their energy and in their menopausal symptoms. I used to have really cool protocol, naturopathic protocol for. For menopause. You know, I took. I took everyone off coffee and off sugar. I still do. Like, you know, if you got pre.

Medical, that's a tough one.

You know, I got my two cents about those two things. When you're healthy, you can handle some of it, right? But if you're going through. You gotta. You gotta manage it. And then I would, you know, have this diet regime of getting them to have like, broccoli, cauliflower, arugula, things like that to support the estrogen dominance and get the liver to flush it out. And then a combination of black cohosh, schisandra, Don Quay, you know, all the blue cohosh, all like herbal formulation of that that I put them on. And then I would Put homeopathic depending on their mental state. So like if there were, they were irritated and they didn't deal with anyone, I would probably put them on sepia if they were a little bit more sad and you know, showing water retention signs and I would put them on nature miraticum so like depending on the mental state. And it worked all well until I discovered pine pollen. And then since I discovered pine pollen I basically say don't drink coffee or sugar and take pine pollen. And within literally a couple of weeks they notice temperature regulations come back. So it's, it's amazing. Cool, cool strong herb in that.

That's amazing. You know, the mother nature really provides this for us and it's still not known about it very well at all.

Yeah, so.

Yeah. So besides you know, pine pollen and you mentioned to me you put pine pollen in your water, you mentioned to me earlier. And I think that's such a good way to take it, especially for people maybe that don't like water.

Yeah, that's, that's one way to you know like taking, taking water first thing in the morning is, is one of the best things for, you can do for your skin health, you can do for your, I, I imagine for your oral health I would put that question absolutely. For your digestive health, everything. But a lot of people can't do just plain water. They get digestive symptoms from it. It doesn't sit well with the stomach. You get acid reflux, you get burping. It just doesn't feel right or it flushes through you. Like your kidneys don't really absorb that non structured in a way water. Right. There's some talk about structured water or not. What I find for myself is if I add the tincture to the water that it makes that water more palatable and I can handle it. So I actually look forward to it. And the tincture I use in my water is the, the spruce and the pine needle which has a slightly different impact than the pine pollen. The needles are antimicrobial, antiviral. You know they have a lot of, a lot of pineins that, that kind of improve respiration like that, that whole like idea of the Japanese idea of bathing in the forest. Right. Like walking there and. And then the pine pollen is more particular to the androgens. It does have like, I mean being, being a pine source, it does have some of those pine and whatnot but it's more for the androgens. And that's one way to take the tincture to start with like you can put it in your mouth or if you're sensitive to the alcohol content, you can put it out to a little bit of water and take it. And that makes it, that makes it easy, right?

Yeah. And pine pollen actually such a good, you know, not the pine pollen, but the pine needle tincture. It's a great breath freshener too.

That's. Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't be super. So we had to put an NPN natural health product number for that tincture in Canada. And in the process I had to dig out all the oral references from first nations, different first nations on pine needles and the use of pine. And the pitch itself was essentially used for all. Everything. Mouth. Right. Like, it's just like if you had a cavity, if you have a sore, if you had like here is a, here's a, here's a pine pitch. Here's, here's a spruce pitch. That's what they use. It, you chew on it. It's, you know, you, you keep it in your mouth, you move it around. You just, you know, even like on skin sores and cuts and things, you just chew it and just put it on because it's antimicrobial, antibacterial, antiviral and it's, it's got such a balancing effect and you get the antioxidants from it, you get the aroma and the essential oils. You get a lot of amazing things from it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaking of essential oils, you know, I actually grew up in Transylvania, part of Romania, where we had a lot of pine trees. So one of the things, you know, growing up, I remember if I was getting a cold, you know, my grandmother would always take some pine needle like essential oil and I would just breathe it in and she'd give me this little syrup that she would make from the pine needles and that's what we would use, you know, to treat any kind of cold or respiratory infections.

For sure. For sure. There's like, there's actually the references for pine needle use are from Romania. Like, I think that's the, the clinical research I've looked at is from Romania. The rest of it is from, from first nations and they, they have so many different first nations referencing its use for colds. Like it's, it's brewer. The, the needle tea for colds, for colds. It's just, it just. And the bark too. They, they use the bark as well as, as another source of the antioxidants and the anti. Inflammatory effects of it. So when I, when we talked at the show and you told me about that, I found it, like, really amazing that it's kind of like, okay, well, I have a research paper here looking at the different, different species of pine used in Romania and the oral tradition behind it. And you telling me that, hey, I remember this as a kid. Like, wow, that's amazing.

Yeah. So that's why, you know, when I saw your product at a farm, I'm like, this really brought me back home. And it's so great that, you know, you're harvesting this with such care and integrity and really putting out a good product, you know, without the use of chemicals, like some of the ones coming from China. And then you have other tinctures. We were talking about the reishi mushroom tincture that actually helps tooth decay and bad breath. And a lot of people don't know that there's a lot of reishi tea. But. But I think reishi tea is probably different than a tincture. My guess is not. Not the same properties.

