Dr. Paul Andersen explains how stress hormones are made from cholesterol and require B-vitamins, vitamin C, and minerals to function. He breaks down why common stress supplements contain specific ingredients like B5 and B6, then covers five adaptogens: astragalus, schisandra, eleuthero, rhodiola, and ashwagandha. Diet and exercise come first; supplements work best with professional guidance.
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And you're live. Good day and welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Andersen. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And today we're going to do part 2 about stress and your stress response. Because, well, there was a lot to say and we only got some of it said in the last program. But also, one of the places I wanted to go last time that we just ran out of time for and then got a lot of specific questions about had to do with, well, so in the first program about stress and, you know, what is stress? How's it work? What do you do about it? We were able to get through the, what is it? You know, how's it work in your body? And how do we use what we would call lifestyle or hygienic sort of measures to deal with stress, to recover from stress, et cetera, which are all very important things. And I do think it's important that people understand understand, you know, where the stress response, you know, resides chemically in your body, what it does, how it works. Because that way, you not only understand why it affects you physically the way that it does, but also then you can look at what kind of things— because this is literally something that works in and with my body— what are the kind of things I can do in and with my body to, you know, help the stress response out, especially, you know, where You know, so many of us have new stresses or different stresses if you're listening live in 2021. You know, just a lot of things going on. But the part that I wasn't able to get to, and then of course I got a lot of really good questions about and feedback was, well, okay, so you talked about kind of the basics and these, you know, physical or lifestyle sort of things that you can do. And that's good. But what about all of the more specific types of support that can go on with stress or for stress that we see maybe, you know, promoted on the internet? I mean, the internet, you can probably find, you know, a few hundred thousand things about stress and things you could do about stress. So I wanted to jump off from where we left off on the last program. And if last program is not making any sense to you, you can— Go back, and if you want to, you want to watch the video version of the podcast, you can do it either on my page, DRA Online, or on the CTR Radio Network. And if you want to go on the, on an audio podcast, any pod burner will have Medicine and Health with Dr. Andersen. And so you can get that on, you know, Apple or iHeartRadio or Google Play, any, any of those places. So you can go back to the last one. If you're having trouble finding links, you can always go to DRA Online either on Instagram or Facebook, and, and there'll be links there too. So, but let's say either you're going to listen to or you heard the last show, so we don't need to get into the deep physiology and biology of the stress response, but just want to Make sure we start out with this place where the stress response is normal. It's part of how our body actually stays alive. It is involved in things, certainly obvious things such as we talked about running away from bears and, you know, those sort of stressors. It's involved in the way that we feel when we get under pressure, even if there's no visible pressure. Your, your brain responds the same way to invisible pressures as it does to bears and things of that nature, which I think is important to remember. And so it's a very normal thing. And it, uh, the important part about that normal thing is like all normal functions in the body, it can be overtaxed and then, uh, can get out of balance. And like almost everything in the body, when you tax it and push it out of balance, it doesn't simply stop working, thank heaven, or you would be dead, but it just gets, uh, less and less optimal function as it goes along. And so then we have what we come to know as stress response problems, or some people will talk about, you know, like adrenal problems or adrenal burnout or other things of that nature. All of which are descriptive terms to describe a stress response that's kind of gone out of balance. And the other thing, you know, that I just want to bring forward from last week too is to remember that this is just as physiologic a response as the way that your heart beats or your lungs move air in and out and all of that. And And so the stress response is often seen as, well, it's all in your head. And while there are parts that your brain operates, it's not imaginary. This is a real physiologic thing. Now, the out-of-balance part is kind of where I want to go today when we talk about therapies and things of that nature that can be done. And so remember that last week where we kind of left off, we're with the more diet and lifestyle-oriented types of interventions, which are very important because diet and lifestyle are the things that sort of— what I would tell patients is that this keeps you healthy and helps you return to health. It's like a base. And so if you're really stressed out and you, you know, your system is really out of sorts and all of that, you might not feel as much change if you make some diet and lifestyle adjustments. Some people do right away, But it's very important to get your— get the ship turned around physiologically to heal the system, because much like most parts of your body, for example, when we would see people— this is a million years ago when I was an intern and I worked in outpatient care centers that were free clinics for homeless people. And we would see people that, you know, their liver was really, really damaged from, say, drugs or alcohol or that sort of thing. One of the places that I interned at, we— it was also drug rehab. And my mentor, the physician who was in charge, would always tell the patients, you know, your liver loves to get well if you let it. And that is true. Your liver, you know, is— in the one case where they were in rehab, they usually weren't using anymore and all that. And we did a lot of things to try and help You know, support the liver along to heal. Well, much like your liver can heal if you kind of take some of the stressors away, your stress response can heal also if— not necessarily take away the stress, you might need to participate in the stress differently, and there