The wonderful world of dosages

You’re drawn to the world of plants, and that’s great. You buy a few books to document yourself, you look at a few sites, you get your first taste of it, it’s perfect… The first cold weather arrives, and with them, the first bronchitis; the perfect opportunity to put into practice everything that has been read. And presto, it will be a small elderberry infusion. Heat the water and take the plant out of its package. And then, the big question mark: how many plants?

Wait until you read what the authors of specialized books on plants advise us in terms of dosages; a real gas factory, a real puzzle. The list below shows specialist instructions for preparing an infusion of black elderberry (Sambucus nigra).

• Bruneton: “flower, 3 x 2-5 g/d […] use limited to one week”
• Cazin: “2 to 10 gr. per kilogram of water, to be taken per hot cup”
• Chavanne: “2 tsp. of flowers for 15 cl of freshly simmering water, after infusion and filtration, drink one to five times a day”
• Corn: “2 teaspoons of dried flowers for a large cup of cold water, bring to a boil and let it infuse for 10 minutes off the heat, strain, drink 3 cups a day”
• Debug & Couplan: “50 g of dry flowers per liter of boiling water, let it infuse for 10 minutes and take 4 or 5 cups a day”
• Dubray: “pour 150 ml of boiling water over […] 3 to 4 g of elderflower flowers, infuse for 5 minutes, drink 1 to 2 cups of infusion several times a day”
• Fleurentin & Hayon: “5 to 10 g of flowers […] for respectively 1/2 to 1 liter of water to drink during the day”
• Supply: “10 to 50 g per liter of boiling water, to be taken per hot cup fairly close together”
• Grünwald & Jänicke: “Pour 150 ml of boiling water over 2 or 3 tbsp. coffee of dried flowers, let it infuse for 10 minutes and drink several times a day”
• Lorrain: “infusion of 2 tsp. of dried elderflower flowers per cup, 1 cup 1 to 3 times a day”.
• Luu & Fournier: “infusion (10 to 15 minutes): 1 small handful of dried flowers/l of water, to drink during the day”
• Minker: “infuse 2 teaspoons of elderflower in 15 cl of simmering water for 5 to 10 minutes, 1 to 3 cups per day”
• Mup: “1 tablespoon for 1/4 liter of boiling water, let it infuse for 10 minutes, drink 3 cups a day away from meals”
• Valnet: “1 handful per liter of boiling water, infuse for 10 minutes, as desired”

Whoa! It tires all these numbers

If we dissect the instructions a bit, we can see that some authors give us the weight of plants for 1 liter of water, while others try to simplify our lives by giving us the correspondence of a handle or a spoon. It’s cool and it comes from a good feeling. Only between the soup spoon, the teaspoon, the tea spoon for the English, and sometimes the dessert spoon or the mouth spoon (if you’ve already seen it mentioned), you have to admit that it doesn’t really help.

Uh… does the spoon bulge?

And if that’s all it was! We are also told about the number of cups per day, but what cup are we talking about?

A short personal survey: take your favorite cups, put them on the scale, type them, weigh them full of water, ta-da! As a result, no cup is the same in terms of volume.

Well so how do we do it?

The only way out is to standardize each instruction, namely to determine how many grams for what quantity of water. For example,

• 50 g of dry flowers per litreis equivalent to 8 g for 150 ml
• 1 tablespoon for 1/4 liter is equivalent to 4 g for 150 ml
• 1 small handful of flowers/l of wateris equivalent to 2 g for 150 ml
• 2 tsp. for 1 large cup of wateris equivalent to 2 g for 150 ml
• etc.

And after all this standardization work, we can clearly see that there are still differences, ranging from 2 to 8 grams for the same quantity of water. It is therefore necessary to fine-tune the results to obtain an average weight that can be adapted according to each situation.

No but, I don’t have time to calculate all that myself!

Don’t panic, at Phyto-info, we like calculations and we decided to stick with it. Moreover, simplification has already begun for some plants, the others will follow soon. To go back to the elderberry example above, the light version, taking into account all the instructions found in our reference books, is as follows:

Infuse approx. 3 g of dried flowers in 150 ml of boiling water, infuse for 10 minutes, strain and drink 3 to 4 cups a day away from meals

It’s a bit more readable and a bit simpler, isn’t it? 🤗

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