Hi all!
I have been lurking around for a while but this thread hit my buttons. I think you will find very useful information about herbal teas and tisanes in the field of classical Chinese medicine. It essentially is a 5000+ years statistical analysis of what herbs do to the body. Ample resources are available on the web for a huge number of plants and animal products.
For example:
Mint
https://www.americandragon.com/Individualherbsupdate/BoHe.html
https://tcmwiki.com/wiki/bo-he
Chrysanthemum flowers
https://www.americandragon.com/Individualherbsupdate/YeJuHua.html
https://tcmwiki.com/wiki/ju-hua
Dandelion
https://www.americandragon.com/Individualherbsupdate/PuGongYing.html
https://tcmwiki.com/wiki/pu-gong-ying
Ginger (fresh)
https://tcmwiki.com/wiki/ginger
Ginger (dried)
https://www.americandragon.com/Individualherbsupdate/GanJiang.html
the list goes on and on.
A word of caution: Whatever is powerful enough to help you can also hurt you if not used correctly. The most important information for every herb is the "properties", namely their nature which means roughly temperature effect on the body and their flavor, which does different things for each taste. Something classed as a cool or cold herb like mint will noticeably cool of the body while a hot herb like dried ginger will heat it up. Obviously if you are suffering from heat flashes and can't be cool, don't drink a lot of hot herbs, it won't help, whereas a cup of mint or chrysanthemum might help you vent this out and cool down a bit. Similarly if you feel cold and dislike winter, a cup of mint tea, green tea or chrysanthemum will likely upset your stomach, make you shiver or have cold feet and hands, while ginger or jujube dates will help you stay warm. Trust your senses and your body when you try herbs and ignore statistics about chemical components, antioxidants and the like which more often than not are a marketing scheme based on some statistics for a very limited number of patients or even worse a petri dish collection. And since we don't know if we are on the 40% of that study or related to that petri dish there are better ways to judge what is right for us.I have attached a very nice article, albeit a bit technical for the non initiated, explaining the classical way of evaluating herbs for their effects.
That's it for my first rant, I hope you find the information useful
