– Bitters can be used to stimulate a weak appetite. And I use this a lot with elderly people who start to lose their appetite. I give them digestive bitters because one of the flip sides to this is that when you take in digestive bitters, and give yourself some time, all your digestive forces are revved up and that means your appetite’s gonna come on line. And so if you’re suffering from a poor appetite or you’ve been sick and you just haven’t been able to eat much but you really feel you need to, digestive bitters can be one way to stimulate your appetite. And another benefit of digestive bitters is they actually can reduce inflammation in the gut wall. And that’s big because gastric inflammation is a major issue right now. Think of things like irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn’s disease. Also just people consuming foods that they may be allergic to or they’ve having an immunological reaction to them and there’s this inflammation going on in the gut. And that inflammation in the gut can translate back up the vagus nerve to the brain and cause neuroinflammation. When you start to have neuroinflammation, that can accelerate neurodegeneration. And as you have accelerated neurodegeneration, that’s gonna feed back down to the gut and it’s going to impact the gut in a negative way. It will actually slow gut motility meaning that food will stay in the gut for a longer period of time which leads to the possible fermentation of carbohydrates to putrifying proteins and the rancidification of fats. All of which sets up this really wonderful environment for dysbiotic bacteria to come in and create this unhealthy ecosystem in the gut. So the bitters can come in. They can reduce inflammation in the gut. They can improve digestive function and get things moving. Many bitters tend to actually be anti-microbial as well. So some classic bitters would be things like wormwood, which is also a anti-parasitic, anti-microbial. Oregon grape root, another one that’s anti-microbial. So you’ll have these wonderful anti-microbial compounds in these bitter plants that can be used medicinally.