Maple Root Beer, Sassafras, and an FDA Myth

We were doing something as ordinary as a grocery run at Meijer when this whole root beer adventure started.

My family was grabbing the usual staples when I remembered that my niece—visiting from Portugal—loves root beer. She doesn’t have easy access to it over there, so I wanted to make a batch while she was here. I decided to sweeten it with maple syrup. Maple syrup digests more slowly than refined sugar and brings along trace minerals, and it also layers in a deeper flavor.

As I tossed a bottle of maple syrup into the cart, my daughter asked the obvious question:

“Why are you getting maple syrup? We have a bunch of homemade maple syrup at home.”

Fair point.

I told her I was planning to make root beer with it. That caught her attention.

“Where are you going to get sassafras root from?” she asked.

I explained that I was going to use root beer extract and vanilla for this batch. I don’t have easy access to sassafras root, and I haven’t experimented enough to know how much root I’d need for five gallons of soda. Before I could finish, she reacted with pure horror:

“That’s not even real root beer! If you were going to make real root beer it would be made with sassafras root.”

Part of me was amused—and part of me was proud. My kid had just gatekept root beer in the most old-timey, herbalist way possible.

What Counts as “Real” Root Beer?

Her reaction made me wonder how many other families have conversations like this in the store aisle. Probably not many.

Traditionally, sassafras root was the main flavoring ingredient in root beer, and before that, it was commonly brewed as a simple sassafras tea. Root beer in its original form was a folk beverage: roots, barks, herbs, and spices, lightly sweetened and fermented or carbonated. The “root” in root beer wasn’t metaphorical.

Today, most commercial root beer uses flavor extracts or reformulated oils that avoid certain compounds, and many home brewers lean on extract too. It’s convenient, predictable, and you know exactly how much flavor you’re getting per gallon. But there’s something undeniably compelling about going back to the roots—literally—with sassafras.

On my own property, I don’t have many trees yet. I planted some sassafras seedlings a couple of years ago, and I know at least one took because it’s growing close to the house where I can easily keep track of it. The idea of eventually pulling some of those roots to make a truly from-scratch sassafras brew feels like stepping into an older, slower rhythm of living.

Why Sassafras Got Banned

If you’ve ever gone down the rabbit hole of traditional root beer, you eventually hit the FDA wall.

The FDA banned the commercial use of sassafras root because of safrole, a compound found in its essential oil. In rat studies, high doses of safrole were linked with liver damage and increased cancer risk, and that was enough to push sassafras off the market for mainstream commercial use.

But, as is often the case, the story is more complicated.

Samuel Thayer, in his book Incredible Wild Edibles: 36 Plants That Can Change Your Life, takes a closer look at those studies and the way they’ve been used to demonize sassafras. He offers a few important counterpoints worth sitting with.

First, safrole is not unique to sassafras. It naturally occurs in a wide range of common foods and spices, including black pepper, cocoa, cinnamon, nutmeg, tarragon, basil, ginger, star anise, fennel, parsley, dill, allspice, and clove. In other words, if safrole itself were the core problem, a big chunk of the spice aisle would dissapear.

Second, the doses used in those rat studies were wildly out of proportion to normal human use. To reach similar exposure levels, a person would need to consume enormous amounts of strong sassafras tea over time—far beyond the occasional mug or even a periodic batch of homemade root beer.

Third, the process of boiling sassafras root to make tea or syrup changes the chemical picture. Heat can evaporate and break down a portion of the safrole in the preparation. Thayer goes into more detail on this, but even just that basic point undercuts the simplistic “safrole equals cancer” narrative when applied to everyday culinary use.

Taken together, these factors suggest that the FDA’s move may have been an overreaction to an oversimplified interpretation of the animal research. It’s a reminder that once a plant gets labeled “dangerous,” it can be hard to rehabilitate its reputation—even when the science is more nuanced.

Navigating Tradition, Safety, and Curiosity

For someone interested in herbalism, homesteading, and rewilding, sassafras sits right at the crossroads of tradition, regulation, and critical thinking.

On one hand, there’s a long history of safe traditional use in modest amounts. On the other, there’s modern regulatory caution based on lab data that doesn’t always translate cleanly into real-world human context. And somewhere in between lives the everyday person trying to decide: Is this something I feel comfortable working with?

For now, I’m content making maple-sweetened, extract-based root beer for my niece and letting my daughter rib me about it not being “real.” But the desire to work with actual sassafras root is very much alive. As those seedlings grow and establish themselves, there will almost certainly be some experiments in the future—careful, small-batch, eyes-open experiments that respect both tradition and our current understanding of risk.

Until then, I’ll keep enjoying that tension in the grocery aisle: one foot in old-world herbal soda, the other in modern practicality, and a kid reminding me that there is such a thing as “real root beer.”