What are Adaptogens and Why They Are Beneficial to Our Health and Wellbeing. [Episode #964]

Topic: Adaptogens

Hi everyone and welcome back to our Thursday Q &A show. I hope that you’re having a lovely week so far. And if you aren’t, because we all have these challenging moments, that being together here on our show will give you a little bit of comfort and solace, especially because today we’re going to be talking about a very actionable, practical tool that we can take advantage for our well-being, which is adaptogens. And specifically, we’ll talk about today what adaptogens are and how they can be so incredibly beneficial to our health and wellbeing. And I come to you speaking from a very tender heart today. There are different levels of processing this fire, which I still very much feel, and the community around me and in our school community, which was so close to the fire.And as I’ve been sharing on the past few weeks, our children’s school burned, many community members homes burned. And I really feel like my body needs a lot of support right now. And I’m speaking about adaptogens today from personal experience and some of the plants and herbs that I’ve been using to get through this challenging time. And so I’m really excited to share the show with you.because we talk about all the cornerstones here, right? We talk about food, body, emotional well-being, spiritual growth. And some of the things are a bit more long-term. We need to journal, we need to process. We want to be self-aware of our emotional patterns, for example. We want to continue to unfold into our true selves. But today’s show is very practical. You can learn about certain plants…..

Episode Summary:

In this episode, Kimberly discusses the powerful benefits of adaptogens, which are natural substances derived from plants and mushrooms that help the body cope with stress and promote overall well-being. She shares her personal experiences with adaptogens during challenging times and explains their scientific basis, including various studies that support their effectiveness. The conversation also covers specific adaptogens like ashwagandha, amalaki, tulsi, goji berries, and ginseng, highlighting their unique properties and health benefits. Snyder emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach to wellness, integrating the four cornerstones of food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth.

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Episode Chapters

00:00 Understanding Imposter Syndrome
05:03 Personal Experiences with Self-Doubt
10:14 Manifestations of Imposter Syndrome
18:00 Mental Health Implications
27:01 Gender Differences in Imposter Syndrome
29:06 Transforming Imposter Syndrome

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• How the Power Foods Diet helps with Weight Loss with Dr. Neal Barnard
• How Not to Age with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Greger
• How to eat to reduce anxiety with Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo
• How to Optimize Your Metabolic Health with Dr. Casey Means

STUDIES AND RESEARCH

A 2010 study in the journal Pharmaceuticals highlighted that adaptogens might exhibit neuroprotective, anti-fatigue, antidepressant, anxiolytic, and nootropic effects. Clinical trials suggested that adaptogens can enhance mental work capacity, particularly during stress and fatigue, by increasing tolerance to mental exhaustion and improving attention.

A 2018 Study in the Journal of Chinese Medicine noted that adaptogens might enhance the body’s resistance to stress by affecting the immune-neuro-endocrine system and the HPA axis, suggesting a multi-targeted approach to maintaining homeostasis.

A 2021 study in the Journal of Nutrients indicated that plant adaptogens could offer benefits in treating chronic fatigue and cognitive impairment, as well as providing immune protection.

A 2021 systematic review in the Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine identified seven studies that investigated the use of ashwagandha to treat stress and anxiety. A total of 491 adults with either self-reported high stress and anxiety or a diagnosed anxiety disorder, were randomized to take ashwagandha or placebo for 6 weeks. The studies found that ashwagandha significantly reduced stress and anxiety levels, sleeplessness and fatigue, and serum cortisol levels (a stress hormone) when compared with placebo.

A 2020 Study in the Journal of Sleep Medicine suggested that ashwagandha extracts improve sleep. Participants with and without insomnia who took ashwagandha reported falling asleep faster, improved sleep quality; longer sleep duration, waking less frequently during the night and led to less time spent awake in bed.

A 2018 study in the Journal of Integrative Medicine involving 68 participants with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) found that taking two 500-milligram amalaki tablets twice daily after meals significantly reduced heartburn and regurgitation symptoms over four weeks.

A 2019 study in the Journal of Complementary Medicine and Therapies assessed 98 individuals who received a 500-mg amalaki tablet or a placebo twice daily. Those who took the Amalaki extract experienced significant reductions in total cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

A 2021 study in the journal of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy indicated that Amalaki might help control blood glucose and lipid levels, as well as protect against diabetic complications like neuropathy and retinopathy.

