Welcome to Astro Botanico.

As a chef and functional health practitioner, I'm a big believer in using food as medicine. In fact, taking in a wide variety of wild plants on a regular basis in smaller, culinary doses is one of my go-to dietary strategies to nourish the body and create good health, and prevent chronic dis-ease. It becomes much harder to correct poor health using "food-as-medicine" without resorting to the use of "nutraceuticals," which, while better than depending on pharmaceutical drugs to alleviate symptoms, still runs the risk of depending on a quick and easy "fix" to solve a problem instead of modifying your lifestyle to repair, build, and maintain good health.

At one point in our history, all plants were "wild", and their daily consumption included micro-doses of medicine that were present in them all - including psychotropic plants used for spiritual reasons called entheogens (literally "generating the divine within"). If you've consumed wild plants before, you'll notice that many of them have a bitter taste. That bitterness is the medicine (or poison, depending on the dose.)

However, in order to appeal to our modern palates, we've bred much of the bitterness out of our plant foods - and thus, eliminating our daily micro-doses of medicine - while spending our money on pharmaceutical drugs that are based on the medicinal constituents found in the plants that we should be consuming in the first place.