10 Comments
Jan 28Liked by Modern Discontent

It's always elderberry season 😎.

(So nasty if you hurl something so colorful that might even stain the "throne", and memorable for sure. I have sympathy, and a relatable 🤢 red pepper story.)

I noticed 3',4',5,7 tetra-methyl-O-quercetin which got the 30,40 numbering in the Mocanu article, had the regular ACS numbering in the article that Mocanu referenced. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19682714/

Chemical nomenclature drives me nutz. I stored an article on how those plant flavanoids are numbered in IUPAC-land. https://iupac.qmul.ac.uk/flavonoid/index.html#Flv361 It's fairly systematic, I guess.

So glad you included the cytokine storm discussion. Even before COVID people had been somewhat terrorized by the Spanish flu story in which many deaths were later blamed on cytokine storm. In herbalism people were being talked down from using echinacea and elderberry for flu.

Seems to me that on balance these plants are immune modulatory rather than immune stimulants. They can enhance some immune functions and chemotaxis, and suppress others.

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Hahaha, I should have elaborated that elderberries are likely not growing right now so people may be fresh out of luck if wandering. 🤷‍♂️

Yeah, the image of something red/dark coming back up doesn't help one from feeling some degree of anxiety.

It can be aggravating when people using different naming rules. ACS seems to go with IUPAC and that seems to be rather consistent, although it can still seem super confusing with large, multicyclic structures. It require having some rote memorization of the parent structure and that can get confusing when there are tons of them out there.

As to the cytokine storm it seems rather reductive to assume this clear 1:1 of take elderberry -> worsen COVID symptoms. There's a lot more going on but many outlets aren't going to take a bit of time in pointing out why this probably wouldn't be a big issue.

As for an immunomodulator it would at least fall in line with what has been argued of quercetin.

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Jan 31Liked by Modern Discontent

Many herbalists kowtowed and didn't recommend elderberry during COVID, but I was personally using that chronically and used quercetin itself if people all around me at the hospital were getting sick. Good thing about elderberry is that someone, somewhere has the dried berries all year round. Quercetin exhibits so much activity. I've personally found all sorts of applications for it.

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I have an elderberry OTC cough and cold formula I keep on hand at the start of winter, when taken just as sxs begin, it always nip it in the bud. thank you for this well thought out article. I hope the job is going well!

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Interesting! It's only in recent years that I noticed the number of elderberry products out there which makes me curious if they have always been there or increased in number during COVID.

Thanks for asking about the job! Work is work, but the main thing would be that I don't have as much as time as I would have hoped to dedicate to researching/writing. I still haven't found a proper balance and it unfortunately also means that I don't have time to make posts such as these.

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Jan 28Liked by Modern Discontent

so the "........-methylquercetin"..... how close is that to the quercetin that is so highly recommended for spike detox?

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It's been a while since I have looked at quercetin in relation to COVID but just keep in mind that quercetin refers to a large class of compounds, all of which may have different effects. In regarding spike detox in particular I don't really recall any information about that. If you have any information I can take a look.

But the overall point is that quercetin is rather common in many fruits, and so it may just be worth considering eating more fruits in general as a possible health benefit.

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Jan 28Liked by Modern Discontent

It's also reported as effective against some protozoans (in vitro if I remember the papers correctly, would have to check to be sure).

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I haven't found any information on that so if you do end up finding those studies I'd be interested!

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Feb 1Liked by Modern Discontent

I came across papers in the process of doing a very deep dive into toxo,. Lts of interesting findings in general, in no regard to elderberry (https://tessa.substack.com/p/study-correlates-inflammaging-with-toxo and https://tessa.substack.com/p/grand-theory-of-covid for example)

When it comes to elderberry species, here is one sambucus / toxo paper that I found just now to share with you https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26299111/

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