Herbs To Keep Cool On Hot Summer Days

Wanna stay cool during the summer? Here’s some of my favorite herbal remedies to beat the heat. Learn tips on recognizing symptoms of heat exhaustion and the importance of hydration throughout the summer. In this episode I dish the love on herbs like lemon balm, mint, fennel, elderflowers, hibiscus, lavender, and marshmallow root for their cooling properties and shared a fabulous iced tea recipe. If you want to take advantage of the abundance of medicinal plants at their peak this summer, consider joining us inside of Medicine Making Mamas, so you can create the best remedies in town.

00:35 Cooling Down in the Summer Heat
01:20 River Adventures and Safety Tips
04:03 The Importance of Staying Cool
06:04 Recognizing Heat-Related Symptoms
09:26 Herbal Remedies to Beat the Heat
13:36 Delicious and Hydrating Herbal Teas
19:13 Join us in Medicine Making Mommas

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Chapters

• 1:44 Stay Cool With Herbal Remedies
• 19:20 Cooling Herbal Remedies for Summer
• 27:16 Herbalist Path Disclaimer and Thank You

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:45

Hello and welcome to the Herbalist Path, a podcast where you'll discover how to make your own herbal remedies at home so that you can take better care of yourself, better care of your family and better care of our planet. I'm Mel. I'm a clinical herbalist, environmental educator and mountain-l living mama with this crazy passion for teaching more mamas and their little loves how to use plants as medicine in a safe, effective and tasty way, so that there can be an herbalist in every home. Again, it's an absolute honor to have you on the journey down the herbalist path with me so that together we can make herbalism Hashtag spread like wildflowers. Hello, hello and welcome to another episode on the Herbalist Path Podcast. I am so very happy to have you here tuning in, nerding out on herbs with me. If you are new here, hi, I'm Mel. I'm a clinical herbalist and I love to talk about herbs and I love to help moms and families learn how to use herbal remedies in a safe and effective way, and I'm really jazzed about today's podcast episode topic. I wanted to come on and just chat a little bit about how we can use herbs to keep cool in the summertime.

Speaker 1: 3:19

It is right now, mid-july 2024, as I'm recording this podcast, and today was so hot I had to drive around in the city, which just really reminded me of how hot it was. I'm usually I live in the mountains and I my house is covered by trees and I have a beautiful mountain river out my backyard. So while we do get a little bit of heat here, it's normally pretty darn cool in comparison to the summer or the city. And if I can't like catch my cool, I go jump in a river. I love, love, love, love, love, love, love to float the river or to go rafting. That's one of my all-time favorite summer things to do. We actually just did last week, and it was me and my partner, chris, and our daughter and her two best friends, and it was kind of like the closing of a week long celebrating her 11th birthday, and so we decided to float a river.

Speaker 1: 4:22

That gosh pre-motherhood and when I'd lived in the city about 18 years ago, I would go float this river three to five days a week. I am not exaggerating at all. If I had time, I was on the river and I know this river really, really well. I love it, it's beautiful and of course, it's a mountainous river, so the water fluctuates and sometimes there's new obstacles and barriers, depending on coming to a section where the river was kind of colliding, like there was an island, and now two sections of the river were colliding and I had my daughter on my little inflatable kayak with me and we hit that little part where it was colliding together and it just knocked my boat right on over and you know, we come up from underneath the water and you're stuck underneath the raft and it's pretty scary and my daughter was definitely scared and she did the right thing, though I was so darn proud of her.

Speaker 1: 5:40

For any of you that don't know, if you're ever in rapids or a fast flowing river, of course you have your life vest on right Because you're no dummy and you want to save yourself and your life, but what you do is basically put your feet so they are going down river from you and your toes are up in the air, so your butt is down towards the bottom of the river, your belly's facing up and you just float on down until you get to a more calm part of the river. And I was so proud of Anira, my daughter, because she did exactly that and I could see the fear in her eyes. She was definitely worried. She couldn't find me right away and I was busy trying to make sure I had, like, the paddles for the boat and the boat and her, of course, making sure she was safe and she was. Anyways, how did I get into my river story?

