What are the safety considerations in making pine needle tea?

Question

Living in a northerly climate, I have often speculated about how aboriginal people avoided diseases caused by vitamin deficiencies like scurvy (no imported citrus in those days.)

According to wikipedia, the French explorer Jacques Cartier and his men were saved by the natives showing them how to

boil the needles of the arbor vitae tree (Eastern White Cedar) to make a tea that was later shown to contain 50 mg of vitamin C per 100 grams.

Has any one ever made this concoction? The instructions at eHow seem pretty straight forward, but I am still a bit nervous about the whole thing. After reading a passage like

If you have access to fresh, bright-green pine needles, you too can enjoy this unusual tea

questions that occur to me like "will any kind of pine's needles do, or are some poisonous" have prevented me from experimenting.

Inquiring minds need to know!

Answer 1

I have been told that cedar, white and yellow pine, and many other variaties are safe in normal quantities and have high vitamin content. Some have supposed medicinal effect for headaches, such as cedar. My advice is to look up "tea" or "infusion" with each type of needle you want to try so you can avoid a poisonous concoction. As for white pine, I have made delicious tea for breakfast and for the canteen with it while camping and have survived so far. It goes quite well with wild mint.

Answer 2

I've made white pine bark soup, which is made from the inner bark of the eastern white pine (Pinus Strobus). I did it for a wilderness survival course, years ago. Tasted like paint thinner, though I'm told that in a non-survival situation, you're supposed to keep changing out the water until it's nearly clear (obviously the water would be rich in leached nutrients, so don't do that if you're starving).

Here is a link to a guy who's pretty enthusiastic about the stuff. I don't know where you'd get the bark to experiment with that sort of soup (or chips??! I suppose he'd make cereal out of it if given the opportunity), but the needles should be reasonably easy to gather for tea. I'm afraid my experience with it has stuck with me, so you'll pardon me if I don't try it myself.

Answer 3

I read on on a survival website that you boil the white cedar needles or bark to make the tea. But it will leave an oily surface on top of the water when you are done. The site says to simply pour off the top portion to remove the oil and you will be fine. The oil has painful side effects if you drink it because it is toxic.

Answer 4

I am having trouble finding any record of any sort of evergreen tree being harmful to consume sparingly as tea. obviously overdoing anything has harmful consequences.