A 2017 study in the Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine focused on individuals aged 45 to 60 and found that Amalaki helped maintain the length of DNA telomeres, structures that protect chromosomes from damage, thereby supporting cellular longevity.

A 2017 study in the Journal of Complementary & Alternative Medicine found that Holy Basil has impressive anti-asthmatic abilities and may make breathing easier, which is why it’s a commonly recommended herb for respiratory issues in Ayurvedic medicine.

A 2011 study in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology found that Holy Basil can enhance immune responses. The study administered an alcohol extract of Holy Basil leaves to healthy volunteers for four weeks and observed an increase in immune response, indicating the potential to strengthen and modulate the immune system.

A 2014 Study published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology found that Holy Basil leaves contain anti-inflammatory properties that help lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Tulsi also helps lower cholesterol levels, which is a risk factor for heart disease.

A 2013 study published in the Journal Nutrition and Cancer, indicated that tulsi and its phytochemicals (including eugenol, rosmarinic acid, apigenin, myretenal, luteolin, β-sitosterol and carnosic acid), may help prevent chemical-induced lung, liver, oral and skin cancers.

A 2021 study in the Journal of Nutrients involving 114 participants with early macular degeneration found that daily supplementation with goji berries improved macular pigment density, potentially slowing the progression of this eye condition.

A 2008 study in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine found that healthy adult participants who consumed 120 milliliters of goji berry juice daily for 14 days showed improved energy, mood, digestive health, ability to focus, enhanced athletic performance, mental acuity, and feelings of calmness.

A 2022 study published in The Journal of Integrative Medicine found that Panax ginseng supplementation improved physical and mental fatigue in individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome. Participants who took ginseng showed significantly improved energy levels and reduced feelings of exhaustion.

A 2016 meta-analysis in the Journal of Frontiers in Pharmacology concluded that ginseng supplementation helped lower blood pressure in people with hypertension. Researchers also found that ginseng contributed to improving cholesterol profiles, including a reduction in LDL (bad cholesterol) levels.

A 2002 study in The Journal of Urology showed that Panax Ginseng helped improve erectile function in men with erectile dysfunction. The study found that the use of ginseng led to significant improvement in sexual performance, likely due to its effects on nitric oxide and blood flow.

A 2017 study published in the Journal of Ginseng found that ginseng supplementation led to reduced body fat and improved metabolism. The study suggested that ginseng can play a role in weight management by promoting fat breakdown and increasing energy expenditure. I also may help control appetite and prevent the over intake of food energy by attenuating the HFD-induced chronic inflammation of the hypothalamus.

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Transcript

Kimberly Snyder (00:00.59)
Hi everyone and welcome back to our Thursday Q &A show. I hope that you’re having a lovely week so far. And if you aren’t, because we all have these challenging moments, that being together here on our show will give you a little bit of comfort and solace, especially because today we’re going to be talking about a very actionable, practical tool that we can take advantage for our well-being, which is adaptogens.

And specifically, we’ll talk about today what adaptogens are and how they can be so incredibly beneficial to our health and wellbeing. And I come to you speaking from a very tender heart today. There are different levels of processing this fire, which I still very much feel, and the community around me and in our school community, which was so close to the fire.

And as I’ve been sharing on the past few weeks, our children’s school burned, many community members homes burned. And I really feel like my body needs a lot of support right now. And I’m speaking about adaptogens today from personal experience and some of the plants and herbs that I’ve been using to get through this challenging time. And so I’m really excited to share the show with you.

because we talk about all the cornerstones here, right? We talk about food, body, emotional well-being, spiritual growth. And some of the things are a bit more long-term. We need to journal, we need to process. We want to be self-aware of our emotional patterns, for example. We want to continue to unfold into our true selves. But today’s show is very practical. You can learn about certain plants.

You can go out and purchase them. You can start ingesting them. You can start to make them part of your routine. You can understand how in nature there’s these really powerful aids that we can bring into our daily modern life. And it’s really wonderful to have all these different tools in our arsenal. So before we go further, I want to remind you that the show notes with the research and the information for today’s show, if you want to read through it yourself, is over at mysaluna.com.

