2020. The Year of Covid. Norway Spruce to the Rescue!
Norway Spruce...is one of the beautiful essential oils in our collection of spruces. However, we gained a whole new level of appreciation of her gifts with a recent discovery.
One of our long time patrons of Wisdom of the Earth shares her love of the essences with her husband. He enjoys them but, as a scientist by training, he tends to be somewhat skeptical of claims unless they are scientifically confirmed. He has learned to appreciate them more and more over time because they simply work. However, his appreciation of them was always subdued compared to some of us that simply go nuts over our essences. Until one day, the owner of the company was in total surprise to receive an urgent email from him with unbelievable excitement about something big!
The pandemic prompted him to browse certain sites to see what the most recent scientific reports were on Covid-19. Imagine his surprise when he found a citation on a research site that an Argentinian plant geneticist in a US University had found that RNA in the Covid-19 spike...the means by which the corona virus enters people...has a match in the RNA of Norway Spruce. (According to an article in the Journal of Virology, the spike (S) protein is the sole viral membrane protein responsible for cell entry. It binds to the receptor on the target cell and mediates subsequent virus-cell fusion.)
It seems that the plant researcher ran a search of the RNA of the Covid-19 spike against a massive database of known RNA sequences in nature, and to a great surprise, the only unique match was with Norway Spruce. The scientist hypothesized that it may have been that an ancestor of Norway Spruce encountered an ancestor of the Covid-19 coronavirus and developed a defense to the virus. Norway Spruce thus seems likely to have in its essential oil defenses, or building blocks for defenses, that may uniquely help protect us from COVID-19.
Although there were no hard conclusions in this article, here is the link should you wish to do the deep dive yourself into this data (link: https://osf.io/hyz89/ ).
We have known that all the conifer essential oils are anti-viral. However this research suggests that Norway Spruce may be particularly effective with the virus COVID-19. You can apply Norway Spruce essence as you would any other essences. It is not generally skin sensitive, so you could apply on your chest or on your upper back, a drop on your upper lip so you receive her with your breath, or on your feet like all essences. You could also put a few drops in a cup of boiling water and breathe in the infused steam for a deep recharge into your lungs.
Norway Spruce is $47 for a 15 ml bottle, and has a very gentle smell.
