Healing Tonics Next-level Juices, Smoothies and Elixirs for Health and Wellness. / Adriana Ayales, 2016. Sterling Ethos. 210 pages includes Index. Color illustrations.
Passion for tonics, those mysterious liquid formulations of herbs, fruits and spices, comes to life in a speed of light journey with author Adriana Ayales in Healing Tonics, Next Level Juices, Smoothies and Elixirs… Ayales’ childhood exposure to herbs as medicine, and especially to plants from the tropics in Costa Rica and their inherent powers for healing, drives the inspiration for this book, and for her life as an herbalist and owner of Botica and Anima Mundi Herbals in New York. Reading Healing Tonics… you cannot help but become infected with her enthusiasm and the promise of radiant health in these drinks.
As might be expected from part of the title, “next level juices, smoothies and elixirs”, recipes for health are nutritious and good-tasting. Superfoods we already know and love, such as cacao or pineapple become the taste factor, with exotic-sounding herbs added in. These “next-level” herbs are identified as possessing extraordinary amounts of vitamins, minerals, or healing substances.
Another thought regarding the title: wherever the word “healing” occurs, automatically the concept of dis-ease is present, and that we are attempting to heal from something. A tonic herb is an herb that, rather than provide the means to heal, instead strengthens the entire body. Its action is non-specific. Tonics are strong and potent superfoods that taste delicious, mainly because they are not actually medicine at all, but food.
Never mind that the words “healing” and “tonic” are seen here in one phrase—a puzzling combination. Healing Tonics… conveys the idea of healthy potions that you’ll enjoy drinking. Indeed, many of the recipes in Healing Tonics… are put together as good tasting drinks, rather than strictly medicinal ones.
But the real news is that as wondrous as an herb might be, all the appeal it has cannot be realized unless you get your dosage of it. This is a difficult thing to achieve on a daily basis, especially for healthy people who just need a bit of shoring up, physically. Who, then, sets aside time specifically to medicate? Why not instead include the substances in daily drinks, juices, smoothies, and elixirs?
And such delectable combinations are just what Ayales’ virtuosity serves up, in Healing Tonics… Part One, “Next Level Nutrition”, prepares you to create sensational healthful drinks. In this section, the author discusses a selection of 20 herbs to have on hand for creating tonic drinks. The author gives instruction on nutrition and how to make the basic teas or tinctures in your kitchen. Categories of cleansing herbs are given. For example, Herbs for Kidneys include horsetail, marshmallow root, parsley leaf, and dandelion, among others.
Part Two, “Juicing for Your Body and Your Mind”, contains Ayales’ range and variety of recipes for green juices, flushes, and detoxifiers. Next, warming juices, nut milk or fruit and green vegetable and algae tonics and mineralizing juices are offered. The recipe “Sparkling Vitamin C” includes powerful flavors and vitamins from tropical sources. It’s made with three superherbs, beet and grapefruit juice and in the photo looks brilliant enough to be a delicious daily gulp!
Then suddenly in the same section, a few pages describe how to create beauty products from essential oils and other basic ingredients. There’s no suggestion to ingest the oils, but you can read there how to make creams, scrubs, oils, and washes. Ingredients in the beauty products are not found in juices and elixirs, etc.
“Juice Sensorium” is the section of Part Two which gets into the nitty gritty of combining herbs mentioned in Part One. With juices and superfoods like spirulina, coconut water, nut milks, and fruits you can make a variety of drinks. And it’s how simple recipes become tonics. These are organized by type of tonic: for beauty, joy, energy, relaxation, nourishment, and spirit.
Captivated by the possibilities in these recipes and generally a person who’s thirsty for new kinds of drinks, I’m bound to try the recipe for “Master Detoxifier: Detox Shot” which has these ingredients: spirulina, lemon juice, dandelion greens and coconut water. Some of the mocktails in this section call for a tonic, in this case a recipe in Healing Tonics… which is essentially a bitters formula composed of 4 dried herbs steeped in vodka for one month.