Kimberly Snyder (02:16.002)
which is mysolluna.com. I also encourage you to get on our newsletter over there because there’s so many different offerings and just live Zooms, articles, new products, things coming out, sales, promotions, so that you can stay in our community and be really up to date. I’ll also mention that we had a wonderful Heart Reset, a two-day at-home retreat that you could do, which included

recipes, stretch video, different journaling, prompts, meditations, and you can really do this at any time. I very much feel this time of rebirth right now that we had Lunar New Year this week, and also for me just feeling such a strong energy of transformation in the wake of these fires that I would encourage you to go back and do the program or check it out for the first time over on our website as well. Also,

quick reminder to please leave us a review. It’s such an amazing way to support the show and to keep the show going. Please share this episode and the show in general as well with anyone that you think would benefit. Please spread the love. Please spread the healing and the coherence, the heart, which is really our intention of our feel good show. All right, today, let’s get right into our question, which comes from Jenny in Iowa. Jenny.

Sending you love wherever you are. Hope you’re listening to this. Thank you for inspiring the show directly with your question. As you write, Kimberly loved the podcast. Thank you. I was thinking about incorporating some adaptogens in my wellness routine, but I am not sure which ones and how often to take them. What are your thoughts on adaptogens? So we may have heard this term being tossed around. Maybe it’s a new term. Let’s start off.

right off the bat with defining what we are really discussing here. And this comes from the Cleveland Clinic. Adaptogens are active ingredients in certain plants and mushrooms that may impact how your body deals with stress, anxiety, and fatigue. Plants and mushrooms provide adaptogenic actions. When consumed, these plants target specific stressors in your body. There are three qualities that a plant has to contain to be an adaptogen.

Kimberly Snyder (04:36.79)
Number one, they are non-toxic when taken in normal doses. Number two, it helps your body cope with stress. And number three, it allows your body to return to balance known as homeostasis. So adaptogens have different names in some of the ancient traditions and there’s healing traditions all around the world. The one that I am the most familiar with and have studied extensively for years is Ayurveda.

And our uvata has a class of these herbs known as raciola herbs or rejuvenative or anti-aging, which also encompasses these adaptogenic plants. And the power of nature is that there is energy and all these different incredible creations from mother nature, from spirit, from God, universe, however you like to think of it.

And when we take these specific energies into our body, they can give us strength and resilience and fortify us, especially when we choose these plants with care and intention and with a deep intuition about what our body may need at certain moments in time. So the first part about adaptogens is when we take them normally, they are non-toxic. And of course, this is very different than when we overdose on pharmaceuticals.

or we create an over-reliance on, let’s say, taking Tylenol every time we don’t feel so well, or some of these over-the-counter or prescription drugs, we don’t sleep well, so maybe we take some anti-anxiety drugs every night, or we take tons of melatonin every night. The power of these plants is that they give us benefits, but they don’t deplete us.

And there’s an incredible intelligence and wisdom in these plants being able to do that. So the second quality is it allows our bodies to cope with stress. And we’ve been talking about stress for many months specifically because heart coherence and the power of our hearts specifically allow us to create more emotional resilience. And sometimes we think of stress in the environment in terms of water. It’s been a really big topic for us here.

Kimberly Snyder (06:52.342)
in the Los Angeles community because when the fires hit, was an impact. A lot of the Foscheck flame retardant, the burned up chemicals from the homes and the cars and everything else got into the water supply. And even some of the pipes in the water filtration system melted and there’s been a lot of toxicity in the water. So of course there are stressors that are very real in the air, in the food supply, but I don’t wanna discount how impactful

mental and emotional stresses because this also weakens our body and keeps us in a state of fight or flight, raises cortisol, immunity and our ability to digest really well. And so everything works in such an interconnected way. And there’s certain plants such as Brahmi, which is an herb used in Ayurveda, which is known to create that mental focus and resilience.

