Greetings.
Eric Bakker a naturopath.
Thanks for coming back.
We're going to talk about the caster oil plant today.
And castor oil.
You might have heard of the word castor oil.
It's used for constipation.
It's been used, in fact, for 4,000 years for constipation.
Go figure.
A long time.
Looking in one of my books, I've got a few of those, as you can see.
The castor oil plant here.
We can see the castor oil.
When my wife and I lived in Australia, we saw a lot of them growing alongside riverbanks.
They're considered like a toxic weed or a pest over there.
But the Egyptians, they found a lot of castor oil bean seeds in one of the Pharaohs tombs,
which is quite interesting.
And as far back as the 1590s, there was an English herbalist called [Gerard 00:00:45]
and Gerard used to recommend castor oil for, guess what, skin lesions, skin problems.
In fact, it's been used for hundreds of years for different types of skin tumors.
And of course, the medical profession don't like this at all.
They call it taboo and quackery and dangerous and things like that.
There is a lectin, a kind of protein found in the oil of the seed called ricin.
Ricin's highly highly toxic.
It's very dangerous, in fact, if you ingest it.
So, as little as two or three grams of this ricin, the pure lectin will kill a human being
very quickly.
So you don't really want to chew on the seeds or crush the seeds or eat them.
The seeds are basically crushed, oil's extracted and the oils heat it up.
And we know in oil what heat does to lectins, it destroys lectins.
So cooking beans, for example, because they've got lectins in them is what you do.
Some beans you can eat, in fact, are poisonous until they're heated up and made a lot less
toxic.
The heat denatures the lectin, of course.
But castor oil is very very effective for constipation.
You only need a small amount of it.
We're talking like maybe 20 mils, 20 milliliters, only a very tiny bit.
It's best taken before bed at night.
If we look in parts of Africa, they still use the leaves of this plant, the castor oil
plant, to induce lactation in women even.
The leaves are crushed up and applied around the breasts and apparently it works really
well for that purpose.
So there are many purposes for the castor oil plant.
It is an effective product for constipation.
Small amounts are required.
It's a natural product, unlike that mineral oil I just spoke about before made by crude
oil refineries.
I mean how the heck can you compare something that's made out of crude oil, compared to
something that's made out of a plant.
There's a big difference there.
So I would certainly say if you wanted to try an oil for constipation, very very small
amounts of castor oil work exceedingly well.
In Victorian times, castor oil was used as a purgative and a cleansing ritual for many
women before they go for birth.
So when a woman's full term and she's overdue, you give her 10, 20 mils of castor oil, she's
no longer overdue, because the uterus starts contracting because it has a very powerful
effect on the bowel, this oil.
So yeah, I certainly recommend it.
Only if it's used careful in the correct amount of dosages.
In the correct dosage, I think you'll find castor oil quite a good product to use.
Last tip I'll give you.
Caster oil packs are very effective also if you've got a problem with your digestive system.
If you've got any kind of pain in the tummy or in the liver region, you can just get a
piece of cheesecloth, the stuff that you polish a car with, you get some of that.
You're going to get a bottle of about 10 ounces or 200 mils of castor oil from the drugstore,
the chemist, put that in a pan, warm it up, cheesecloth, put it in the oil and wring it
out.
And apply that to the liver or the bowel pain or wherever you've got it.
And leave that on for three or four hours.
It does stain bedding and clothing, so you might want to put a big of saran wrap around
that.
A clean film or maybe an old towel around that, a towel that you dry the dog with or
the kids or whatever.
You put that around here and then you're going to lie down for a good hour or so.
That castor oil works wonders on those kinds of problems.
Don't ask me what it does, but the feedback I get from many people who apply castor oil
packs, is fantastic.
So that's just a bit of a tip there as an aside.
But definitely try if you've got major constipation, you've tried all the tricks, try a small amount
of castor oil.
Even if you try a quarter of a teaspoon, that could be enough for some people to produce
a nice bowel motion.
Give that a go.
Thanks for tuning in.