Speaker 1: 6:33

I don't know, because I love to stay cool on the river in the summertime. That's why, right, but sometimes you know there's people out there that don't have access to a river or time to get to the river or anything along those lines. So it's really wonderful that we can use herbs to help us keep cool as well, because there's a lot of things that can happen if we are not staying cool and being really mindful of that. Like people can get heat exhaustion or a heat stroke. You may just get really tired and lethargic. Have you ever Kind of how I feel right now? Today I drove around the city it was hot all day and I'm recording this podcast and I'm just like I'm kind of sleepy, kind of mellow. I could definitely go for a nap or something. No, I'm not taking a nap, um, but yeah, when we keep ourselves well hydrated, keep ourselves really nice and cool, we can have more energy to go throughout the day, your body and your brain perform much better and you're more comfortable.

Speaker 1: 7:42

Like, think about how miserable it is to be really hot. And one thing I do notice, like when everybody's in one hot area I actually I used to live in Atlanta, georgia, in the Southeast and you want to talk about hot and humid and crowded and you would just see people get kind of bitter and angry and just and like who wants to be that way? Nobody. Another perk to keeping cool and doing it naturally and using herbs to do that is you're going to save money on air conditioning bills. Yay right, we don't have an AC where we are. We just open up the windows at night and let all the cool nighttime air in and then shut them in the morning. And again, those trees that I have covering my house really do a great job of keeping it cool. And I'm lucky in the summertime. My office where I'm recording this right now is down in the basement. So I get to you know, stay nice and cool.

Speaker 1: 8:44

So I also want to chat a little bit about you know, heat in the body and what that means heat in the body and what that means. So when we have excessive heat in the body. The body temperature is going to be above 98.6 degrees right when we get there. That could be a very clear sign of excessive heat. You could also see if somebody is just sweating a lot. This is the body's way of trying to cool down by releasing heat through the skin via sweat. Or they may not be able to sweat because their body is already so dehydrated. Therefore, their body can't find any more moisture or water to release through the skin moisture or water to release through the skin. So that's when you're at a little bit more severe case of heat stroke. Perhaps you can look at somebody's skin. So think about when you get hot.

Speaker 1: 9:44

Me, I'm a pretty pale white girl and I get really red in the face. Sometimes I'll get heat rash in. Like my thighs will get heat rash or get really red bumps that are very, very itchy and really irritating, and I will try to remember to talk about ways we can take care of that as well. Another thing you might notice is they may just be really, really thirsty. They're like oh my gosh, I can't get enough water, give me more, give me more, give me more. Or when you go to use the restroom and you're going to urinate it can be very dark in color and that's a sign that you are dehydrated and probably having excessive heat. You could see somebody might like just be breathing really rapidly or have a very rapid heartbeat, they may get dizzy, they may get headaches, and it's because heat can cause vasodilation and, as I've mentioned, dehydration and that leads to symptoms like the headaches, like dizziness, like lightheadedness or just maybe even being confused or, in a really bad scenario, somebody might even faint, some people get muscle cramps, some people just get really nauseous and might even vomit because they're too hot. I mean, we're really talking about extreme excessive heat here, or again, kind of like I was talking about before. They just make it very fatigued, very tired, very lethargic, very just like no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1: 11:22

So thinking of those things, recognizing those things, knowing how important it is to get somebody proper hydration and electrolytes, and things like that is so incredibly important. So we can also good news we can turn to really tasty foods to keep us well hydrated. So things like cucumbers, celery I love to eat lots of berries in the summertime I'm really fortunate to be in Oregon and the berries are just off the hook here Pineapple, coconut water, eating lots of greens, you know, get your great produce in that happens to be growing really, really well during this time of year. They're like, hey, we're here for you. And then there's a lot of herbs we can turn to as well to help us keep cool.

Speaker 1: 12:14

One of them that I love a lot is lemon balm, and lemon balm just makes me happy in so many different ways. It is Melissa officinalis, if you did not know this already, and it's got this lemony fresh scent. It is really delightful and it's actually known as nature's sunshine when it comes to uplifting somebody's mood or spirits. But it is also a very cooling herb and it does help the body to release heat from sweating. So it is a diaphoretic herb that helps us to stay cool man, stay cool. So this could be really nice for those of you dealing with hot flashes as well, and as I was talking about how people get a bit irritated and irritable when they are hot, you may turn to something to lemon balm to not only cool the body but maybe cool your jets man, like just to chill out in all the ways. So lemon balm is just a really great one.