So these plants can create intelligence and resilience and help us with stress on many different levels. And ultimately we are these, you know, complex beings of energy that are impacted in different ways and have different layers to our being. And so, so is the truth with these plants, these mushrooms, these incredible energetic tools, as we like to refer to them.

or one way to refer to them that we place into our bodies. And then the third characteristic is that allows us to come back to balance, back to center. So when we think about when we are really clear, when we are really kind, and we are really loving, we are in our hearts. We’re in our center. When we go out into our thoughts, when we start to get pulled into distraction, into comparison, into judging, into overthinking, we get pulled away from our center and we start to get destabilized.

This is one of the reasons that watching the news all the time or being on social media all the time can be destabilizing to our emotional resilience. Similarly to our relationships, similarly to eating junk foods or sugar, all these shelf stable foods all the time take us away from the center of power. And we think about the center of power being this access of the three brains, the brain in our head, our heart brain, and our gut brain.

Kimberly Snyder (09:15.926)
So when we are in our center, we are like that pole that’s so deeply in the earth, it’s not getting knocked over by the wind and the storms. And when we’re not in our center, we’re sort of like a flimsy twig that’s getting tossed about in the wind. And we become more susceptible to illness and breakdown in our organs and inflammation and all these different attributes of…

Weakening that we do not want, right? We want to be strong and resilient and this means being centered. And so these plants and herbs can really support us on our paths. Now there’s so much research right now around adaptogens and this reinforces a lot of the ancient wisdom that’s been talked about in Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, in these tribal cultures from South America and Asia and so many different parts of the world. There was, you know, this,

real reliance on our bodies being connected to nature and this reliance on plants being the foundation of medicine. So let’s get into some of this research and once again this will be in the show notes which is over at mysaluna.com. If you want to check out we’ll have links to the studies as well.

So the first one comes from a 2010 study in the Journal of Pharmaceuticals, which found that adaptogens can exhibit neuroprotective, anti-fatigue, anti-depressant, and nootropic effects, helping to elevate our brain and our cognitive functioning. Clinical trials suggest that adaptogens can enhance mental work capacity, particularly during stress and fatigue, by increasing tolerance to mental exhaustion and improving attention. So…

Here we’re talking about how we can be more productive, more focused during the day. That’s why there is a lot of, and we’ll get into specifics in a moment, but there’s a lot of different functional mushrooms that you may find in coffee, even in chocolate, in different beverages. These incredible, they’re not even plants, they’re their own category of fungi, which we see so much on our hikes.

Kimberly Snyder (11:29.358)
In Hawaii, my kids love to see the mushrooms. They become so popular because we can see these powerful qualities that we can take on once we actually ingest these mushrooms, for example, or certain plants, again, such as the Brahmi or the Amalaki, which we’ll talk about in just a bit. These fruits, these berries, these twigs, these leaves, right? There’s different parts of the plants that are used in different herbal preparations and they have different properties.

Another study from 2018 in the Journal of Chinese Medicine noted that adaptogens might enhance the body’s resistance to stress by affecting the immune neuroendocrine system and the HPA access, suggesting a multi-targeted approach to maintaining homeostasis. So what this means is this immunity.

neuroendocrine, all these sensitive glands. We think about our endocrine system in such a powerful way. It secretes hormones, certain organs that we’re starting to learn more and more about, the pineal gland, the pituitary, really creating this master system of the body, as well as the heart. And when we take these plants, we can really support these organs and their functioning and our overall energy. And again, I’m more familiar with Ayurveda.

When I was pregnant, I was definitely doing more acupuncture and there were certain herbs I was even taking to help with some of the aches and pains that I was going through. And there’s incredible wisdom, once again, from traditional Chinese medicine and all these cultures around the world, which have had this attunement to these plants. And in modern day, sometimes we tend to overemphasize the modern science or the Western doctors.

But it’s amazing to see how much is coming back to this wisdom. It’s sort of coming full circle. It’s becoming more holistic, which I think is really wonderful because we don’t want to miss out on this incredible natural wisdom and including these adaptogenic plants and mushrooms. Another study from 2021 in the Journal of Nutrition found that adaptogens could help with chronic fatigue and cognitive impairment.

Kimberly Snyder (13:44.14)
and specifically ginseng and quarter steps mushrooms enhance physical endurance and combat fatigue and lion’s mane supports cognitive function and memory. Now quarter steps mushrooms, I can’t help but point out is a mushroom that we have in our glowing greens powder formulation. And one of the things that I wanted to do when I created this formula, which you can put in your glowing green smoothie or you can simply mix with water is that I wanted to

I had in mind that this would be something we would use, we would consume in the mornings or during the day. Instead of just overloading our body with caffeine, there’s these other plants which really help to create that endurance that we need as busy moms or students or different members of the workforce, taking care of aging parents, showing up on Zooms in the office.

