I Hear a Lot About Antioxidants, Ashwagandha, and GABA. What’s the Deal?

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I hear a lot about Antioxidants Ashwagandha and Gaba. What's the deal? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Brooklyn from Facebook asks, I hear a lot about antioxidants Ashwagandha and Gaba. What's the deal? Hey, it's JJ and today I've got integrative medicine practitioner and researcher Dr. David Brady with me to answer this question. He has a super fun position as the medical director of FX Chocolates. This is a fair trade dark chocolate with therapeutic amounts of targeted nutrients. If you want a delicious way to take your supplements. FX Chocolate is keto, sugar free and makes you feel great. And when David's not seeing patients or advising on chocolate, he can be found drumming with his rock and roll band. We'll be right back with the answer. Stay tuned.

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Well, you know, I'll answer that question in two parts. One is the antioxidants. Obviously, when we live in today's environment, you know, in the industrial western world, if you will, we're obviously exposed to a lot of things, pesticides, herbicides, endocrine disruptors, chemicals in our water, in the air, in our food. And many of these chemicals do their dirty work by exerting oxidative stress, which means they kind of derange the molecules a little bit in our body, right? And it's a natural thing. I mean, there's natural oxidative stresses around us all the time. In fact, our own metabolism within the body, as pure as we may be or we may live just normal mammalian physiology will produce certain amounts of oxidative stress. For instance, when we make energy using oxygen in the mitochondria of our cells, it produces a lot of oxidative stress because it's using oxygen and stripping it down and helping to make ATP or energy. But we have coping mechanisms to deal with oxidative stress, and they involve many different compounds known as antioxidants. They come to us in many forms and generally in our diet, they come from fresh fruits and vegetables. So you may have heard the old phrase, eat from the rainbow, right? Vary your foods. Eat foods of a lot of color, meaning vegetables and fruits of many different colors. The coloration in these foods generally is imparted because of the polyphenols and the bioflavonoids and other types of compounds that are antioxidant, they're anti inflammatory, and they have many, many different health benefits. So delivering these antioxidants comes partly from advocating that people eat a whole food, real food, preferably organic food diet with lots of varied vegetables and reasonable amount of fruits. However, in addition to that, some people just need More antioxidant protection. And we can see this on various types of testing that we do in the lab, such as organic acid testing that we use in integrative and functional medicine all the time. And when that's the case, when people need more oxidative or antioxidant protection from oxidative stress, maybe they're being exposed to more toxins than the average person, maybe occupationally, or some people just don't do as good of a job detoxing compounds and chemicals and things like that, and therefore they have more oxidative stress to try to deal with. We can give them antioxidant supplements, but once again, we're back to pills, we're back to soft gels, we're back to capsules and things like that. So what we're able to do is put key antioxidants in some of the FX chocolate offerings that get the job done. And chocolate itself has a lot of antioxidant functionality to it. Now, when we get to things like Ashwagandha and you mentioned gaba, these are things that directly affect the central nervous system. And Ashwagandha, also known as Withamia somnifera, its scientific name, it's genus and species, genuses with any species, is somnifera. And the name somnifera comes from the name somnolence. So it's calming, it can promote sleep, rest, just a more calm state. However, it's a wonderful herb and it comes from Ayurvedic traditions, from India. It's been used in Indian or Ayurvedic medicine for as long as we have record of it, a long, long, long time. It's interesting in that it's considered an adaptogen, meaning it will help the body adapt to stressors. But some adaptogens are stimulating, some adaptogens are sedating. Ashwagandha is interesting in that it's pretty neutral in that if you need calming, it will calm you. If you need kind of picking up, it will help pick you up. Kind of works from both ends, but its general tone overall is a little bit more on the calming side. Therefore, you get the name somnifera. It's a wonderful herb. It doesn't push your body really strongly in one way or the other. It just sort of regulates the stress response and allows calming of the mind in particular. So that racing mind, often producing insomnia and things like that, anxiety. Ashwagandha is very, very good for that. So is gaba. I mean, gaba is a neurotransmitter and GABA receptors. Anything that hits a GABA receptor has a very calming effect on the nervous system and can really combat anxiety cravings, whether it's craving smoking or sweets or gambling or anything kind of, you know, a destructive activity. We use GABA a lot and many of the anti anxiety medications are GABA nergic, meaning they hit GABA receptors. So you have drugs that are used as anxiolytics, pain reducers, things like gabapentin for instance. But we can use natural fermented GABA very therapeutically. It's very natural, it's very functional, can help calm the person, help stop cravings, help reduce anxiety and help with sleep. And we have an offering in the FX Chocolate line that does exactly that.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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