What is Guayusa? Everything You Need to Know | Chris Fields x Dave Asprey
Chris Fields and Dave Asprey discuss guayusa, a caffeinated plant from Ecuador used by Kichwa tribes. They explore how its caffeine works differently in the body than coffee, and what makes it interesting for biohacking.
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You make something different called amati or amate Max. And you're calling it nootropic caffeine. And it's made from Guayasa.
Right.
Can you tell me about Guayasa?
Sure, yeah. So, okay, so this is pretty exciting because we, our company, Applied Foods, we've spent a lot of time just researching all these plant based compounds that contain caffeine. And we started in coffee, we merged into tea. We understood the benefits of caffeine like you were mentioning, and, and the synergistic pairing between that and polyphenols. And we came across this plant when, the Wyusa plant, when we were, you know, kind of looking through all the different plant species that have caffeine in them. Right. And actually there's, there's only a few. And one of them is the Ilex species, Yusa. And so we went down to Ecuador and we met with a tribal team, it was the Kichwa tribes. And we were kind of just noticing how they were using this Wayusa and they were telling stories about, and it's an indigenous group down there in Archadona, so it's in the western.
You said these are Ketchuan people from Ecuador?
Yep, yep.
Okay, got it.
And. And it was pretty amazing just to hear their stories and how they integrated it into everyday life. And everyone in their family did it. So every morning they have this Yusa ceremony and they'd sit around and they'd take the leaves off the tree and they'd put them in a pot and they would basically make a herbal tea out of it and infuse it, and then they'd share it with everybody. And that was a way for them to connect with each other as a family, but also to gain energy and health for the day. So it's a really, really important medicinal plant for them. And they would actually probably say it's the most important medicinal plant that they have. And so we said, okay, we're onto something here. You know, these people have been using it. It's actually been dated back to the 16th century, but they've been using it forever. And they understand not just its mental acuity and cognitive performance, but that it can actually control and manage that energy in a really nice way.
It's fascinating to go down to Peru and Ecuador and because certainly there's yerba mate and guassa is a relative of that, right?
Yep.
And then there's also mate de coca, which is basically tea made out of coca leaves, which helps with altitude sickness and performance. And when you go around the world. It turns out there are DMT containing plants on every continent, except maybe, I think, the Arctic, although maybe they're there too. And there are caffeinated plants on almost every continent as well. And for some reason, humans have figured out those two things. And if you're new to the show, DMT is a potent psychedelic that your brain forms on birth and death and probably a few other times, like during breath work, or you can just take it as a drug or in ayahuasca. So we're seeking these transcendent states, and we're seeking these high performance states, and those are both inside the biohacking movement. But these performance states, it's like, okay, these guys use chocolate, these guys use guayasa, these guys over in Africa are using coffee. But we're all seeking this same basic effect, right? What's different between yerba mate versus the amity guayasa extract that you make? Or just regular caffeine?
Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the things that we did very early on when we started looking at WEUSA is we wanted to understand is pharmacokinetics, right? So is it any different than the way you metabolize caffeine? Is it any different than the way you metabolize coffee? Coffee, caffeine, for example. So we, we commissioned a, a pharmacokinetic study and we noticed that the absorption of caffeine was the same, independent of the source of caffeine, and that even included synthetic caffeine. But so that was really interesting. But the other thing that that was done at that, that research center was we measured neurotransmitter function. And one of the things that we saw in WEUSA was that it had the ability to shunt the epinephrine effect that caffeine has. So as you know, caffeine is a stimulant, right? It, it helps block the adenosine receptor A2A. But in doing that, it does it in the dopamine region of the brain where you actually transmit all these neurotransmitters, which one of them, along with norepinephrine, is ultimately epinephrine, which is what gives us the anxiety and the stimulating effects of caffeine itself. And there's these polyphenols in WEUSA that actually can shunt that activity. So you get the stimulating effects in the brain, but you don't necessarily get the physiological effects.
And is the stimulation going from norepinephrine or is it coming from some other thing?
Yeah, so we don't clearly understand the research behind it, aside from the fact that we can measure things like epinephrine, and we know that it's basically reducing the level of epinephrine.
Is it reducing it compared to synthetic caffeine, or is it reducing compared to baseline?
No.
Okay.
Relative to caffeine itself.
All right, so you're getting a stimulant hit, but it's one that's less reliant on adrenaline, which is epinephrine. Okay, Right, interesting.
Yeah. But you see all the other. So the serotonin and the dopamine, so all those other hormones still go up.
Right, interesting. All right, that makes. That makes a lot of sense. And if you're saying, dave, you just got really nerdy on us, the way stress in the body works is if you're working properly, you have a 4 to 1 ratio of adrenaline, also known as epinephrine, to noradrenaline, also known as norepinephrine. And when you get stressed or burned out, the ratio goes heavy on adrenaline and light on noradrenaline. And I know this because in my mid-20s, when I was £300 and burned out and had all sorts of stuff going on, I had a blood test, and they're still unusual, but it was very unusual back then. My ratio was 45 to 1, and it should be 4 to 1. In other words, I was entirely depleted of norepinephrine, and my adrenaline was way through the roof. Why? Emotional stress, physiological stress, mold toxins, adrenal dysfunction, methylation issues, like all the stuff that's now known in biohacking. I just got to have the whole deck of cards all at once.
And you felt that, right?
Oh, good. You feel like crap.
Yeah.
And so being able to manage either less adrenaline and adrenaline's not bad for you. It actually feels really good.
Right, right.
But to make sure you have enough noradrenaline to balance it out is really important. And there's a variety of supplements that can help with that. But if you're someone who gets just tweaked on regular caffeine from any source, maybe this amity extract, because it has a different effect, might be something that you could consider.
