Nutrition Nutz, with Jim Wilk C.N.C.

The Power of Herbal Remedies with Jamie Cotter, WishGarden Herbs

• Jim Wilk C.N.C. • Season 5 • Episode 6

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Curious about the natural world of herbal remedies and how they can enhance your wellness journey? Join us in this insightful episode of Nutrition Nutz as we sit down with Jamie Cotter, Herbalist and Educator with Wish Garden Herbs, and Dewey Thomas, an educator. Together, they unravel the secrets behind unique formulas like Bad-Ass Bitters and Kick-Ass Allergy and share the inspiring story of Jamie's personal health transformation. Learn about the fascinating history of WishGarden Herbs, founded by a pioneering midwife in Boulder, Colorado, and discover how embracing herbal medicine can transform your approach to health.

Have you ever wondered how herbal tinctures work? Jamie sheds light on the medicinal use of alcohol in these products, enhancing their extraction, delivery, and preservation. She introduces us to the innovative pump spray delivery method, making herbal remedies more accessible than ever. Hear about WishGarden’s commitment to sustainable sourcing, including wildcrafting and supporting organic farmers. Jamie introduces the Herbiculture Project, which aims to promote the domestic cultivation of medicinal plants, ensuring that nature's remedies are both potent and responsibly sourced.

Discover how to tailor herbal remedies to your specific health needs with practical tips and strategies. From managing acute symptoms with Kick-Ass Allergy to supporting long-term immune health, Jamie provides expert insights on the varied applications of WishGarden's products. Learn about specific formulas like Emotional Ally for anxiety and Cranial Comfort for tension relief, and explore how Party Prep and Deep Lung can support alcohol metabolism and respiratory health. Tune in for a comprehensive guide to harnessing the power of herbs in your daily wellness routine.

Use coupon code "NUTZ" (in your cart) for 15% off your entire order of featured products on our sponsor's website: HollyHillVitamins.com.

Jim Wilk:

Welcome to Nutrition Nutz, where we discuss the latest nutrition breakthroughs, supplements and wellness choices with leaders in the natural products industry, health practitioners and research scientists. I'm your host, Jim Wilkes, certified Nutritionist. Thanks to our main sponsor, hollyhillvitamins. com, the place for great selection, service and prices. Check out their extensive wellness library for updated science-based info. Okay, folks, thanks again for joining us today on Nutrition Nutz and I got a couple of nuts with me here today, live. So this is cool. I love doing this off the phone, face to face, and it makes it more like a party. Right, I have a party here and in the studio today I have Jamie Cotter, who's an herbalist and educator, and Dewey Thomas, who is an educator as well, and they're with a company called Wish Garden Herbs.

Jim Wilk:

So very unique company, unique formulas, unique names. This would be my second vocation. If I was looking for a job, I would want to name certain herbal formulas and put a nice name to it, but they beat me to it, you know, and they're great. So we're going to be talking about Genius Juice and Tree Country, kick-ass Allergy all these great names and great herbal combinations from Wish Garden, and you can catch them on wishgardenerbscom and, again, you can always go to hollyhillvitaminscom, we'll be offering a 15% discount. So, in honor of having them here today, we're going to be talking herbs folks, which we've done a bunch of shows on.

Jim Wilk:

But these formers are kind of unique, so I'd love you guys to listen to it. And also they have a different delivery method. That's kind of unique as well, and they actually use a pump spray, so we're going to be talking about that. I'm tired doing those little drops into things and the pump sounds so much better thing and I wonder why no one else has been doing this. So it's pretty cool. So welcome, jamie and Dewey. Thank you for being here today.

Jamie Cotter:

Thank you, thanks for having us.

Jim Wilk:

So, Jamie, we just met and you came all the way from California to see me. I hope you're enjoying the hot weather.

Jamie Cotter:

You know what I hate being cold. That's why I live in California, so I never complain about it?

Jim Wilk:

Oh my gosh, yes, and it is cold here in the studio, so I'm sorry. It's okay. So interesting story about you're an herbalist. You're an educator. How'd you come about this vocation?

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, Like most people, I was sort of forcefully pushed into it. I didn't wake up one day and say I want to be a weird herbalist hippie and it happened gradually. I had a very normal origin story In my early 20s I was living in Chicago, no-transcript, perfectly healthy, and I was like, well, something feels wrong, so I'm going to have to keep seeking, and so I thought you know what?

Jamie Cotter:

I've seen books down at the local health food store. Let me go down there and see what I can find out. I'm living in Chicago, so I went to the health food store, started reading books and then it kind of the light bulb went off that, wow, what I'm eating could be impacting how I feel, and this misery, this like digestive upset, lightheadedness, all these things could be related to my diet. So I started changing my diet. That was the first thing I did. I started taking supplements, like one of the first things I did was chlorophyll and aloe and things like that that I knew could help bring back some balance.

