Sassafras Tea
Proven Health Benefits of Sassafras Tea:
- Sassafras tea can help correct complications of the urinary tract
- Potent diuretic, important for helping flush the system
- Helps relief pains from swells and sprains
- Assists in managing arthritis and gout
- Used to treat insect bites
What is Sassafras Tea?
Sassafras tea has obviously got something to do with the sassafras plant, Sassafras albidum. This member of the laurel family is a medium tall tree that would only bear either male or female flowers (dioecious). The alternate leaves start off bright green, but turn yellow or red in the fall. Almost every part of sassafras has found itself into medicinal infusions one way or the other. However, the most popular part used is the root. When boiled, the white roots produce a deep red stock that is drank as a beverage or mixed with other herbs into a medicinal concoction. Sassafras tea actually refers to this red stock from boiled root. This tea is of particular delight due to the strong spicy aroma, carrying the essence of root beer.
What is the Usefulness of Sassafras Tea?
The discovery that sassafras contains high amounts of safrole – a substance that is classified by the FDA as potentially carcinogenic – more or less pushed sassafras out of the research labs. This, however, does not cancel out all the positive benefits that folk medicine has so much achieved with the plant, over the numerous years of its existence. Throughout the ages, sassafras tea has been known to be a powerful anti-inflammatory agent, being used to reduce pains from swells, sprains and arthritis. Sassafras tea is also given to people with nausea, indigestion and constipation.1 In other instances, leaves of sassafras is used as a spice in food, as well as a fragrance for soaps. Sassafras tea may also be ingested to cause euphoria and highness.
Health benefits
- Helps Prevent
- Diuretic
- Urinary tract complications
- Indigestion and constipation
- Anti-inflammatory
- Stimulant
- Gout
- Fever
Nutrition
Sassafras root, beyond macro-components, contain about 2.5% essential oil, tannins and sassafras, mucilage and wax. The essential oil has the bulk of it, about 80%, being safrole, and the rest including eugenol, sesquiterpenes, phellandrene, α-pinene and camphor.2 These impart the rich spring aroma of the plant, and many health importance of the root tea.
Toxicity
In 1960, the FDA declared safrole as harmful to humans and hence, banned sassafras from food use. Safrole has not been definitely proven to cause cancer in humans. However, a study showed that injecting rats with high doses (66mg/kg), caused liver cancers.3 Today, sassafras can find their way back into the human diet, if safrole has been removed from by a laboratory process, bringing back the esteemed sassafras root beer.4 Beyond, the safrole controversy, there is little known adverse effect due to the consumption of sassafras root tea.