You know, at the store, whatever we’re doing, we need this energy to sustain us. We need it in ourselves. We need it down in our bones. We need it in our blood. We need it throughout. so drinking or consuming cordyceps is something that I have found to be personally really beneficial. And so in that formula, the glowing greens powder, which is on our website. You can check it out if you’d like, is that there’s only seven key plants.

so that you’re getting a beneficial ingredients. should say once again, because cordyceps are not a plant, they’re a mushroom, that you’re able to get a beneficial amount of each ingredient so that you can really benefit. I would caution you to be aware of formulas where there’s, you know, multiple 20, 30, 50, 70, 80 different ingredients, because then you’re only getting a very small amount and perhaps not an amount that’s able to

be actually beneficial in your body to create actual change, right? So I remember working in the RU-Vated Clinic. We wouldn’t mix a lot of herbs at once so you could get enough of each herb into one dosage. So keep that in mind when you’re looking at formulas that contain these adaptogens. So there’s also been some, now we’ll get into some of the specific adaptogens themselves. And the first one I wanna point out is ashwagandha.

Kimberly Snyder (16:06.386)
And ashwagandha is an amazing bala, is the Sanskrit word, strengthening herb. I have been consuming quite a bit of ashwagandha over the past few weeks, specifically in tea and just having hot elixirs because I felt a lot during these fires and being in evacuation and constantly checking the fire maps. I’m still in this processing mode of really how much

happened in the past few weeks and it’s just been wild. And as I continue to connect more with people in my direct community and these people that I love and their stores were saved and the businesses are still there. And the mourning of those who did lose their businesses and their homes, there’s just so much wear and tear emotionally. And so Ashwagandha is so powerful.

A 2021 review in the Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine found that ashwagandha helped with stress and anxiety. Specific studies found that it lowered stress, anxiety levels, sleeplessness and fatigue, and serum cortisol levels, which was a stress hormone, compared with a placebo. One of the things about ashwagandha, as I mentioned earlier about adaptogens, is it doesn’t have a toxic effect. So you can cycle in ashwagandha.

You don’t have to take it every day. You can use it more in times of stress. But it’s a very powerful herb and it’s one that you can take in a beverage form. There’s teas now with ashwagandha. There’s different formulas. There’s even chocolate with ashwagandha. I don’t cook with it. It’s more of, for me, something that you really take as a type of herbal medicine.

Now, the next herb that I want to talk about, which is very near and dear to my heart, is Amalaki. And Amalaki has been studied extensively. It’s a very important herb in Ayurvedic medicine. In fact, it’s considered the number one Rasayana herb, even over Ashwagandha, meaning rejuvenative and enhancing your vitality and anti-aging. And this is why, directly from my Ayurvedic research and studies,

Kimberly Snyder (18:28.904)
that I chose amalaki to be the star ingredient in our glowing greens powder. It’s not something that we’re buying fresh. It’s not like the spinach and the lettuce and the celery that’s in our glowing greens smoothie. It’s something special that we would take in a powdered form. It’s also known as amla and it’s incredibly high in vitamin C, which is bioavailable to the body. The way that they process the amalaki, there’s antioxidants.

There’s incredible nutrients and it is believed to support the three brains. So back to this centering homeostasis that comes when we are in our true center, heart, brain and nervous system. So Amalaki supports each of these and we will link to in the show notes to a podcast that I did with Vaideh J, my own Ayurvedic physician and personal teacher who I studied with for over four years.