Jamie Cotter:

And within weeks, this you know plague that had been kind of bringing me down for six months at this point started to turn around seemingly overnight. And I saw what happened when I gave my body the right things and took away the I don't want to say right and wrong, but you know the things that aren't ideal for it and how quickly the healing process began. So that was my gateway into this whole world of nutrition, natural health. And then when you learn one thing, your eyes kind of open up to all the other things like what am I putting on my skin? Is that good for me? What is the medicine I'm taking?

Jamie Cotter:

Should I be going to the drugstore. Oh, on this earth for us. And that it's so compatible with the human body. This is as natural as you can really get with, you know, using medicine from the earth. I got really passionate about that and that eventually led me to Wish Garden, because I had been using herbs and herbal remedies for about 10 years before I knew of Wish Garden, and when I found these remedies, they blew my mind with how effective they were, how thorough the use strategy guidance was, and that made me really want to. I was like you know I'm going to be talking about this whether you pay me or not, so it would be nice to not just be like the weirdo out there.

Jim Wilk:

It's nice to get paid for something you love.

Jamie Cotter:

It's really nice because it would have been difficult to just be on a, you know, like the street corner, preaching herbalism and having to beg for money.

Jim Wilk:

And there's not that many herbs on the street corner, so you have to go around to the backyard.

Jamie Cotter:

So it's been seven years I've been with Wish Garden and have loved every minute of getting to travel all over the country and talk about what I'm most passionate about, which is natural health and herbalism, and yeah, and how long has Wish Garden been around? Wish Garden has been around since 1979. So we were founded by a midwife in Boulder, colorado, in the late 70s Of course.

Jamie Cotter:

Of course, right, one of the hubs of natural health, and she was just really focused on her clients who were on their pregnancy journeys and wanting to bring natural remedies to support them, because midwives at that time I don't know what the laws are now were not allowed to carry any sort of pharmaceutical.

Jamie Cotter:

You definitely have to have certain medical degrees to carry a pharmaceutical, so the midwives relied on the plants that had been used. I mean, herbs have been our medicine for 99% of human history. It's just the last hundred or so years that pharmaceuticals have even been around. So the midwives went back to the plants and so they're really in big ways responsible for the herbal renaissance that really began in the late 70s when companies like Wish Garden and other herbal companies were founded. And in 1987, our current owner, katherine Hunziker, bought the company Also a trained midwife, but had way more of a vision to grow beyond midwifery, which is why we now have close to 100 formulas for everyone. We have a kids line, a women's specific line, we still have pregnancy and postpartum, and then the bulk of what we do is everyday adult wellness. So for everyone.

Jim Wilk:

And it's a woman-based company.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, to this day, catherine still owns the company with her kids, so we're a women-owned family run. We are a family business through and through. No corporate ownership, just real old school family business. Our dedication is to the plants and to the people who we're making these remedies for, and that's what we're very mission-driven.

Jim Wilk:

You mentioned pharmaceutical. That's kind of taken over in the last hundred years or so, but it's all based in herbal medicine. Pharmaceuticals yes.

Jamie Cotter:

Most pharmaceutical drugs were derived from a plant. At one point they found the constituent in the plant, figured out how to isolate it and then concentrate it, and that was the early days of pharmaceuticals. And then what they have done since is they have found a synthetic source to make the same medicine so that it can be patented and trademarked, because you cannot patent nature. So that's why these pharmaceuticals are no longer made from plants. But what's ironic is, in the US, pharmacopeia, which is the big guide of all medicines, most botanicals used to be in there and then slowly, over time, more and more and more came out into the point where there's almost nothing left. But this used to be recognized as a legitimate form of medicine. And then the power of the powers that be have put this really under the under the table.

Jim Wilk:

Well, yeah, like you said, there's not much money in the in the natural stuff there. So that's, everybody in the world is taking it and getting it from your company and then there's some money in it. So I can understand that and you know there is a time and a place for pharmaceuticals, of course.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah absolutely.

Jim Wilk:

But the nice thing about herbs there's a lot of herbs that you can't take with certain pharmaceuticals, but there's others that can complement as well. So that's why it's good to seek out people like yourself there to go through that.

Jamie Cotter:

I think in many ways we're actually kind of in a golden age of personal medicine, because we have the power that pharmaceuticals can offer. Like, some of these methods and drugs are lifesaving and they're essential and we're glad they exist, but they don't solve our lifestyle issues, right, they're not great at the chronic issues. So if we, with all this knowledge we have today and all of the science, we can really combine using natural remedies for our day-to-day and then saving the pharmaceuticals Because we also don't want to go back to the time where people died of preventable things, right, and so it's a really cool time in history where we can really re-embrace plants and then also have the stuff that's life-saving.