The. The reishi tincture is basically your lazy man's version of the reishi tea. If you want to make proper fungal tea, whether it's reishi or another herbal mentioned, turkey tail, which is good for herpes and oral cancers. Right? Whether you want to make a tea from reishi, turkey tail, chaga, any of these mushrooms, you literally got to boil it on simmer or you got to simmer it for 7, 8 hours to get the right active ingredients. So, like, you see all these like, offy mushrooms popping up where you just like, that's ready. Well, that's ready because somebody made a tincture from it, dehydrated that tincture, turned it into powder, and then mix it with your instant coffee. So now you got instant reishi and instant coffee. Right. But if you really do that. So like the brands that like mix up the reishi or the chaga and they just ground it up and mix it in the supplement, and you take it as a tablet, or if it's crude herb that needs to boil for eight hours. So mushroom tinctures are that. It's kind of like we take the mushroom, we do the first alcohol pass extract, and then we take the pulp and we literally, at 80 degrees, we simmer it in an ultrasonic tank to knock out all those complex sugars that have the health benefits, right? The complex sugars, those saccharides, those are the ones that are immune stimulating, antiviral, antibacterial like. And. And they are antiviral and bacterial. Not directly, but. But true. Stimulating the immune system. So if it's helping to decay, it's because it's. It's helping those macrophages and T cells and, you know, it's triggering a proper inflammatory response through its. Its polysaccharides. So that's one thing is like you can with mushroom tinctures. You just take it and put it in some hot water and there you go. You just made your tea right there.

Love it. I'm going to use it as that.

One process less than taking that tincture and turn it into a powder. Right. So like extracting with alcohol water, and then keep boiling it, boiling it, boiling it, exposing to heat for such a long time. Or they do it under pressure, like under vacuum, so that you don't need as much eat in there. But then one. One more step of processing of dehydrating, drying, and then because it's powder, now you have to sterilize it too. Right? Wow.

Yeah, it's a process. See, we don't know what goes into our food and how. How many hours it takes to produce what we're drinking or eating.

The closer to nature it is, the. The better it is. Like. And tinctures would be like the herbal medicines. Closest way of saying, hey, how do we preserve nature in time so that you can have, you know, you don't have to get that fresh herb, but you have the qualities of the fresh herb. Shelf is stable for the next few years because it is in a tincture form.

Yeah. I'm glad you brought up turkey tail earlier, because I was really fascinated by mushrooms. Part of my book Heal up actually wrote about mushrooms and the medicinal benefits. And I remember looking at the research on turkey tail and how it helps with cancer. And I had a patient that came in with a, you know, this tumor in his mouth, and I actually used high doses of turkey tail for him, and he healed.

Nice.

Finally healed. Yeah. So I was so excited and I. I know you gave me the study also for other oral health uses. So the 61 patients with gum disease. 88% of the 41 patients who received both turkey tail and reishi mushrooms showed positive results only after two months of treatments. And HPV in the mouth, you know, obviously we know can lead to cancer, so the fact that, you know, we can use it for. For so many oral conditions, pretty amazing. It's not taught in dental school, by the way. So there you go. Yeah. So dentists listening. I know we have dentists listening to this podcast. You know, I highly encourage them to look into the studies of turkey tail and Rishi, especially when it comes to gum disease and HPV related tumors.

Really?

For prevention purposes as well.

Yeah, absolutely. That's. Mushrooms have a really good reishi is Chinese medicines top longevity. Her. Right. If you were to take one mushroom, in my opinion, it would be reishi. It's the queen of mushrooms. I like it just on par as chaga, I would say. I just like the. The flavor of the chaga better than the flavor of a reishi. Reishi is not that flavorful, colorful. Like, I mean, you're making chaga tea or a chaga tincture. That dark brown, kind of earthy taste hits you right away. But reishi is definitely Chinese medicine's top longevity herb. And it's. It's one of those things that, hey, you hit again, like 40s and 50s. Why not keep it in your preventative cycle? Like it's. That's the thing, right? Like, you and I see patients and we see people healing, but the main problem is we see patients when they are in a disease state. They come in when they've had the problem, right? So when you have HPV recurrence or, or symptoms that are just like telling you, hey, something's out of balance, instead of it becoming cancer, why not prevent it with things that have that preventative effect off the bat or. I'm a super healthy person, things are going well. But I know I'm aging. My body's not forever. Why not slow that down in my 40s and 50s as opposed to wait till 60s and 70s for that process to kick in? Because it does take for like, for a herd to work in. It does take a couple of months at least, right? It takes like pine pollen is amazing in my opinion, for menopause or andropause because like you see the impact within a two to three week period. But generally healing takes time. Body just, you know, you can expect like I get patients still like, you know, because motor vehicle accidents, concussions, you end up getting like joint injuries and things like that. And the expectation is like, I would do something and it would go away. Well, no, like it will take five, six, seven months for that injury to heal, even though you can't see it, because it's like your brain got. Got shook up, right? Same thing with any other condition. It's. It's time is what the currency of healing is.