Speaker 1: 13:22

It is in the mint family and since we're talking about mint, like how can you not love mint on a hot summer's day? I know there's a few people out there that are allergic to it or what have you, but I just love, love, love, love mint. I love to add it into iced teas. Sometimes I'll take a little iced tea, iced peppermint tea, and I will put it into a spritzer bottle on a hot summer day if I'm going to go out and about, and I'll just spritz myself throughout the day. Sometimes I'll infuse some peppermint in witch hazel, maybe a little bit of glycerin or something like that to keep it in its space, maybe just a tad bit of alcohol in there to preserve it as well, and I will use that as a spritzer to keep me nice and cool. Maybe, if I'm really lucky, I can store it in the fridge and that'll be really, really nice.

Speaker 1: 14:11

I also love fennel. Fennel is a nice cooling herb as well and it's what's called mucilaginous. So mucilaginous herbs by nature are cooling and coating and soothing herbs, and fennel can just add a little bit of sweetness to a blend of something. You can just chew on fennel seeds. You can add it to an herbal tea. You can, you know, make the fresh fennel fronds and fennel bulbs and use them as your food in salads and things like that, and that could be nice and refreshing. It's also going to be really helpful for the digestive system as well. That's a really, really yummy one.

Speaker 1: 17:33

I love to turn to elderflowers. Those are another great one, another diaphoretic herb, so it's going to make you sweat. It is also demulcent, so it's got very cooling encoding. Demulcent and mucilaginous can be very, very similar to each other. And elderflowers actually help to ease inflammation and if we think about inflammation we know it's hot. So if something is anti-inflammatory, we know it's going to cool something and in this particular case it can help to cool our bodies and our mucous membranes. Plus, elderflower drinks are usually. They can be really good in a nice tea which, if you're drinking that, it's going to help to cool the body because you're also hydrating the body and it's going to reduce any swelling of any tissues like. A lot of times people will get swollen and puffy in the heat. Maybe it's the ankles or the hands or the eyes or something like that. Turning to something like elderflower can be really nice. You might even want to use like a cooled elderflower tea if you do get the heat rash and those raised itchy bumps. Maybe just a nice little wash of some cool elderflower tea on those to ease some of the itchiness and the irritation and the inflammation, that could be a really nice sweet treat to give to your skin. And hibiscus Hibiscus is another great one. Actually, for my daughter's birthday party she had me make a couple gallons of hibiscus tea. She wanted to do a Hawaiian luau theme and so we did have hibiscus tea and it was a very cooling blend.

Speaker 1: 19:20

I'm actually going to put the recipe in the show notes of this blog, so be sure to check that out. It'll be linked in this blog cast podcast, blog slash thing. I think I want to call it like a blog cast because I always write up a mini version on the blog and then link to the podcast. But I will put the recipe in that mini version In a nutshell. We use holy basil, we use lemon balm, we used some mint I think I used spearmint this time because I had an excess of it. I did cinnamon and a little bit of licorice root as well, and then hibiscus I think that might be it.

Speaker 1: 20:09

Oh, nettles I love to add nettles in there too, and it's just such a delicious, sweet, delightful, flavorful, amazing iced tea, and what I'll do is just brew it up really, really, really strong and then I can just pour that on top of ice as the day goes on and it'll, you know, pour that on top of ice as the day goes on and it'll dilute itself down by nature, which is pretty darn nice. But yeah, I love hibiscus because it is hydrating, it's a vasodilator, it is a very cooling herb as well. It helps to actually bring the body temperature down, as it simultaneously is a great thirst quencher. So if you're sweating in abundance and you need, you're like thirsty and you're hot and you're tired and all that jazz, like hibiscus is for sure your friend. But if you're like me, hibiscus can be a bit too tart, like you can taste that hibiscus is so potent in vitamin C, right, and for me I'm just like, yeah, not so much. And that's why I bring in all those other herbs in there to help balance out all of the tartness of hibiscus. It's, yeah, it's a really nice one to have balanced with other herbs. In my opinion, some people just love it straight and if that's you, awesome, get you some more hibiscus, especially on those hot, hot summer days, right.