Jim Wilk:

There you go. You know I mentioned that you guys have this. They have their tinctures, folks in extracts and we can talk a little bit about well, that's a good place to start the difference between a tincture and you know you have different classifications for herbs right and deliveries. So what's the difference like an extract and a tincture and a formula.

Jamie Cotter:

Tincture basically means herbal plants, herbal constituents extracted in alcohol, and there's always some percentage of water in there as well. Now, something unique that we do because an alcohol-free tincture is usually this is simplifying it usually just extracted in glycerin. So what we do at Wish Garden is we use all three. We use alcohol, water and glycerin to extract every single plant. So the beauty is you get the full strength of extracting with alcohol. That alcohol is the best method to getting to the most constituents in a plant, which is what you want. You want as many of the constituents out of that plant as possible. But the beauty of adding glycerin is that we're able to reduce alcohol in the finished product. So you don't get this high alcohol tincture. A lot of people don't like tinctures because they don't like the way it kind of feels like it's burning their mouth.

Jamie Cotter:

It feels like they did a shot of whiskey when they take a tincture. So our tinctures range between about 25% and 45% alcohol. So it's much more palatable, very easy to take directly if you're okay with the bitter, herbal-y taste, but much smoother, better tasting. You can actually pick up more of the plants, which is a part of herbalism.

Jim Wilk:

But aren't there certain plants that do better with glycerin extract than alcohol usually?

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah. So if you look at any plant, there's dozens, hundreds of constituents in the plant. Some of those constituents will only come out with alcohol. Some prefer water or glycerin. They maybe don't like alcohol. They're repelled by alcohol. So you really need to think about what are the constituents I'm going for in this plant and what is the best method to use. Missing some constituents in that plan, especially when you're looking at immune constituents, those tend to be the ones that are more pulled out by alcohol. So if you see an alcohol-free product that you're taking for immune activation, maybe not your most effective.

Jim Wilk:

People get a little freaked out about alcohol, don't they? Let's talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I would love to. Why should I be concerned about alcohol and tinctures?

Jamie Cotter:

You shouldn't be. This is really funny. In high school college I studied film. I was a language arts person. The idea that I need chemistry in my life is the ultimate irony.

Jamie Cotter:

I wish I could go back to high school and take chemistry. So it's all chemistry. Alcohol is the most effective medium for kind of breaking apart a cell membrane of a plant and getting to certain active constituents really the most of them and so I usually tell people when they're annoyed by the alcohol or freaked out by it or they don't drink. It's always just a chemistry conversation, right, which is not my forte, but just this whole idea of this is the chemistry of how you get the constituents out of this plant. That is why alcohol is used. If there was a better extraction medium we'd all be using it. Right, and it's very much a dose makes the poison kind of situation. This is not like having a drink.

Jamie Cotter:

We've been servicing communities around the country for 45 years who don't drink just not part of their belief system their culture, but they totally get it from medicine making because they know that is how you get these constituents out of the plant. And you have to remember, in a tincture this is like we have a two ounce bottle. If it's 45% alcohol and it's 20 plus servings in here you're getting fractional amounts of alcohol very easily metabolized by the body and alcohol actually improves the way constituents enter our cell membranes.

Jamie Cotter:

So, there is multiple purposes extraction, delivery. It acts as a natural preservative, so there's a lot of benefit to the alcohol and you just have to remember this is not like drinking alcohol.

Jim Wilk:

This is very medicinal and we do use the glycerin to try to mellow that out and the reason you went to a pump for the major part of your line.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, so if you can picture a herbal bottle and usually it's a dropper- top. It's very traditional, the one ounce dropper bottle, and that's great. We still use them here and there. But we developed a pump top delivery for a few reasons. Most people get very confused with how you're supposed to take it. They don't know if you mean like a couple of drops or a couple of dropper fulls, and then it's like I'm having trouble filling up the dropper.

Jim Wilk:

Am I squeezing too hard or not hard enough?

Jamie Cotter:

And it's like 30 drops and then they're sitting counting to 30 and it's all very confusing and no one knows what a milliliter is in this country. I don't know.

Jim Wilk:

I know it's terrible.

Jamie Cotter:

It's crazy. So we developed a pump bottle. It's really cool. You just can hold it in one hand, you don't have to open it which is great for me, who would spill it everywhere and we are able to say our serving size is seven pumps or eight pumps. It makes it super simple for people, very easy to take directly or to pump into a little shot of water or juice, and we developed this as a way to make it very easy to explain how to take a tincture.

Jim Wilk:

Yeah, folks, we're talking again with Jamie Cotter. She's an herbalist and educator for Wish Garden Herbs, and Dewey Thomas is here too, who represents a lot of companies out there and gets them into market and educates people on it. Dewey, you've been using some of these tinctures for a while.