Amalaki is safe, as he says, for most all-body types to take regularly long term. So that was another reason it was carefully chosen to be in our glowing greens powder. You can ingest it every day as I do. take it, I, I mean, don’t take it away from me. I wouldn’t want to skip it. It’s got amazing other plants as well, like chlorella and spirulina, but the Amalaki.

which is so rejuvenative. I want that in my body every day, right? We wanna feel energized. We wanna have this vitality, wanna have this life force. We wanna have great skin. We wanna have great hair. We wanna feel youthful and look youthful, right? And so these plants, on top of other important practices, like doing the heart aligned meditation, like resting and breathing and being with loved ones and having a water filter, all these different protocols are really important.

and also just really having these tools to support us. This is an act of self-love. This is real self-care. How easy is it to keep some of these herbs around? And one of the things that, you know, an interesting aspect of Amalaki that was studied from 28 in the Journal of Integrative Medicine found that on top of the immunity and the digestion and the skin health, it was really wonderful for increasing digestion.

Kimberly Snyder (20:51.884)
This study in particular measured Amalocchi in conjunction with heartburn and found that it helped to reduce GERD and heartburn over four weeks, showing how powerful these plants are in regulating our vital processes, including digestion when we’re struggling, when we are being challenged, when we are stressed, when we’re busy, when we’re feeling rushed, when we’re not eating so well, we’re not sleeping well, we’re worried about our loved ones, we’re worried about…

calamities like fires. We need this extra support more than ever. So, and was also there’s another research study from 2019 showing that Amalaki was helped with a reducing cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Again, back to the physical as well as emotional and mental aspects of heart health, which expand different levels. Now the next, and then also there’s so much research here, blood sugar, anti-aging effects.

it helped, Amalaki helped to support the length of DNA telomeres. When they shorten, when they become compromised, we age faster. So there is support for Amalaki with cellular longevity and anti-aging, which is so incredible and powerful. Shows the power of these plants. Now let’s talk about another adaptogen, which is very easy to consume and very inexpensive to source, and that is holy basil, known as Tulsi.

And one of the ways I’ve recommended drinking it is through tea. You can get organic Tulsi, either loose leaf or in a tea bag, and you can simply consume it while you’re working, while you’re cleaning up, while you’re making dinner. Like I do like to consume it in the evenings. And it’s incredibly powerful for that homeostasis. I feel very grounded when I drink Tulsi tea. I love it. And it’s also called holy basil, as I mentioned, and it’s

Considered good luck to have a holy basil plant or little bush in your home in India. And it’s also been shown in modern research, 2017, a study in the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine found that holy basil had impressive anti-asthmatic abilities and helped to make breathing easier. It helped with immune system support. It had cardiovascular benefits, helping to reduce cardiovascular disease.

Kimberly Snyder (23:18.382)
This was studied in different journals from 2014, 2011. Again, I don’t want to get too far into the weeds with the research. It’s all in the show notes, mysaluna.com. But the point is modern research is backing up once again, what ancient wisdom has always known for thousands of years. These wise ones, whether it’s Swami Sri Yukteswar teaching us about the five stages of awakening the human heart to these Ayurvedic doctors who are gathering the plants.

and understanding on a very deep energetic level how this could help mankind and humans who would come into more and more and more stress in different ways, right? And into more times of modern convenience and yet so much stressing the body and mind and emotions. So I highly recommend

getting yourself some Tulsi as well as some of the other plants we talk about today. Now, goji berries are a food medicine herb. So one of the things that Argyvada says is plants can be used as herbs, it can be used as foods, different ways, right? And so goji berries are, is something that we keep almost all the time in our home. My kids love goji berries and are more familiar with them than raisins. So if you’re a mom,

And your kids like some of that sweet dried fruit. Maybe you put it in trail mix or you use ants on a log as a snack, which is basically celery with some type of nut better. I use goji berries instead of the raisins. And my younger one, especially, will just sit there with his goji berry bag while I’m cooking dinner and snack on it. It’s a really great snack to keep around. It grows in China. It grows in different parts of the world. A 2021 study in the Journal of Nutrients.

Found that goji berries helped to promote even skin protection, eye protection. It was amazing for protecting against UV light damage. There are so many different amino acids and minerals in goji berries. It’s a strengthening food and you can use it intuitively. You don’t have to use it every day. You don’t have to eat it every day. But just like the other foods that I talk about here, which nowadays,

Kimberly Snyder (25:41.166)
You can find it bulk, you can find more inexpensively. I encourage you to keep it around so that it is part of your arsenal, it is part of your and your family’s diet.

