Beyond the Brew: The Medicinal Power of Hops | Hacker News Reader

Beyond the Brew: The Medicinal Power of Hops

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30 pointsdnetesn25 comments

Technically they are "bines" not "vines". It's mostly just a historic difference from the etymology. However, I believe there are some differences in bine pests and view pests.

Another medicinal use of hops, although non-human, is for mite control in beehives.

> The plant’s introduction to the New World came with European settlers, who brought hops to North America in the 17th century.

This is not true. Hops were widespread in North America before European contact. There are broadly speaking 4 major land races of hops: European, Asian, and 2 from North America.

The history of hops breeding is pretty fascinating (at least to a nerd like me). Almost all of the trendy modern varieties that you would recognise from IPAs and NEIPAs (such as the "C" strains: your Cascades, Citras, etc) are the result of cross breeding a North American variety (probably Cluster) with a European variety (probably Fuggle), and can be traced back to a breeder who imported an "unknown strain from Manitoba" back to England, and bred and categorised hundreds of hybrids. I believe the goal was to breed a strain that was disease resistant but with less of the (now desirable) intense flavours characteristic of the North American strains.

I grow hops in Canada (Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, and Perle varieties). They are a really cool plant: I've never seen anything grow as quickly as they do (Benjamin Franklin once wrote about how impressive it was to watch hops grow), and their smell is really wonderful at harvest time. I dry, vacuum seal, and freeze them, and produce more whole leaf hops than I need for a year of brewing (which would otherwise cost several hundred dollars).

As mentioned below, Nicotine and caffeine are useful to plants, and to humans. Potatoes, eggplants, tomatoes, tobacco all have nicotine. Humans just happen to have receptors for the chemicals in our brains/nervous system.[0]

interestingly, i was going to look for plants that hit our cannibinoid receptors and found this:

> Myrcene is found in extremely high concentrations in hop oil, making up to about 75% of the extracted volume in some varieties, and is also found in high levels in mangoes, lemongrass, thyme and verbena.

Myrcene is a terpene which is a "cannabimimetic" compound;

> B-caryophyllene is found in black pepper, cloves, rosemary, hops, caraway, oregano, basil, lavender, cinnamon, and many more plant species. In most of these species, β-caryophyllene is a major constituent of the essential oil.

Flax (linseed) contains, possibly, straight cannibinoids (in fact, CBD! 2012 discovery). Also, curiously, at least to me, all grasses humans consume are partially (marginally?) converted to compounds that interact with humans' opioid receptors. It's one of the reasons [some?] humans get withdrawal symptoms if they go on a diet that reduces sugarcane sugar, wheat, etc.

I'm repeatedly reminded that everything on earth is connected, even if only by heritage and geographic proximity to our own evolution.

[0] Ketchup has niconoid and opioid compounds in it and that's probably why i go through about a half gallon a month ;-) and combined with french fries it's a potent nicotine lunch with a side of opioids.

Also i'm a layman. My facts are true, but i sometimes use the wrong words because i haven't drilled the exact terms forever, because people's eyes glaze over if you start saying "nicotinic acetylcholine receptor agonist."

Such a widespread cureall medicine, they named a whole profession who uses it after it. DevHops..

Do some plants have medicinal powers because we evolved with them (meaning we are just reinventing what we already knew for thousands of years), or is it more a random phenomenon?

Looking beyond simply “medicinal” properties, there are examples of plants that have evolved their chemical composition in response to animals. Hot peppers, for example. The capsaicin only affects mammals, not birds. Birds can eat the fruit and more widely disperse their seeds than mammals would. It’s advantageous to the plants that birds eat the fruit instead of mammals.

So it’s not unreasonable that other plants may have also developed specific chemicals in response to some pressure from animals.

Though in a twist it turns out that one specific mammal has spread hot peppers far more than any birds ever before.

Peppers evolved to produce capsaicin because mammals chew on vegetation in a molar fashion which destroys seeds (birds do not). In fact, the majority of capsaicin in a pepper exists in the pith, where the seeds attach.

> So it’s not unreasonable that other plants may have also developed specific chemicals in response to some pressure from animals.

Wouldn't it make most sense for plants to develop chemicals that kill us, rather than cure us from a disease?

I don’t mean that medicinal plants developed those properties to benefit us, but rather it may have evolved as a response to some animal for some purpose, and it happens to be beneficial to us in some way.

Take caffeine for example, likely it evolved as a defense against pests.

Caffeine at low levels in flowers can stimulate insect activity and even potentially memory, increasing pollination activity.

At higher concentrations yeah it’s an insecticide.

Cool, I didn’t know that. But all the same, the same principle applies.

Possibly too costly. From what I've read, every chemical defense has a metabolic cost. This is why antibiotic resistant bacteria will lose their resistance over many generations if not constantly challenged by the antibiotic.

On the other hand, some plants do kill us.

It has nothing to do with us. It’s evolutionary warfare against microbes.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC88925/

Sounds plausible, but I suppose that not every disease cured with plants has a microbial origin.

Fig leaves are proving to demonstrate strong anti-cancer properties for roughly half of cancer patients, though more testing is required because those anti-cancer properties could become toxic in excess quantities. That is evidence of plants curing diseases without a microbial origin.

But how can you explain that from an evolutionary perspective then?

Plants are continuously evolving a variety of chemicals to ward off pests. Most stimulants like caffeine and nicotine, for example, are actually potent insecticides.

Among the most interesting of plant responses is plant latex. Latex is found in lettuce, thistles, rubber, fig, and variety of other plants. Latex is thick with a variety of anti-microbial chemicals to ward off fungus, viruses, bacteria, insects, and more. These chemicals provide a wide distribution of medicinal value. Opium is a plant latex.

Have you considered why Australia has the most poisonous animals on the planet? Many venoms found there can easily kill humans many times over. It is supremely excessive, for humans, but not for the other animals living there. It is a constant state of evolving bio-chemical warfare because the intended victims evolve resistances to the strong venoms until they no longer become strong, so the predators and insects continually develop more targeted venoms to keep up.

Cannabis suggests we evolved with it, see Endocannabinoid system or whatever it is called. However, I do believe it is random. Magic mushrooms have been around for longer than we have, so it's probably just chance that they make us trip (which enabled lots of mental healing power).

Isn't it much more likely that cannabinoids are poisonous to insect larvae?

Interesting because nicotine in tobacco evolved to ward off insects as well and that's why there's so many pesticides made from related chemicals: neonicotinoids.

Mushrooms have been around longer than we have, but that doesn't mean they've been making psilocybin that long.

Just because we have receptors that have affinity for molecules that we call cannabinoids doesn't mean much in terms of evolution related to plants. There is a wide range of molecules that have a shape that bind to the wide range of receptors that are a part of what we call the endocannabinoid system.

I'm sorry but that sounds like "wet pavements cause rain" to me. The naming need not be causative in that direction. I'm not disagreeing with that we did indeed evolve with them.. Grug smoke plant. Plant make strong, heal. Grug stomp stupid weeds and make more space for plant. etc

Don’t they act as an estrogen in men?

It is debated, most of those studies are made in-vitro using really poorly designed assays. Clinical studies in humans don't really show that estrogenic effect, even with high doses of extracts processed in various ways.

So reasearchers have mostly extrapolated what they saw in a tube with a pure compound to what may happen in a plant extract that contains thousands of time less what they did put in their tube directly in contact with cells sensitive to those compounds...

The effects seen may also simply be associated to the sedative properties (which are only really present in fresh hops, old hops cones don't work as well).

But I have yet to see a report of estrogenic effects in a human having consumed an extract.

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