Dewey Thomas:

They really work. Yeah, work well.

Jim Wilk:

I know, knowing you for all these years, you usually do not represent something unless you've tested it on yourself and your family and things like that right.

Dewey Thomas:

Yes, they have some very exciting products and they have a methodology. Uh, jamie was talking about in terms of getting enough herbs in to your body, and that's usually the the challenge. People take one capsule. I did it, but these are some really awesome combinations. I call them the queens of the combos.

Jim Wilk:

Yeah, okay, I like that.

Dewey Thomas:

And Jamie can articulate on that and they're traditional combos. A lot of them are traditional North American recipes.

Jim Wilk:

Yeah.

Dewey Thomas:

And when you look at herbal healing, the best herbal healing is local.

Jim Wilk:

Right.

Dewey Thomas:

And have that become part of your healing protocol as a good first start.

Jim Wilk:

Yeah.

Dewey Thomas:

In terms of you having a pristine environment For us to get all these good herbs from America. We're going to need a clean environment.

Jim Wilk:

Does Wish Garden actually grow some herbs, or is it just mostly sourced? I'm going to let her take over. All right, jamie.

Jamie Cotter:

Okay, so mostly no. We don't grow our own plants that we use in our formulas. We source from growers all over the country because we do a combination of certified organic. When they grow on an organic farm, that's plants that are endangered or gone from the wild, something like echinacea you're not going to wild harvest, you're going to get it from an organic grower. We also do a ton of wildcrafting. Now, the beauty of wildcrafting is that these plants live in their natural environments. They tend to have the densest constituents because they fight the hardest to survive.

Jim Wilk:

the elements that can actually be better than organic.

Jamie Cotter:

Yes, absolutely. Now a lot of plants are gone from the wild or they're endangered, so we don't touch those. And when we work with wildcrafters, we make sure that we are working with people who are protecting the environment and making sure that the plant population is sustained there. So we're very, very thorough with our sourcing. But the beauty of sourcing from all over, from different farmers and multi-generational forest farmers or wildcrafters, is we're able to really get the plants from where they grow the best and also support the economy of the farmers, of people. We get a lot from Appalachia forest farms, plants from Appalachia, and it's beautiful to see a diversity in what they're able to produce there versus just being dependent on one industry. So we love to be able to get plants from all over.

Jamie Cotter:

And the other thing we're doing Catherine, our owner, who's owned the company since 1987, she now runs a nonprofit called the Herbiculture Project where she is working on getting more plants grown domestically. So she's got a test garden right near our Wish Garden offices where she's experimenting with different medicinal plants and seeing okay, how much light does this one like, how much water, what's the soil condition? And the next step is teaching farmers how to grow medicinal crops, because it's better money for the farmers, better for our soil health, and then it helps our whole industry. This is not just for Wish Garden. This is for everyone to have access, domestic sources of these very important medicinal plants that are at risk of going away if we don't protect them.

Jim Wilk:

Do you think there's an answer out in nature for everything that befalls us? It's probably more of a belief than a no, but do you feel that way?

Jamie Cotter:

I do. I think we tend to think that we have the answers as humans and if we get out of our own ego and turn back to nature, the answers are there. People get really worried about the planet's survival. I'm like, oh no, the planet's going to be fine. It's the humans who might not make it. So if we look to nature, I do think whenever you know there are certain things that cannot be replicated in a lab, like they've tried to take bee pollen and replicate that in a lab and they can't figure it out. I've heard that.

Jim Wilk:

So you can live on bee pollen. It's got everything known.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, it has everything known and it's kind of incredible natural intelligence, and I think I mean even just the idea that our nervous systems can be reset by walking through a forest. And we're looking for all these millions of interventions and it's like all you have to do is go back to nature.

Jim Wilk:

Right, exactly, I like that viewpoint there. Some people do take herbs under the tongue. I've always heard that. I don't know if it's a myth or something, but you can absorb it If you just put it in juice. You don't always have to take it straight like that grimace every time. Right, right, right right right?

Jamie Cotter:

No, you don't have to do sublingual absorption. In fact, with the alcohol and the tincture it can be a little irritating to tissues, especially if you're sensitive. I will hold the tinctures, sometimes sublingually, because I'm so used to them. I actually like the taste and you do start absorbing-.

Jim Wilk:

There is a psychological thing. Yes, exactly.

Jamie Cotter:

And you do start absorbing right through the mucous membranes of the mouth. So that's great, but we never want to have barriers to entry, and if someone's like, this is disgusting, I don't want to force them to do that, so you just really need to get it in the bloodstream. So, if you have to dilute it in juice or kombucha or whatever you like, that's perfectly fine.

