Now for dessert

by YankeeJim | June 2, 2011 at 08:56 am

73 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

Cherries and mulberries

Cherries are ripe and about at peak. So too are mulberries. I see many mulberries being harvested by Asians who also appear to be doing something with the leaves.

“Mulberry Helps Control
Blood Sugar, and More
The leaves that silkworms love contain agents
that can significantly improve our health
By Will Block

In case your Latin isn’t what it used to be, that quotation says, “A man will pass his summers in health, who will finish his luncheon with black mulberries.” And you thought mulberries were for the birds. Actually, birds are very fond of mulberries. Humans are less so, however, because, although mulberries are sweet and edible, they’re considered rather insipid, as berries go. With such an abundance of delicious blackberries (which mulberries resemble), raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, etc., most people just don’t care much for mulberries and are happy to let the birds feast on them.

But let’s get back to the quotation. The great Roman lyric poet Horace (his real name was Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and he lived from 65 to 8 B.C.) may have been onto something. The folk medicine of his time encompassed countless herbal remedies—in fact, botany and medicine were pretty much one and the same in those days, and remained so for about another 16 centuries—and a great variety of therapeutic benefits were ascribed to them. Some of the claims were specific, whereas others, such as Horace’s couplet about mulberries, were vague, leaving us to wonder just what it was that the ancients saw in these plants.

Mulberry leaves have long been
used in Chinese medicine for the
prevention and treatment of diabetes;
they contain compounds that
suppress high blood sugar levels.

There was probably at least a germ of truth in all their claims, though, and many of these claims have withstood the tests of time and scientific scrutiny to become accepted by modern medical practitioners as both genuine and significant. In many cases, we can now pinpoint the chemical compounds that gave these ancient herbal remedies their biological activity. Sometimes we extract the compounds from the plants so that they can be used in supplements or drugs, and sometimes we synthesize them in the laboratory for the sake of greater purity or lower cost.*”