Nutritive herbs are one of the key cornerstones for integrating herbal nutrition into your daily life. Nutritive herbs help to support micronutrient sufficiency, stress management, and more. Simply put, nutritive herbs nourish your body. They bring your health and body functions into balance. They tend to be very gentle, tonic herbs, meaning they can be used in larger quantities for longer time periods with very little if any negative side effects.
Some of my most favorite nutritive herbs include stinging nettle (Urtica dioica), red raspberry leaf (Rubus idaeus), rose hips (Rosa canina), calendula flowers (Calendula officinalis), seaweed, dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), and red clover (Trifolium pratense) blossoms.
There are many characteristics of nutritive herbs that make them exceptional herbal allies for daily self-nourishment.
The mineral and vitamin-rich qualities of nutritive herbs provide essential nutrition and can be an easy method for improving and bolstering your overall health and well being by enhancing micronutrient intake. Because they are gentle and nourishing tonics, they can usually be consumed in large quantities on a frequent basis.
One of the many reasons nutritive herbs are helpful daily tonics is because of their ability to counterbalance the effects of stress. Tonic herbs directly address systemic inflammation (a common by-product of chronic stress) because they have a high antioxidant content. As you may already realize, inflammation in and of itself is not a bad thing by any means, as it’s an important function of our bodies to survive and thrive during challenging situations. However, if you are not supplying your body with the building blocks to balance your inflammatory responses, you may have an issue of rampant unnecessary inflammation on your hands - and chronic stress is great at promoting this. As such, nutritive herbs can be effective players to turn to in order to mitigate these responses and bring your inflammatory reactions - and stress responses - back into balance.
As tonics, nutritive herbs bolster your energy reserves and boost your metabolic fire because they provide sources of vital nutrients that help to stoke these functions. One of my most common and favorite recommendations for clients who are struggling with fatigue and burnout is to start drinking a nettle leaf infusion daily in order to get their energetic fire back on track. This infusion (recipe shared below) is rich in iron, vitamin C, calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, vitamin K, vitamin A, a variety of flavonoids and phytonutrients.
If you are curious to begin playing with nutritive herbs more as part of your daily self-nourishment, I highly recommend trying my most favorite herbal infusion recipe to help get you started. It is a delicious, fruity, and nutrient-rich introduction to nutritive herbs - I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
Sierra’s Tonic-Tea
Ingredients:
1 cup dried nettles
1/2 cup dried hibiscus or rose hips
1/2 cup dried red clover
1 heaping tsp. dried stevia leaf (or honey to taste instead)
Instructions:
Put dried herbs in a 64 oz mason jar and fill with just boiled water.
Cover and let steep for 4+ hours (I often leave it brewing overnight).
Strain out herbs and return herb-infused liquid to the (rinsed) mason jar.
Fill the remainder of the jar with cold water.
Refrigerate and enjoy within 3 days (if it lasts that long!).