Jim Wilk:

I know we touched on this a little earlier, but I get this question a lot. Just counseling people all these years, how quickly is this going to work? For me and I said such a tough question to answer, right, I mean, I've been to symposiums where herbalists will put people on a program for months before they really see. I guess it's some deep-rooted stuff and some quick stuff can maybe happen within 15 minutes, right, I mean, how does that range?

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah. So sometimes people don't realize that herbs can work so quickly for some symptom support and people think that you need to take it over time and it builds up in your system and then magically it kicks in one day and starts working. And I always say it's not true of herbs, it's true of issues. So we're not going to solve chronic fatigue or a hormone balance in 5 or 15 minutes, but we can certainly bring symptom support to specific things like allergy symptoms. We can support that in 10 minutes. We can do that with period cramps. We were just with a group of women and a woman was telling me that she was like struggling, starting to struggle with her cramps, and I had our cramp release product and I handed it to her and I said, okay, tell me in five minutes how you're doing. You might need a second serving, but if not we're good to go. And then she was like I don't know if this is in my head, but I think this is working, so we can-.

Jim Wilk:

First of all, it's not in her head, yeah.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, no, I was like no, no, it's in your uterus, so they can absolutely. And that's something really, at Wish Garden, we really love to share. Is that you and this is why we're trying to get people to realize you don't have to go to the drugstore for every minor little thing. These are safe, they're effective, they can work quickly.

Jamie Cotter:

And then for the conditions that you do need more long-term support. We have tonics that's what we call the, something that you take over time. So hormone balancers you're going to take over the course of a couple of months to bring balance back Makes sense to me Also what I've noticed in your catalog.

Jim Wilk:

here you have like three ways of using these herbs and one is fastest effect strategy. These are strategies, folks. Fastest effect, then move through it strategy. Then the third was tonic strategies. So you just mentioned the tonic thing. So that's the fast you know. Just go into a little depth.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah. So what we wanted to really do was this whole concept we were just talking about is different strategies for different reasons. So are you looking for, in the moment, symptom relief? That's the fastest effect and the way you do that like let's use, you know, allergies as an example. So we have a formula called kick-ass allergy.

Jamie Cotter:

So if you're having symptoms the watery eyes, runny nose, itching, all that stuff you're going to take your serving, which, on our bottle, is going to be eight pumps, it's three milliliters. You let that kick in, give it five, 10 minutes to do its thing and you're going to check back in. Do I have the symptom relief? And if you get it in one serving, I always joke that you're a cheap date. That's the dream, because it's an expensive habit when you need more. But we're all different right Constitutions are different. The severity of our symptoms is going to be different day to day. So when, if you feel like, okay, I'm getting some relief, but I'm not fully there, you can take a second serving. You can really play with how much volume you need to get the job done. And because we're all different, there is no one size fits all. Volume might be a little different person to person. Now we're going to max you out at a certain point.

Jamie Cotter:

We're not going to let you drink the bottle but we really play within a range and then the move through it, which you mentioned. Usually that's done in an immune response. That's the idea of you take the remedy every couple of hours to keep your immune response ahead of what's trying to get you right. So let's keep activating. Activating, that's short term. That's going to be between one and five days of pretty frequent use to knock something out. And then tonic is the idea of this would be something like if you're going through a period of chronic stress and you want to really bring the sort of protection and so you're going to take something like deep stress twice a day over the course of a couple of weeks or even a couple of months, and not every formula is appropriate for every strategy.

Jamie Cotter:

So some formulas like kick-ass immune or signature immune activator. That is meant for when you are dealing with symptoms, not every day. You don't want your immune system on guard and hyperactive every day. You want it in homeostasis. You want it ready to go, but not hyperactive. So different formulas. We have one called daily immune. That's something that you can take for a couple of weeks at a time, maybe a month at a time, when you're looking for more strength in the immune system but not dealing with an active issue.

Jim Wilk:

So that could be a seasonal thing too, like during the winter.

Jamie Cotter:

I take certain things, I don't take the rest of the year, exactly when you know you're going through high exposure. So we're going to come up on back to school different parts of the country. It's going to be three weeks to a month or so from now and back to school is a big time to think about that tonic strategy. Okay, stress is going to amp up, immune issues are going to amp up.

Jim Wilk:

Let's take these tonics for a couple of weeks to give the whole family a little bit of protection from all that that, back to school, gets my stress levels up only because of the buses on the road.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, exactly Some of us who don't even have to deal with it. Really, we have to deal with traffic.

Jim Wilk:

I got to get to work. Stop that, yeah. And you get in front of these apartment buildings and 50 kids come out. You're there for an hour. It's amazing, can you mix these formulas at all? Do people mix herbal formulas? Is that an appropriate thing to do?

