We told you to take everything with a grain of salt—including us. If you disagree with the history, have a question about a formulation, or want to share what your own grandmother kept in her medicine cabinet, our inbox is open. Keep it honest.

NAD+ IV therapy and subscription infusion clinics didn't appear out of nowhere — the molecule's real history runs through pellagra, a niacin-deficiency disease that devastated the American South in the early 1900s, and nixtamalization, the Mesoamerican corn-processing tradition that prevented it for thousands of years before anyone knew why. This episode holds the modern NAD+ trend — pharmacy-compounded versus subscription IV lounges — against that historical record, walks through the real structural bridge between ancient corn chemistry and modern infusion delivery, and shares our own experience with early fatigue: what's a normal adjustment response versus when it's a reason to call your provider. We are not doctors — this is history, current research, and our own lived experience, not medical advice.

Ash & Honey: The Root and The Road is hosted by Alexandria Quinn Love, M.A. — historian, formulator, and founder of Ash & Honey Botanique.

Nothing on this show is medical advice. Talk to your licensed practitioner before making any health practice a regular part of your life.

Search Ash & Honey: The Root and The Road wherever you listen.

The road was always there. Someone always walked it. Now — so do you.

We told you to take everything with a grain of salt—including us. If you disagree with the history, have a question about a formulation, or want to share what your own grandmother kept in her medicine cabinet, our inbox is open. Keep it honest.

Beef tallow skincare is everywhere right now, marketed as what your ancestors used before "Big Skincare" ruined everything — but the pre-industrial record tells a different story. This episode traces tallow's real history as a food preservation technology and a candle-making staple, and shows why its actual skin-adjacent tradition was soap, not raw balm — a full chemical transformation (saponification) that turns fat into something no longer chemically fat at all.

We put the viral leave-on tallow balm trend on trial against that record: the real comedogenic risk data (low-to-moderate, roughly on par with olive oil, worse for acne-prone facial skin), and the regulatory gap nobody's talking about — beef tallow is classified by the FDA as a food, not a cosmetic, meaning no mandated rendering-temperature standard, no batch testing, and no sterility check before it reaches your face. Alex is joined by her husband Dennis, drawing on thirty years in pharmaceutical and manufacturing quality control, to unpack what "grass-fed, small-batch" actually does and doesn't tell you.

This is a history podcast about healing, not a wellness podcast — every viral claim gets held against the pre-industrial record, the actual chemistry, and a healthy dose of the historian's own genuinely bad gag reflex.

Ash & Honey: The Root and The Road is hosted by Alexandria Quinn Love, M.A. — historian, formulator, and founder of Ash & Honey Botanique.

Nothing on this show is medical advice. Talk to your licensed practitioner before making any health practice a regular part of your life.

Search Ash & Honey: The Root and The Road wherever you listen.

The road was always there. Someone always walked it. Now — so do you.

We told you to take everything with a grain of salt—including us. If you disagree with the history, have a question about a formulation, or want to share what your own grandmother kept in her medicine cabinet, our inbox is open. Keep it honest.

Cold-pressed olive, sesame, and linseed oil have a pre-industrial track record going back millennia — and none of it looks like the "seed oils are poison" claim currently circulating online. This episode traces how ancestral traditions actually pressed and used plant oils, from stone-milled Mediterranean olive presses to Ayurvedic sesame oil massage, and puts the modern viral panic on trial against that record.

Historian and formulator Alexandria Quinn Love, M.A. is joined by Dennis — bringing thirty years of quality-control and compliance experience to bear on his own independently-researched position on seed oil processing — for the show's first two-voice episode. Together they trace the Ancient Origin of cold-pressing, the Real Tradition of how these oils were actually used, the Viral Claim currently dominating wellness feeds, and The Gap between "seed oil bad, animal fat good" and the real distinction: cold-pressed versus industrially refined. Listeners walk away knowing exactly what to look for on a label — cold-pressed, expeller-pressed, unrefined — and why that, not the plant itself, is the real signal.

This is a history podcast about healing, not a wellness podcast. No fifteen-item lists. No synthetic quick fixes. Just the map to the territory you already occupy.

Ash & Honey: The Root and The Road is hosted by Alexandria Quinn Love, M.A. — historian, formulator, and founder of Ash & Honey Botanique.

Nothing on this show is medical advice. Talk to your licensed practitioner before making any health practice a regular part of your life.

Search Ash & Honey: The Root and The Road wherever you listen.

The road was always there. Someone always walked it. Now — so do you.