may be other things, but the stress response can get back to normal. It doesn't have to stay wrecked. Now, Something important, you know, I want to say at the top here is I usually say, you know, I'm, I'm a doctor, but I'm not your doctor. And so this is, this is for your information. This is not medical advice. I am describing how things work, and we're going to talk about the, the kind of the chemistry and the things that people might use supplementally to help out, but none of that is to be taken as a medical recommendation. That's Probably not a good idea to get your medical care from, you know, YouTube or wherever you're watching this. But that being said, the things like how you eat and moving your body around, you know, getting some muscle activity and the way you think and what goes in and out of your brain, super important, super, you know, super core. But what I want to talk about today would be specific support. So if we go back to last time, and again, if you didn't hear last time, you can go back in any of the PodBurners and listen to it or on my page. And what we talked about last time is the stress response is kind of like your immune system. It, it's all over your body. Now, it has heavy representation in our brain and in our adrenal glands, which are right above our kidneys, and in some related glandular tissue around the body. There are other places that get involved as well, but we're going to kind of keep it to the core of the central nervous system and then the adrenal and related glandular tissues. Otherwise, you know, this would become 10 hours worth of discussion. But I think it's important if you— if we go back, you know, to what we talked about last time, that there's 2 major pieces of currency that are used for stress response. One piece of currency are hormonal products. So things like the cortisol family and things related to cortisol and some other, you know, related hormonal things. Hormones of that type are sterols. They're steroid hormones and they're made from cholesterol. And so they're going to be larger molecules that have this cholesterol ring structure as a skeleton, and then they're going to have some changes on them. Now what those hormones do is they go around your body and they're messengers that usually alter processes. So they may alter an inflammatory process. They may shift the use of blood sugar or certain fats in the blood. And they may do all sorts of things, all in support of your stress response. So there's the steroid part, the hormone part. The other part, or what we would globally classify as neurotransmitters, and you hear about those things. So, you know, famous neurotransmitters are like serotonin. You hear about— there's a lot of drugs that manipulate serotonin. You may heard of like dopamine or norepinephrine. Well, dopamine and norepinephrine have a cousin called epinephrine that you've heard of, sometimes called adrenaline. In the United Kingdom, we'd still call it adrenaline. And epinephrine or adrenaline is more the, the cousin of dopamine, norepinephrine that operates outside of the brain. So dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine are all made in a little in a pathway, a chain. And so dopamine's made first, then norepinephrine, then epinephrine. Mostly in our brain, norepinephrine and dopamine do the heavy work. And in the peripheral body, mostly through what's called chromaffin tissue, which is in the middle of your adrenals, they call it the adrenal medulla, and also in other tissue called chromaffin tissue that literally like lines your aorta and all sorts of places. That tissue makes— turns dopamine, norepinephrine then into epinephrine. And so about 80% of what's made outside of your head is epinephrine. Reason that's important is these are all cousins, and they're all made and they're metabolized through the same processes. Now, when you get to the adrenal glands and the chromaffin tissue to make the stress hormone Adrenaline or epinephrine, you're going to use up a lot of nutrients to do that. So nutrients are going to become kind of big. This thing we said about cholesterol and the sterol balance, that's going to become kind of big when we talk about supportive things. So you have production of hormones that are related to stress, you have production of neurotransmitters related to stress. But then the other thing is that your body always has, you know, I talked about like currency, or you can talk about metabolism, you know, a little bit, maybe like a bank balance or, you know, whatever way you want to think about it. But it's very transactional. The human body, when you get down to the level that chemistry works at, is transactional. And so there are the components that need to go into making these things. And then we make either the hormonal side or the neurotransmitter side, and they're ready to go and they do their job, but it doesn't end there. When a hormone or when a neurotransmitter is done doing its job, it has to be metabolized and moved out of circulation. Because— and we'll talk about this happening in people— if you could imagine, if you've ever been really, you know, frightened suddenly or whatever, and you feel that adrenaline rush, that epinephrine surging through your body. Yeah. Well, imagine if that didn't go away for a long, long time. You would get all of the side effects of the adrenaline rush, like your heart rate increasing, your vision changing, breathing changing, all, you know, even your blood sugar and other stuff changing like we talked about last week. So in this transactional business that the body does, there's production, but there has to be elimination. And there's always a balance. Now, there's a lot of reasons people can have not so much balance there, and that'll come up later on. But let's say the average physiology in people is to make the stuff, to use it, and then to get rid of it. And we call the getting rid of it metabolism. Now, if it's a hormone, it's a slower process. You think of hormones sort of like this big lumbering sort of molecule. They're not that big, but relative to say epinephrine or adrenaline, they're pretty big. So to make the sterol hormones like say cortisol, we first need cholesterol and then we need to take it and we need to put it into particular cells in a particular layer of the outside, they call it the cortex of the adrenal glands. And then it goes through these different processes, and if you really You know, if you're a biochemistry geek, you can go look these up if you don't already know them. There's a whole bunch of steps where you're taking the cholesterol substrate or a related skeleton, turning it into, in this case, cortisol. Now, doing that takes