Quick & Dirty PSA: Supplementing with Nutrients and Herbs
A good friend texted me an article from NY Times recently written on the Ashwagandha (an evergreen “root” shrub) supplement titled All About Ashwagandha, the Stress Relief Supplement of the Moment. He asked me “What are your thoughts on this?”
Without even reading the article, I quickly texted back the following (without grammar or punctuation check):
“Herbal mushrooms are very healing and some can only be taken for short periods of time. Some are good for longer daily durations and it gets complex with medication too. Always best to consult a herbalist / naturopath. Reishi is one that’s good long durations. Natural remedies are always the way to go in my opinion but like anything you have to determine the purpose for taking it and why. People with bad diets think they’ll just supplement with nutrients and vitamins and not address the root cause therefore the affects of nutrients and supplements are working against you and waste of money. However, when on a good diet, they become way more helpful and actually work in conjunction as a “supplement” for healing. What most people don’t understand is these nutrients and supplements need proper balance of other vitamins and nutrients plus minerals in the body to work with absorption and assimilation. If your mineral and nutrient intake isn’t helping these herbs and supplements to allow the body to absorb then that’s where the waste is.”
IG: @functionalnutritionalliance
Ashwagandha should not be taken for really long extended periods for many reasons, one of which — the liver. And, medications taken with this plant root herb needs to be understood too.
Reading it back now, there’s a few things that should have been stated differently and more intentionally (one obvious thing I accidentally referred to it as a mushroom - in fairness it was morning for me and I was still in bed at a time when 98% of it, I’m not ready to look at my phone for at least another couple of hours). However, the spirit and premise still sticks. There are certain nutrients that our human bodies need that cannot be provided to us through food and therefor, are key and necessary, so we must supplement. Sometimes things also do go wrong with our health and we want to heal safely and get a necessary additional boost to support what needs healing.
Even those with great diets must supplement if we cannot intake the exact balance of everything our bodies need each day to thrive. This article is not to get nerdy or deep onto the topic. I will do that in smaller doses in subsequent posts.
When I refer to nutrients you can interpret that as vitamins if you wish. I prefer the former as we should be taking in proper, high quality, full spectrum, assimilating nutrients coming from plant food sources to obtain what we need. Not vitamins with fillers produced in a lab in hard form that may not be broken down or carried through our system fully. Back to a point I want to make. If your diet is not good, whatever you are taking, even if optimum quality, will not be of benefit if your insides are broken down by long term poor diet and living habits. For our bodies to work and absorb supplementing to cover our bases on what we are lacking we have to be primed with the right minerals, nutrients and healthy foods to be the carrier to our bloodstream. For instance, if you consume probiotics or eat organic probiotic foods, great! At minimum it is doing something. However, for the full proper results, prebiotics are the primer to the pros. And we need those before or in conjunction with.
To drive the concept home further, if you bake a cake without flour, it will not work with the other ingredients and will not rise. If you don’t put clean oil in your car and you also let it deplete, the car will not run. If you leave “O” out of H2 it will not be water. And the gardener, if not using and replenishing the right soil according to the type of plant, will not thrive. It’s the same with us. We are a complex system that to fully, truly, thrive, be well, take care of our gut health, our brains, our epidermis (all of it), we need to understand our own internal eco system to make it work for us and not against us. We have to be our own gardener and chemist.
And as such, to shorten this up (again not getting into the micro details here) we must do our diligence on why we are seeking something out. Get to the root cause, then restore, heal, and supplement. With so many herbs now becoming popular, it’s ever more important to be diligent, talk with a doctor, herbalist, and/or naturopath to ensure it’s safe for you. Know that it’s exactly what you need prior to popping any new trend, or even ancient wisdom into your mouth and wasting your money. Seems obvious, but I want to make as many people aware that a quick fix is not the answer. If it’s the bridge to get somewhere, albeit. But it’s not the fix. Feeling better is a hard, honest look at how you are caring for yourself. Start there to repair and restore. This is crucial.
Today there is so much amazing new information, learnings and studies. It’s almost as if we all need another high school health class for modern times. With a re-education on how to care for ourselves - unique to ourselves. There is no one person that falls into the same old school food pyramid (spoiler alert - we never did). Too many of us are on various prescriptions too which means we have to understand that we may need to supplement with other nutrients, minerals and foods and most likely in higher doses to counteract the impacts from those prescriptions stripping key things from our bodies until, hopefully, we don’t need the prescriptions anymore.
Ok, I’ll stop — because I’m quickly going down a rabbit hole and finding lots of worms to follow. There’s a lot to spin off here and I’ll jump off my soap box. I’ll go read that article now he sent me. Hopefully, it addresses some of what I just stated.
Oh, and that health class? It’s being percolated this year. Feel free to sign up for my general email on the home page of my website for general one-off business announcements.