Re: Temperature control.

 Also, possible/of value to make chapparal tea? I liked the taste from the tincture.

Not advised.  Chaparral is very resinous and resins and water don't mix.  If you try to make a tea from the leaf the resins will separate out and stick to the pan wall.  You need to use rubbing alcohol to dissolve and remove the resin from the pan. It also stinks up the house.

Surprisingly, the sales gal assisting me went on to note concerns posed regarding it being somewhat detrimental to liver function/health. Know anything about this?

Actually I have been asked this quite a few times before and wrote this on the subject:

Q: Can you explain why all of the bad press on toxicity in regards to chaparral?

A: The short of it is more FDA manipulation games in an attempt to gain control over herbals to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical companies they have been illegally invested in to for decades.  Kind of like their false claims about kava causing hepatitis, tryptophan being dangerous, ephedra causing numerous deaths and being used to produce methamphetamine, etc.  The kava claim came about as a result of the greed of a pharmaceutical company.  Traditional preparation involves removing the toxic outer root bark, which is thrown away.  A pharmaceutical company decided to jump on the herbal bandwagon, but wanted to maximize profits.  So they dried and ground up the toxic outer bark being thrown away, and capsuled it up for sale.  That is where the cases of hepatitis came from.  No cases of hepatitis have ever been reported from use of the inner root, a fact the FDA failed to mention.  The tryptophan fiasco came about from a Japanese pharmaceutical company genetically engineering the tryptophan.  The bacteria being used mutated and started generating a toxin that contaminated a batch leading to various deaths and injuries.  The problem was discovered and corrected, yet the FDA maintained their ban on tryptophan since it competed with 3 of the largest pharmaceutical markets: weight loss, depression, and sleep.  The FDA's latest fraud was the claiming of multiple deaths from ephedra and claiming that methamphetamine is made from ephedra.  First of all there is only one death that was ever linked to ephedra.  And that was an overdose.  The man took 8 times the recommended level.  Several other of the deaths the FDA reported to have been from ephedra were later proven to be from other causes.  In fact one of the deaths falsely attributed to ephedra was in a man that had not even taken ephedra in over a week. If we used that reasoning then we could blame nearly every death on some pharmaceutical drug.  ALL of the remaining deaths falsely attributed to ephedra were actually from the pharmaceutical drug ephedrine HCl, which is a strong, dangerous, SYNTHETIC compound.  Ephedrine is found in ephedra, but in relatively low levels.  Therefore the FDA has misleaded the public by trying to convince them that the herb ephedra and the drug ephedrine HCl are the same thing when they clearly are not.  That would be like claiming that the coca leaf is the same as "crack" cocaine. Though the FDA has to use this lies and manipulations in order to confuse the public and to scare them in to thinking that the FDA is needed to protect them.  As far as methamphetamine goes, it is made from the pharmaceutical synthetics ephedrine HCl and pseudoephedrine HCl, not ephedra.  Furthermore, the FDA left an exemption for the pharmaceutical drugs used to make methamphetamine, when they illegally banned the herb ephedra.  Again they are protecting pharmaceutical profits, not the public.  It is also interesting to note that since the FDA illegally banned the herb ephedra, the use of methamphetamine has risen, particularly among body builders who can no longer get ephedra, which they use to burn body fat. And since ephedra is no longer available  I would like to see the FDA explain how methamphetamine production is on the rise.  Where are the producers getting their base materials?  Oh, that's right, the FDA lied about ephedra being used, and made sure the base materials remained on the market, which has allowed the methamphetamine problem to grow!

The chaparral issue started a while back when out of the clear blue there were 13 cases of hepatitis reported in a two year period, in people taking chaparral supplements.  Though there are several unanswered questions.  For instance, chaparral has been in use for thousands of years, and is still widely used from Mexico, to South America to cure various diseases, such as cancer.  Yet there have only been 13 isolated cases of hepatitis reported in a two year period.  Furthermore, up to recently the chaparral extract nordihydroguaiaretic acid (NDGA) was widely used in the food industry for its powerful antioxidant properties.  It was added to foods to prevent oils in the foods from becoming rancid.  This is also the active component that inhibits the cellular division of cancer cells, and destroys pathogens, such as many viruses.  Despite decades of use as a food ingredient, again there were never any cases of hepatitis reported.  The FDA never explained why there were only 13 isolated cases supposedly from chaparral in this two year period, with no cases reported before, nor since.  By the way, contrary to popular belief, chaparral was never banned from the market.  The FDA called for a voluntary moratorium since they could not legally ban the herb. The FDA can only ban an herb if they can prove that the herb shows an unreasonable risk to safety, something they were never able to do with chaparral.  Nor with ephedra, which is why the FDA was ordered to lift their ban by a court of law.  Though, when stores did not comply with their "voluntary moratorium", the FDA would harass stores that they found openly selling chaparral, again in violation of the law.  The reason that the FDA was never able to prove an unreasonable danger was because the FDA left out some very important facts about these 13 patients.  These included the facts that many of these patients were taking pharmaceutical drugs well known for causing liver damage, and some of the patients were reported to have preexisting liver failure, BEFORE they started taking the chaparral.

Another fact they left out is the stability of the alkaloids in the plant.  Chaparral does contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs) when fresh.  Some PAs are harmful to the liver, though they are also relatively unstable.  As an example, both fresh comfrey and dried comfrey have been tested on rats to test for liver toxicity.  What was determined was that only the fresh comfrey caused hepatitis in the rats, but not the dried comfrey since the PAs are readily destroyed by oxidation when dried.  The same was found in cattle feeds that contained plants with PAs.  If I recall right the PAs were destroyed in about 20 to 30 days of curing the hay rendering the hay safe.  Though, this brings up another point.  Some herbs have to be processed in a certain way to make them safe and useful.  For instance, rhemannia is Chinese foxglove root that is boiled in 9 changes of water to render it safe.  Jack in the Pulpit root has to be aged for two years to prevent caustic burns.  Some anthraquinone laxative herbs must be aged for several years before they can be used.  The point here is that an herb should not be considered dangerous just because it is not prepared right, since the herb can be safe if properly prepared.  Even though the PAs in chaparral have never been proven to cause liver damage as some PAs can, it is best to error on the side of caution and only use chaparral that has been thoroughly dried and aged for at least a couple of months.