Taste Like Saw Dust And You Will Thank Me For It!

So this is one of the most invasive pest species in North America, and it's also fantastic medicine. Let's talk about it. So this is Russian olive, Eliagnus angustifolia, and they call it Russian olive because it's not Russian and it's not an olive, so that's, you know, that's where they got the name. It actually originates in the Middle East and in Southern Europe. The Persians have used it for centuries. In fact, Persian olive is one of its names. They also call it oleaster. They call it silverberry. It has several names, and it's not an olive. No relation at all taxonomically to the olive trees that we get olives from, olive oil, but it looks like an olive. You know, the leaves are similarly shaped, sort of. It makes little fruits that sort of look like olives, but that's where all the commonality stops. The fruit of the Russian olive is edible, but only in the most hypothetical sense, I guess. The seed is huge. It's mostly seed, and it's rock hard, and then there's sort of a paper-thin coating of really sour sawdust on that seed, but the birds eat them and like them. That's why these trees are everywhere, because the birds are spreading them everywhere, and it has been used historically all over the world by people as a food source, especially in the winter, because those berries stay on the trees all winter, and people gather them, and I don't know how they got the meat off the berries in the old days off the seeds, but what you can do now is you can take those seeds, put them in a blender, and if you put it on a real low speed, the blender will knock those around and knock the flesh off the seeds, and it won't break the seeds, and it won't break the blender blades. Okay, if you turn it up high, it'll break the blender blades, not the seeds. They're really hard. Anyway, and then that powder could be used to make teas, or tinctures, or to eat. You know, put it in bread for the vitamins, but anyway, it's really, really sour. I mean like sort of a bitter sour, lots of tannins in there, and if you were going to open like a kissing booth, it'd be great, because you're puckered up for about three days after you eat it, but anyway, great plant. Medicinally, the leaf and the fruit of the berry, and the flower too, they're all medicinal, and they have pretty similar properties. Let me tell you how I learned about this plant. I was actually walking right past this very tree, and I had really sore knees. I've been a veterinarian for over 30 years. I spent a lot of my life standing on concrete behind cows, preg-checking cows all day, and so my knees have a lot of miles on them. You know, every week or two, a cow would kick them really good, you know, and anyway, so I was jimping around out here with my sore knees, and I saw this Russian olive tree. I didn't know any about it. I mean, I knew the birds ate it, but I didn't know anything about it being medicinal, and saw those berries, and I was just, wow, I want those berries. Man, those look really good. I really want those berries, and I grabbed a handful of them and tossed them in my mouth, and I learned then the nature of the Russian olive, which is that it's a rock with a little thin coating of bitter sawdust on it. Awful. Really bad. So dry, but about 10 minutes after I ate that handful of berries, and I spit the seeds out, but about 10 minutes after I ate that, my knees felt fantastic. Fantastic. I mean, no pain at all. All the inflammation's gone. All the pain's gone, and so, you know, I got into my old dusty herb books and started digging around. There's nothing in it on it in the newer books, you know, but the old guys talked about it, and sure enough, it's a really, really fantastic anti-inflammatory. You know, it's really good for osteoarthritis, regular old arthritis, but it's also good for rheumatoid arthritis, not only because of the anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties, but it also has some immunomodulatory properties. It sort of balances and manages and corrects the function of the immune system, and so when you have an autoimmune condition like rheumatoid arthritis, which is your own immune system attacking your joints, right, it's decided that you're not you, and it's going to attack you, or, you know, fibromyalgia, lupus, any of those autoimmune things, Russian Olive can help because of the anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties, but also because of those balancing immunomodulatory properties that, you know, maintain cytokine levels at normal levels and prostaglandin production and prostaglandin elimination and all kinds of, you know, physiological things that your immune system is doing to promote and create inflammation, okay, so it can be really good for that. It can be really good for gastrointestinal things. They used it, it's quite good for diarrhea, quite good for kind of anything wrong with your guts, got a lot of tannins in it, has some antimicrobial antibiotic effects if you had a bacterial enteritis, diarrhea, something like that, it's good for that. It's also quite good for stomach ulcers, and the reason for that is that, first of all, it's good for the gut generally, but a lot of what it's doing for stomach ulcers is that it's accelerating the healing of wounds, okay, so it's got some antibiotic properties, mild, but it also accelerates wound healing, and the way it does that is that it stimulates what we call angiogenesis, which is new circulation, you know, new blood vessels going places that blood and oxygen are needed, and so it just, you know, that wound is crying out that tissue saying, hey, we're dying, we need more support here, and the body will grow as part of the healing process, more new little capillaries to that wound to take white blood cells in to fight infection, to take oxygen in, to take garbage out, right, so the good stuff's going in, the bad stuff's going out, and that accelerates wound healing, and so for a stomach ulcer, that's fantastic, right, mild antibiotic, good digestive tonic, good wound healer, you know, what else do you want? You can also use it for wounds topically for the same reasons, you know, it has some mild antibiotic properties and accelerates the healing of the wound by improving circulation and tissue health. It also, the dried leaf, has some blood stopping properties, so that's good for wounds too, so really great for those kinds of things. So there you go, Russian olive, Eliagnus angustifolia. I'm Doc Jones from the Homegrown Herbalist School of Botanical Medicine. If you'd like to learn more about this plant, there's a much longer video and some other lessons about it in the Homegrown Herbalist School, not to mention, I don't know, probably 150, 200 other plants that we really get into deeply, so if you'd like to learn how you can use things that everybody's telling you is a pest, come and have a look. I think you'll really enjoy it. Thanks for watching.