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, you definitely can, as long as you're kind of on the same theme. So like, let's stick on immunity. Let's say you're combating some symptoms and you want to generally kind of activate your immune response.

Jamie Cotter:

So you take the kick-ass immune, but you're also dealing with a cough, so you could also take the serious cough with it, right? You can combine in that way and then you know. Of course, the exception is like you're not going to take something like an energy formula with a sleep formula. I think that's obvious to most people, but it's perfectly fine to combine like things like deep stress is is, I think of, as a tonic.

Jamie Cotter:

I think that's really good for building resilience, but you might need some in the moment support. If you're feeling about of like overwhelm and that's our emotional ally, that's really good for in the moment combating a feeling of overwhelm, anxiousness, things like that.

Jim Wilk:

I'm sorry folks, I'm going to get a prescription for myself here. Sure, I get some anxiety when I'm in I play some competition kind of things.

Dewey Thomas:

Okay.

Jim Wilk:

When I get into a tournament or a competition, I get very anxious, yeah, and is that something that I can? Is one of your formulas something I could use? That would.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, I would say the one that's most suited for that is going to be emotional ally. So when you're feeling an occasional feeling of anxiousness, overwhelm it's really where you feel that nervous system. You feel like I kind of want to shut down right now instead of engage. That's what emotional ally is really good at supporting, kind of a lift in the spirits and a calming of the nervous system, and that works really quickly.

Jim Wilk:

All right, folks, I'll tell you how I do after I get through one of my tournaments here. I'm going to definitely try that there, and you have something called cranial comfort.

Jamie Cotter:

Yes, that's a great name, yes yes, yes, we're always naming to try to guide you to what that's doing. So that's good for tension release. Main herb in there is white willow bark, which a lot of people are very familiar with, very rich in salicylic acid, and it's what aspirin used to be made from before they found a way to do it from coal or something.

Jim Wilk:

And you also have one called badass bitters, one of Dewey's favorites badassters, um bitters that you know, so popular in europe. All these years it's still not really. Uh, not here for some reason. What? What happened they? They all came over from there. I know they forgot to bring the bitters with them yeah, we've lost a lot of uh wisdom, you know.

Jamie Cotter:

But bitters is actually incredible because a lot of people deal with digestive issues in today's world, I mean, and everything starts with the gut, right. So digestive issues are one of your most common situations, and so the beauty of bitters is most of what we're supposed to be doing traditionally is eating bitter foods. So when you eat bitter foods, it tells your body oh okay, it's time to digest. Let me release saliva and enzymes and hydrochloric acid and bile. But because of the lack of bitter foods in our diet, we can use the tools of the bitter constituents in the plant to do the same thing. So you take the bitters before a meal, a couple minutes before I do like to do that one directly onto the tongue to stimulate the bitter taste receptors, and when you take it you're going to kick into gear all those digestive processes. So it's a really good way to support better digestion without having to use a lot of tools. People take a lot of supplements for digestion.

Jamie Cotter:

They take enzymes, they take hydrochloric acid they're doing probiotics, all this stuff and by using bitters, which you can use all the time, especially a meal that's going to be high in fat or protein. Using the bitters can help support a healthier digestive process where you're not needing as many other tools, so it's a very cost-effective, healthy way to support digestion.

Jim Wilk:

I have to put a little bit of pharmacy in my car, because I'm usually a good boy until I go out, or something.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah.

Jim Wilk:

And now you've got party prep and all that and exercise and revive.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, you want to hear about party prep.

Dewey Thomas:

Yeah.

Jim Wilk:

I'm sure all the frat boys listening would love to hear this.

Jamie Cotter:

Used to love your parties Circa 2000. Yes, so party prep is a newer formula for us Meeting where the world is at, of course, giving people the right tools. The thing that cracks me up about party prep is I've been preaching the herbal gospel for about since 2007,. And my friends think I'm nuts right.

Jim Wilk:

Hey, that's why you're on nutrition nuts.

Jamie Cotter:

So mostly I'm getting eye rolls and like, okay, jamie, but party prep is the one they're suddenly all wanting to hear about, right? So party prep supports the one they're suddenly all wanting to hear about right, yeah, so funny.

Jamie Cotter:

So party prep supports the metabolism of alcohol. So you take it before you drink or maybe while drinking. It's not about the next day. The next day the metabolism is done and you're dealing with the fallout. So what we're trying to do is mitigate those feelings the next day. So we say supports a better morning after. So let's say, ideally you take your serving of party prep before you have your first drink. What party prep helps to do is create more of the enzyme it tells your body to create, more of the enzyme that gobbles up acetyl aldehyde, and acetyl aldehyde is the byproduct of alcohol metabolism.