Speaker 1: 21:42

Another one I want love. It's actually the herb of the month this month inside of Apothecary Mama and the KidSafe Herb Club. So if you want to do a deep dive on lavender, it has a lot more medicinal properties than being anti-inflammatory or soothing sunburns. It's also calming and soothing to the nerves when we are all hot, hot, hot and irritated, irritated, irritated when we are all hot, hot, hot and irritated, irritated, irritated. So another one I will turn to I'm going to cut it off here soon because this is a quick one for me but another one I love a lot is marshmallow and marshmallow root and it is another one of those mucilaginous herbs and it is really really mucilaginous to the extent that it almost looks slimy. And if somebody I love or care about gets a sunburn and maybe their skin is peeling or something like that, I will do a cold overnight infusion of marshmallow root and it creates this almost slimy kind of effect in what comes out of it and I rub that all over my skin or somebody else's skin and it is so instantly hydrating, cooling and really refreshing and it does a great job of helping the skin to heal and repair from all of the damage that has happened there. So it's pretty amazing and so darn helpful and beautiful. So I really hope that just these quick little herbal tips are helpful for you.

Speaker 1: 23:23

Make yourself the tea that is going to be in the blog cast of this episode, definitely linked in the podcast show notes, and then try and do like an herbal cooling spray. If you don't have peppermint on hand, maybe you have some peppermint essential oil and you can just do a couple little drops in some witch hazel with some distilled water and spray that on yourself. Thank me later because it is magical. I have taken this to so many places. I used to bartend or work a lot of events and it would be hot, hot, hot, moving your body all the time. Or outside there's dishwashers and steam things and you're moving, moving, moving, going, going, going and it gets just irritable, right, and I would bring about that peppermint spray. Or when I was doing markets and things like that, or going to big events with Mountain Mel's, my old product line, we would use my Afterburn, sunburn skincare that I've created and it had peppermint in it as well and gosh, oh golly, I would be like everybody's best friend because I had that minty freshness. So it's an easy, easy solution to feel fantastic on a hot summer day, and I really hope that you just try it out. So I also hope that this is helpful and just gives you a few ideas and time to get creative with what herbs you're going to bring on board. If you want to get even more creative and start formulating great blends that you know taste great and work great, that's what I teach you how to do.

Speaker 1: 24:58

Inside of my program, medicine Making Mamas, doors are always open and I am welcoming you in with big, loving arms and what I love about that. I've been getting a lot of messages from students just mind blown at how dark and thick and beautiful their medicinal oils are. They're like, oh my gosh, I can actually smell the herb that I infused in there instead of just a bunch of oil, or just seeing the drastic difference in the quality of the tinctures that they're making. It does make a huge difference how you make your medicine. Yes, I love to play folksy medicine too. That's what I did with that tea recipe. But I've also been formulating herbal formulations for over two decades and I love it. And, if you didn't hear, before, I was a bartender so before I got into clinical herbalism, so I've always had like a blast just dancing the medicinal properties of plants with their flavor profiles, and now I love to teach other people to do that. And yeah, again, that's what we do inside of Medicine Making Mama.

Speaker 1: 26:08

So if you want to take it to the next level with the remedies you're creating, I would love to help you do that. Just reach out to me on Instagram. You can hit me up via email at buddingherbalist, at theherbalistpathcom, facebook, tiktok, wherever you want to follow me. Pathcom, facebook, tiktok, wherever you want to follow me. And if this episode was helpful for you at all, I would be so grateful if you reached out and let me know If you leave me a review on your favorite podcast player that helps other people find this show, and if you share it with your friends, because that's how we make herbalism spread like wildflowers. So thank you, thank you, thank you for taking these 20 or so minutes out of your day to nerd out on herbs with me, and I just hope that you stay cool, my friend, stay cool. I'll see you on the next one. Bye, cool, I'll see you on the next one, bye.

Speaker 1: 27:16

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the Herbalist Path. Being on this journey with you is absolutely incredible. If you dig this episode, please leave me a review on your favorite podcast player and share it with your friends so that together, we can make herbalism hashtag spread like wildflowers. On another note, I must mention that, while I know you're getting some good info here, it's important to remember that this podcast is purely for entertainment and educational purposes and is not intended to be a substitute for medical treatment. While the information in this podcast is absolutely relevant, herbs work differently for each person and each condition. That's why I recommend you work with a qualified practitioner, whether that be another herbalist, a naturopath or your doctor. So thank you again. I am truly honored that you're tuning into these episodes and on the path with me to make sure that there's an herbalist in every home. Again, don't forget to share this episode with your friends so that we can make herbalism Hashtag spread like wildflowers.