Now the next adaptogen that I want to talk about for mental and wellbeing is ginseng. This makes me feel a little tenderhearted because my mom, who is now with us in the spirit world, and whoa, side note, I felt her very strongly around me during the fires. And sometimes we can really tune into these light beings. Depending on your spiritual beliefs, I feel it, the angels.

our guides, our gurus, the protectors. And I felt so strongly my mom and angels and many beautiful spiritual beings around me. And yeah, I’ll pause there. I will go down the tangent, but I’ll say that my mom loved ginseng and she drank ginseng tea. And there’s so much ginseng drink in Asia. It’s not really as popular in the West.

Yet, although a 2022 research study published in the Journal of Integrative Medicine found that it could help with chronic fatigue, and people that consumed ginseng showed significantly improved energy levels and less exhaustion. It’s great for our hearts, the center of our well-being overall. A 2016 meta-analysis in the Journal of Frontiers and Pharmacology found that ginseng helped to lower blood pressure.

and help to reduce hypertension. It also helps with sexuality, which is not just actual sexuality, but I would say also this creative vitality, right? This Kundalini power, which we can channel into our projects, into our creative pursuits, as well as into our connection with our partners, right? And so it helps with blood flow. It has been shown to help with erectile function.

Kimberly Snyder (27:50.754)
But I just think this energy going to our sacral chakra, which again is also for creativity, it’s a very powerful way to just make sure that our energy is in our center and balanced. All the chakras and all the different aspects of energy. Homeostasis. Sometimes we feel very uncreative and we can feel unsexual and unsensual. And there’s a part of us that we want to reinvigorate and renurture.

And so if you’re feeling that specifically, ginseng could be really powerful for you at this moment. Again, there’s some intuition that you can apply here when we’re talking about adaptogens. And ginseng is also helpful for weight management. A 2017 study published in the Journal of Ginseng found that it helped with metabolism, helped with body fat, chronic inflammation. So it’s really powerful in that way. And I’ll also mention

about the functional mushrooms which have adaptogenic properties and the cordyceps, which is in our glowing greens powder. There’s also reishi, there’s also chaga mushrooms. I will link specifically to a show that we did just on mushrooms, so I won’t be repetitive here, but we did a whole show about functional mushrooms and their benefits, if you’d like to listen to that as well, because they really help with stress and focus.

and sleep and all of these amazing functions that we need to, that we want to enhance to enhance the quality of our lives. So if there’s one major takeaway from this show, it’s a reminder that we are connected to nature and that we are holistic beings. And this is really the foundation of Saluna’s Four Cornerstone lifestyle, which again, our cornerstones are food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth. We need to connect.

with all four cornerstones, and the golden thread of all four that is our center is our hearts. And heart-led living and wellness means we use our heart’s intuition to connect all four. And then we take this really intuitive, gentle, intelligent approach instead of getting sort of sidetracked into thinking there’s just one answer or just to look at numbers and metrics, but to really be in this fullness of our hearts.

Kimberly Snyder (30:15.71)
as we approach things from this open-hearted perspective. We take in information, we discern, and we use our heart’s wisdom to guide us into which herbs, which adaptogens, which companies do we trust, which relationships do we want to pursue, how we really connect deeper and deeper to our truer selves through our heart-aligned meditation. So there is a wealth of more offerings for you over at mysaloona.com.

included guided heart-aligned meditation tracts, our amazing digestion supplements. I highly recommend to take, as I do every day, including our detoxi, our SBO probiotics, which is a clinically researched formula, our glowing greens powder I’ve mentioned here, which is seven key plants, incredibly adaptogenic, incredibly resilient, incredible for your skin, your energy, creating youthfulness. Mamalaki is known as the fountain of youth.

Barry. So there’s a lot over there for you on our amazing website. And I also encourage you once again to please leave a review to please share the show with anyone you think would benefit because we’re here to share to support each other and to share. I will be back here Monday as always for our next interview show. Please write in to us. Please let us know if you have a question, if there’s another way I could support you.

Anyways, we are a very responsive community and I’m always listening. So I send you so much love and especially if you are affected by these fires, especially if you’re in the Los Angeles area, my heart goes out to you and to all our loved ones here in the community. I look forward to connecting with you more here and on social media at underscore Kimberly Snyder, sending you much love. Namaste.