The Alchemy of Herbs, Everyday Food That Heals, Part 1, with Rosalee de la Foret - Episode 114

Vidal welcomes Rosalee de la Foret to the Vidal Speaks podcast. Rosalee is sharing how to use food, spices, and herbs to help you in your healing journey. Nature’s medicine is again proving that these so-called “incurable diseases” can be treated and healing can be achieved. Toxins damage our cellular function and if we actively detox, we can enjoy the health that our bodies naturally promote.

 

If you want to know more about Rosalee before listening to this amazing talk, here are some details about her journey. For over a decade her calling has been helping people to radically change their health using herbs and other natural remedies. Through this, she has helped hundreds of clients reclaim their health and has taught thousands of herbal students in online courses and intensive retreats. She is the Education Director for LearningHerbs, one of the most innovative herbal companies of our time, and is a professional member of the American Herbalist Guild RH (AHG).

 

But her story begins long before she had become a successful herbalist. She admits she’s been a natural health nerd her entire life. As a teenager, she would prowl the natural health foods store and look up remedies in the Natural Prescription for Health book by Phyllis Balch.

 

But while she had long been interested in natural remedies she didn’t really take them seriously until they saved her life. When she was 23 she suddenly became very sick. She spent an entire month in bed, tormented with musculoskeletal pain, an itchy body rash that came and went, and a fever that spiked at night and went away during the day. She was finally hospitalized after becoming severely dehydrated and after two weeks was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease called Still’s. The doctors didn’t have good news. They gave her steroids and said it would be a slow and painful decline to an early death.

 

For about three days she just cried and cried and wondered, “why me?” But then, she did what she had always done and started researching alternative solutions to autoimmunity diseases to see what she could find.

 

Over time she began to see that there were lots of small signs leading up to her autoimmunity disease and her “healthy” soy vegetarian diet wasn’t serving her. She realized she needed a total health makeover to purge a lot of health fads from her life. She also assembled a team of people to help her, from acupuncturists to herbalists to naturopaths to massage therapists.

 

After six months of intensive work, she became symptom-free from this “terminal” and “incurable” disease and she has continued to live symptom-free for over a decade.

 

Her experience with autoimmunity further inspired her to delve into the natural health world. She knew she wanted to help people like her: people who wanted to find the root cause of their health problems so they could live a healthy and vibrant life.

 

She thought about being a naturopath but she didn’t want to focus on supplements or any type of one-size-fits-all medicine (similar to western medicine). She thought about becoming an acupuncturist but she knew that in China the major form of medicine was the plants. So, she decided to study the art of herbalism.

 

She has over 10 years of training as an herbalist, from ethnobotany and wildcrafting to clinical herbalism. She’s graduated from the four-year clinical program at the East West School of Herbology and has been mentored by some of the most outstanding herbalists of our time, including Michael Tierra, Paul Bergner, and Karta Purkh Singh Khalsa.

 

Besides her interest in herbalism, she also spent four