Part Three, “Vital Extras”, contains practical information and sources for the herbs. Superherb Functions list the valuable actions or known attributes of 60 herbs. These are arranged alphabetically from Aloe Vera to Yohimbe, and herbs like Astragalus, Calendula, Dong Quai, Garlic, Ginkgo, Lemon Balm, Oats, Rose Hips, Rosemary, St. John’s Wort, etc., etc. are discussed. Some cautionary notes attend certain herbs.
Here are a few of the “next-level” herbs featured in Healing Tonics… by common name. Some of these are tonics, but most are medicinal in their energies.
Garcinia gambogia, cha de bugre, sangre de grado, chanca piedra, cat’s claw, and pau d’arco all have arrived at Ayales’ doorstep in New York City (as well as other places north of the Equator), from the rainforests of the Southern hemisphere. These herbs are known to resolve a number of conditions and diseases like snake bite, blood pressure and blood sugar problems, gonorrhea, kidney stones, and to help with weight loss. They’ve been used more notably to inhibit cancer and diabetes. This is due to the strength and fortitude of their secondary metabolites, the substances that humans rely on for their healing properties.
It’s the same with herbs and healing plants from Asia. Ginseng, Holy Basil, Shatavari, Dong Quai, He Shou Wu, and Goji Berries, from India and China and other South Asian countries are adaptogenic or healing in action, and we depend on them to help alleviate recognizable ailments. Most of these are featured in Ayales’ Healing Tonics… At first encounter, these herbs were mysterious and initially we thought they were either a panacea or “too good to be true”, in the style and reputation of snake oil. Yet after a bit we adjusted and decided they might be useful, if not downright indispensable.
These days herbalists must distill enormous amounts of information to present in a book like Healing Tonics. The final product should be acknowledged as quite an achievement, because the domains of knowledge—on food and body chemistry, herbs and their interactions, and the psychology of health and well-being—are quite phenomenal in scope. Usually years of study and clinical experience are behind the protocols advocated by herbalists.
So many factors go into creating a book like Healing Tonics… The book is visually striking: its concepts have been photographed well. The images have a kind of antiqued tropical flare and are chock-full with sensory indulgence so that we want to sample the recipes just on the basis of their visual appeal. The text is organized into approachable chunks of information.
However, in Ayales’s book you sense something different than the pursuit of textbook learning or the development of a subject that follows traditional herbal wisdom. I think that in an author’s mind, sometimes genius arrives like a flash in the pan, and just going for it creates the needed momentum.
Yet, a type of chaos rather than order, suffuses the book, and it’s obvious that editing was careless or you might say, so relaxed as to be non-existent. Muddled into each section is the essence of a mix-up, a sense that the book was written on the run, or between gulps when testing the recipes or something more vitally important than the text itself. This amounted to a proliferation of errors throughout.
Readers not well-versed in the subject should be aware of notable inconsistencies. Typos, while not a big deal—they happen—but strangely worded and repetitious statements where unique assertions would make more sense? These catch the reader off-guard and are off-putting. I tend to wonder about the herbal suggestions, are there mistakes there too?
Precision in handling a subject is called for at some level for a book dealing with healing juices and tonics. If the only precision that can be managed is to get the names of herbs out there, well, is that enough?
You, the reader, eventually have to decide. But if the quality of the text in this book is an indication of future publishing, I think that’s a dis-service to readers who are genuinely interested in the subject.
Herbalists are people from all cultures of the world, and originate from a rich rainbow of backgrounds—a fact as exciting as it is remarkable. For human energy to be vibrant and dynamic, we need every one of us. And we should strive to offer perfection in areas we can control, such as the printed word. Let it be at least in form, as good as it can possibly be.
Herbalists and their patients choosing natural substances chose powers, like ourselves, that are more complex and embracing than we can comprehend. At the confluence of these strengths, our being with plants creates life, a continuum or space in which we thrive and give support to each another. Let this blending of beings be sacred, at least this one thing, in our world today.
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