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Wright cited Pedersen as Responsible for Many of NSP’s Herbal Combination Products

He has written books to give … information on Nature’s Sunshine Products. And Nature’s Sunshine cannot sell these books, even though they’re perfect for our use, because we’re a manufacturing company and [we] realize the conflict between a manufacturing company and a publishing company. The FDA recognizes that as conflict of interest, [and so] we can’t publish the information that you really want to know about the products. We can only do one because of the legal implications there. We can’t look like we’re prescribing actual products that we’re manufacturing. So that’s why we have such a healthy education program, and everyone is into self-learning … because we have to learn about this somewhere and we have to start somewhere. So, these books are a really good source.

Wright thereupon announced that the books could be bought from her and briefly described the first volume. “When you put these herbs together in certain combinations,” she claimed, “they actually go in and target and help with whatever’s going on.” Her assertions were based on Pedersen’s empirical classification system. The Distributor School kit lists four categories of herbs: aromatic herbs, said to “stimulate action, speed things up”; mucilaginous herbs, said to “soothe, lubricate, absorb water/toxins, slow things down”; bitter herbs, said to “loosen, soften, relax, dissolve, liquefy”; and astringent herbs, said to “contract, tighten, tense, tonify, solidify tissue.”

Wright cited several herbs, including aloe vera and slippery elm, as mucilaginous. “A mucilage herb has a cooling down effect,” she told us. “It has a soothing effect.” She claimed that aloe vera “has cooling properties in it” and would have a cooling effect on “the inflammation in the body or whatever needs to be cooled down in the body.”

“If you have anything hot before [ingesting] slippery elm,” she stated, “then you will feel that cooling down going on.”

She said that saponins, present in bitter herbs, may be thought of as soap, since they “clean out the dirty.” Her description of astringent herbs dovetailed with Pedersen’s empirical system:

Astringent herbs have an active ingredient which is acid. … A lemon is acidic, and when you bite into a lemon, what do you do? You pucker.
That acid squeezes and makes you pucker, and it makes you salivate more, because if you pucker, it just dries you up. So you salivate more to compensate for that. That puckering is a tightening that’s going on, and … the acid ingredients in the herbs have a tightening effect. So in your function of this classification of herb, we have tightening, or toning, or building. All of these types of things come from the astringent properties.

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