Medicine: Burdock Cookies

From burdock roots, whose clinging burrs (“beggar buttons”) annoy rural promenaders, catch in hunting dogs’ tails, John Christian Krantz Jr., 31, director of pharmaceutical research for Sharp & Dohme (Baltimore chemists), produced cookies and bread which diabetics may eat with benefit, he told the University of Maryland Biological Society last week.

Sufferers from diabetes mellitus turn the starches they eat into sugar to an abnormal degree. Their blood and urine is suffused with sugar.* Insulin controls this sugar production. Nonetheless such diabetics must always beware eating starchy foods.

Medicine has long used burdock roots to regulate body functions. Dr. Krantz who taught pharmacy at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland until he assumed his present position with Sharp & Dohme (1927), knew that the root contained insulin, a product much like starch. He experimented and found that diabetics did not transform this insulin into harmful sugar. Further, with burdock baked-goods, diabetics needed to take les insulin.

*There is a diabetes insipidus, where sugar is not excreted.