Yeah, absolutely. The last thing I want to mention is about the spruce tip tea, because I, I've never actually seen that. But you know, I actually tried them just raw out of the little jar, you know, and they're pretty tasty, just raw dehydrator you just dry them up or what's the process there?

We freeze dry those.

Freeze dry. Okay. Yeah. Very delicious. But I have to say the tea itself is so delicious. It's got such a nice like citrusy flavor because it's full of vitamin C. And that's another one that really helps to strengthen the immune system. And especially for people with like oral health conditions suffering from gum disease, inflammation, you know, canker sore, things like that. I think having first dip tea is, is great.

That's. Yeah, for sure. It's funny you mentioned the spruce deep tea and the vitamin C connection with oral health. So one of the things, one study, try to remember the author, it was the journal of Ethnobotany and it was on. It's called Arginine, Scurvy and the Tree of Life, I think. And he was looking at the content, the arginine content of evergreen leaves and connecting that with the mechanism of vitamin C absorption and how the sailors were using these evergreen teas as a way of, you know, recovering from scurvy. Because the vitamins and of spruce tips is great, but it's not a whole lot like it's, you know, a hundred, 100 grams of fresh spruce tips can only give you 200 milligrams of vitamin C, which twice the daily value. But that's 100 grams. Like that's like a big handful of spruce tips. Right. So why is it that like small amounts of it still has like if you take 6 grams of vitamin C from a spruce source, you can recover from, from scurvy. Whereas the daily amounts, you know, like daily recommended doses of ascorbic acid, which is the synthetic form, 75 milligrams. Right. It's, it's super cool that you know, like plants just pack so many different things to synergize their impact. They don't do that for us. The plants do this, do it for themselves. They do that to fend from animals and insects and things like that. But in the process of having learned that, we get benefit from that because we are from that same energetic source. Right?

Yeah. And I'm a big believer of taking natural sources of vitamin C like acerola berries, like antioxidants from greens, vitamin C, but. And also like spruce steps. But it's because they have so many more other factors there that helps with exactly what you just thought with the absorption.

Yeah, those, those freeze dried root tips, I, I really love them on, on my fish. That's how I use them.

I have to try that. You chop them up a little bit and sprinkle up just.

Yeah, just like, you know, sprinkle it over. Like I cook my fish the, the last minute before I put it, one minute before I pull it out of the oven, I open up the oven and sprinkle that on the top, close it up and it just makes them a little bit more crispy. I mean they're already crispy because they're freeze dried but it kind of like gives them a nice little kind of a heat and it just goes well with the texture of I mix wild salmon so it's like it goes really well with that texture and it gives you that kind of zest and a kick on top of the lemon which is awesome.

Oh, I'm gonna definitely try that. So definitely.

Well hook you up with, with more tincture of the, the pine needles and the spruce tips and the pine pollen. Well I'll make sure we, we send you a care package.

Thank you so much and you're so generous. You're offering everybody listening 15 off with the coupon. Dr. Sanda. It's below in the show notes. So I highly encourage everyone. You know, if you want to be healthy, you want to be in optimum health, you're aging to try not just vitamins and minerals. I think you know, mother nature's tinctures like pine pollen and reishi and chaga turkey tail. These are all great things to add on to any regimen that, that you're currently on. So Saeed, thank you so much for being with us. You're a wealth of information. I think this is super interesting and you know, I'm looking forward to looking to see what else you're going to be bringing to the market, you know, from, from the company.

Thanks so much. Yeah. So our shop is canadianpinepollen.com and I think we're launching a new mushroom soon. So Cordyceps is one mushroom that I've you know, kind of like, it's kind of like that love and love and hate relationship because as a source it's an endangered species and you know now there's cultivation around it but you know, cultivated mushrooms but we are bringing that on so we're gonna have that that as new and then we're gonna also make the combination of five different mushrooms. So all the individual mushrooms we have is going to be in one. Traditionally naturopathic doctors we like combination mushrooms. That's because if one is not working for you, maybe the other is working or. But they all have like such overl. But yeah, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate the time and chatting with you and I like your energy. When we met at the show, it's like, okay, well, this is one one podcast and then I'll do that for sure.

Awesome. Thank you so much. And everyone, thank you for joining us today. You can find below in the show notes information about where you can find the products from Canadian pine pollen. And I'll see you all next time for another exciting show on the Holistic Dentistry Show. Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please make sure you check out the show notes for any links mentioned in the show. If you like today's show, please invite your friends to listen as well. That would mean a lot to me. Do you have a question you'd like me to answer? Message me on Instagram. Dr. Sanda. This is Dr. Sanda. And remember, your mouth is the gateway to your health, so take care of it in the most natural and best way possible.