Nutritional Herbology

Nutritional Herbology

Fringe medicine
A proprietary system of eclectic herbal medicine developed in 1987 by a US-based “nutritional chemist”, Mark Pedersen, who divided herbs into five groups based on their active components: aromatic (volatile oils), astringent (tannins), bitter (alkaloids, phenols and saponins), mucilaginous (polysaccharides) and nutritive. Pedersen divided diseases into those of excess or paucity, which he claimed can be treated by any of 80 combinations of herbs.