Jamie Cotter:

If there's too much acetyl aldehyde that your body is having trouble metabolizing, you're going to feel it in the symptoms the next day, and so if we can make that metabolism more efficient, we can hopefully mitigate and make you feel a lot better. The thing to know also about the metabolism of alcohol is that it worsens as we age, which is why we feel worse and worse the older we get, and women produce less of that enzyme altogether, which is why alcohol can be more problematic for women. So that formula is really great.

Jim Wilk:

That's the only way they can talk to men, though, well.

Jamie Cotter:

I know, but that's why we have party prep. So yeah, and there's prickly pear in there. Prickly pear is a wonderful antioxidant. It really.

Jim Wilk:

There's tons of research on Is there another name for prickly pear? Oh well, there's tons of research. On Is there another name for prickly pear?

Jamie Cotter:

Oh well, there's the Latin name, but there's a lot of different varieties of it so I could look in there.

Jim Wilk:

I think it was for hangovers.

Jamie Cotter:

At one time I read about I don't know if that's true- Definitely, alcohol support is one of the things that it's known to do, but it was a very important food for native peoples in this country and it grows the Southeast. You may see it in different parts of the world. It's a cactus fruit.

Jim Wilk:

Right, that's what cactus is.

Jamie Cotter:

It could be used for food, for medicine. It's an incredible plant.

Jim Wilk:

Any herbs where I'm the subject there, because I know frat boys also do other things besides alcohol. Are there any herbs there to kind of how should I say balance out some other things that they're doing?

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah Well, if they're damaging their lungs in any way, then I would recommend a formula we have called Deep Lung. Now, Deep Lung is really good for respiratory immune response. That's how non-Frat boys are kind of using it. They don't feel well. Symptoms are in the chest. We're using Deep Lung for respiratory immune, but when you have exposure and this could be frat boys it could be firefighters, construction workers, any of us breathing in bad air quality, Urban situations Urban situations.

Jamie Cotter:

Urban areas. I don't know if you guys, if people remember last summer the bad air came from Canada because of all their wildfires, so these areas were covered in smoke.

Jamie Cotter:

And what people don't realize is like okay, the air quality is dangerous, Let me stay inside these next couple of days, but all that is coming into our lung tissue and we see a lot of downstream effects that maybe don't show up for months later. But if you think about this more situationally, you have smokers, you're smoking marijuana, cigarettes, whatever. If you're getting exposure in the lungs, deep lung is a really good short-term. You don't want to take this long-term. It's quite active. But if you do it in that two servings a day for a week or two it's a really good way to support.

Jim Wilk:

Well, saying that. I have friends and associates that do smoke all the time just cigarettes but is that something that they could do? You said not to take it, for it's a tough question.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, it's really tricky because what we're formulating is under the parameters of like. Okay, this is formulated for a healthy population, right? And then there's always extremes and there's the kind of bubble of healthy normal and then there's okay, well, sometimes we tip out of healthy and herbs are here to help bring us back into balance. I got you saying yeah, sometimes we tip out of healthy, and herbs are here to help bring us back into balance.

Jamie Cotter:

I got you saying that when we're on the extremes though we have to be more considerate because it's like, well, this isn't really meant as an everyday tool, right? But also, if you're smoking every day, then we do need to help support you. Now, deep lung is so active. It's not what I would take every day. There are certainly some tonic herbs you could do on your own. If you are an everyday smoker you could do on their own that you could take as sort of the little bit of compensation. But deep lung is something if you're an active smoker I would do that maybe a few times a year as almost like a cleanse, like take it twice a day for like three weeks, a few times a year that's going to do the deep clean out.

Jim Wilk:

It's like taking your lungs on vacation for Exactly, exactly. How about the little guys, the kids and stuff? What kind of formulas you have for them?

Jamie Cotter:

We love kids, we formulate specifically for kids, so we have a really nice lineup of both immune nervous system, behavioral attention support. So we have a great lineup for kids. We started in pregnancy 45 years ago and so naturally the moms were like, well, what can I give my kids now? So the kids formulas came out of that. It's one of the fastest growing areas we're seeing in our company is for kids, because so many parents are wanting more natural solutions for their kids. I mean immunity yes, it's always been a thing, but especially for some of the behavioral attention things, they're not wanting to put their kids, young kids on pharmaceuticals and so we're seeing I've been to so many natural medicine conferences this year the biggest question I'm getting is like, what do you have for kids? So we formulate thinking of their gentle bodies. They don't need the same intensity adults need.

Jamie Cotter:

So we're able to choose these really gentle, beautiful plants that are still really effective. So we have immune selection, and then I'd say some of our highlights for kids that are really interesting. We have a formula called Attention Ally. So when you have kids starting to go to school, having to do homework and they're having trouble focusing, whether it's during the school day or when they have to sit and do their homework, this has become a really popular formula. It's very much about the nervous system. Let's nourish and calm that sort of dysregulated nervous system and then also support the health of the brain so that we can improve the way kids are able to focus. Now, of course, there's also the argument of like should kids even have to sit for eight hours a day in a classroom setting? Is that natural right? That's a different argument.

Jim Wilk:

Yeah, you need to talk to the Waldorf kids.

Jamie Cotter:

Exactly, but really even, also just even. If kids are in a Waldorf school, the teacher might be like this kid is bouncing up the walls, he's not paying attention, he won't focus on his work or whatever, and so Attention Ally is a really nice way to bring some grounding to the nervous system and help those kids focus on what they're doing. So that's one of my favorite formulas right now.

Jim Wilk:

They have no problem focusing on the phone, though for some reason yeah.

Dewey Thomas:

I know Shocking Stolen.

Jim Wilk:

Stolen focus. That's the name of my new group. Oh, really, seriously. Oh, my goodness, remember folks. You can go to wishgardenerbscom. Oh, liquid bliss for peace and tranquility. Okay, okay, that's a. I need this right before my meditations there. Liquid Bliss, liquid.

Jamie Cotter:

Bliss is a very cool formula. So we have a request from Dewey to address Liquid Bliss, which I'm thrilled because I think this is the coolest herbal remedy that we make and that you're really going to ever see so a lot of remedies out there that they'll say something about happiness or joy or whatever.

Jamie Cotter:

They're really nervous system remedies right, which is great. We need emotional ally, which I talked about earlier, very much about the nervous system. Liquid bliss is a little bit more about brain chemistry. This is helping boost our mood. So we all have experienced those times of feeling a little grumpy, little not people-y.

Jamie Cotter:

Maybe we're going to a party, we're feeling a little antisocial going on a date You're going to Thanksgiving and there's like an uncle there who really irritates you. We all need this. In today's world, there's a little bit of tension going around, so liquid bliss takes that kind of grumpiness and very quickly helps. It supports the release of oxytocin. That's what's a really cool function. Ah, I got you very quickly helps, it supports the release of oxytocin.

Jim Wilk:

That's what's a really cool functionality. Cotton root bark. I never heard of cotton root bark.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, yes, this is a classic American herb. It's the root of the cotton plant. And so cotton root bark facilitates the release of oxytocin. This is used in labor, in a natural labor. If labor has slowed, they will support the use of the cotton root bark to help induce contractions. In a hospital they'll give you pitocin, synthetic oxytocin, so cotton root bark great for all of us because we all need oxytocin. It's our love bonding connection hormone.

Jim Wilk:

That's true.

Jamie Cotter:

And so when you're feeling that grumpy, disconnected thing, liquibliss very quickly helps to shift your mood, shift your thoughts, and I call it the fake, it till you make it formula because all of a sudden you're like you know what, I'm good, hey, uncle Bob, you know we can chat and it really lifts your spirits. It's great for people who don't drink and want to get in that same feel good.

Jim Wilk:

Euphoric type of feeling. Yeah, like kind of take away the inhibitions. A little bit Cacao nib is in there.

Jamie Cotter:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that Cow has properties that support our dopamine responses.

Jim Wilk:

right, that's true. That's why we love chocolate. Exactly, I got you. You guys are pretty smart, huh. Yes, yeah we know what we're doing, catherine, really knows what she's doing when she makes these formulas. Right, the passion flower too.

Jamie Cotter:

stops that crazy thinking and all that Exactly Wow.

Jim Wilk:

Exactly, and it's a great formula. It also has Damiana and Hawthorne and Orange Peel in there as well. Liquid Bliss, all right. Yeah, I tell you I'm going to have to put the little drugstore in my car there. That's it, yeah.

Jamie Cotter:

Liquid Bliss I do leave in my car, because it usually catches you when you're on your way somewhere.

Jim Wilk:

You know you're starting to think and worry on your way to the party, or the date or the whatever, and then you're like hello, it's so hard to explain to the cops that stop you too. It's very difficult. That's so funny. Well, folks remember it's wishgardenerbscom. You can find out a lot more about their products. Also, hollyhillvitaminscom, if you want to order Mention nuts and UTZ and you get 15% off. I think they're great products. I know I'm going to be ordering it. So there's a whole bunch here that I would love to try and I'll get back to you, I promise. All right guys. So thank you so much, jamie Cotter, dewey, thomas. It's been a pleasure. Let's do this again, maybe six months down the road or so. Get some more new formulas out there. All right guys, that's it. We'll talk to you real soon. Thank you so much. Please subscribe to the channel so you can get our latest episodes, and if you want to contact me with any questions or comments, try jimwilkcncgmailcom. Thanks again. Thank you.