a lot of synthetic, you know, synthesis or putting together sorts of cofactors, which are nutrients. So in addition to cholesterol going in and its relatives, we have a lot of nutrients, very nutrient-dense to do that. So if you think about the adrenals, they're very unique in that they're this gland that sits on top of your kidneys, and they're not very big, much smaller than the kidneys. And in, in your embryology, when you're formed, you know, from being a zygote and a fetus, you know, and all that. They actually come about in 2 parts and then they grow together. Okay, so the middle literally has the neurotransmitter part, the adrenaline part, and the outside has the beefier steroid part. The outside has 3 different layers. But we're gonna mostly focus on the one that's involved with cortisol, but there's other stuff that's made there too. And you think, well, how could one substrate, one, you know, one blank canvas go in and come out to be 3 or more different hormones? It's because each of those layers on the outside have different enzyme systems that turn it into different hormones. So you're thinking about your cortisol or your cortisone relatives, they come from a particular layer there and they're made by a In the middle, the middle part is the medulla. It's the chromaffin tissue. That's where the dopamine, norepinephrine, and then epinephrine or adrenaline cascade goes on. And that's also very nutrient dependent as well. So when we're thinking about it, it takes a lot of effort to make these things, then we use them. And then it takes a lot of effort to get rid of them so that they can stay in balance. Now, one of the things we talked about last time that is worth mentioning is that under normal circumstances, we all, you know, like I said, if you don't have a stress response, you die. Many things would stop working. One is your immune system. Your immune response requires different parts of your stress response system to help your immune system balance out. So the stress response and the immune response systems work together very, very carefully. This is why you see a lot of aberrant, abnormal sort of immune output if you have somebody who is challenged with a microbe or infection or something who gets ill when they're under a lot of stress. So there's a lot of in and out and a lot of this transaction that goes on that we don't feel every day. Yeah. Every morning your body makes more of the cortisol family, and that surges to help wake your brain up in the morning, and then it, it's used up and tapered off throughout the day. It's lower at night. If that gets turned around, for example, you may have trouble sleeping because cortisol literally helps wake your brain up in the morning. It does all sorts of things. We use little amounts maybe of adrenaline as the day goes along that we might not notice. You use some overnight. at times, help keep your blood sugar regulated and things of that nature. So when you're thinking about all this, we have to think about what makes the stuff, what helps us use it, and then what takes it away or metabolizes it. And then we think about, well, if this is such a perfect system, why would it get out of balance? Well, it gets out of balance because even though we use it every day, it's made for periodic use. Okay, you know, the, the design appears to be such that running from a bear, you know, wasn't going to be, you know, a daily occurrence, or it wasn't going to be super common. And so you could use it and call on these resources when you needed to, or if you just had a little need for the stress response to do something, it would be a little blip on the radar and it wouldn't tax the system a whole lot. But when you think about the stress response in especially modern times where literally your brain doesn't know the difference between you not liking your job or your boss, you know, giving you stressful messages or whatever, or a bear, literally your brain doesn't know the difference because it's not our cognitive part, the outside, it's more of the deeper parts of the brain that make these transactions. Most people are under a lot more mental stress than, than they are aware of, or, you know, we don't want to think about it. So the system gets charged and charged and charged, and it has a bunch of different ways it can go. There's a lot of people who've written about this, very famous scientists like Hans Selye and other people who've written about this, and you can look into all of that. So there's, you know, the response system can overregulate for a while, so it'll be really high and you get different symptoms there, and then it'll kind of crash. But important thing is that this system— let's just take the, uh, let's just take the steroid part, the cortisol part. There's diseases associated with that. Let's take the cancers away, but there's the hormonal diseases. So Cushing's syndrome is where your body naturally is, uh, has a disease where it makes too much corticosteroid, and then Addison's disease where it makes too little corticosteroid. And both of those can make you very ill, or you can even die from them if they're not corrected. Okay. What we're talking about is between those diseases. Usually this stress response doesn't push you into one or the other of those. It can, but that's much more rare. We're talking about here is a physiologic problem where you've gotten out of balance. It's, it's a lot like If you stop moving your body, you will get in less and less and less shape. Now you're not dead, you're just out of shape. And so it might be hard to, you know, go upstairs or something of that nature, but you can recover it. It's a lot like that. It's like the stress system's out of shape. So when we think about what do we put back into the body to help out, to say feed the system, We need to think about the production side of making all this stuff, the transactional side of using it, and then of metabolizing or getting rid of it. And if we think about it from that point of view, that's helpful in looking at why would, you know, certain nutrients be important, etc. Now, one of the things to consider as we go through these are And this is— I think it was a really good question that came up. And so I kind of want to couch some of the descriptions around this particular question, which was, well, why do I see, you know, stress support supplements, let's say, you know, nutritional supplements that might have vitamins and minerals or amino acids or maybe herbal things, botanicals, etc.? Why do I see those with, you know, a lot of them have real similar components and then some of them have very different components and why are, why are those components in these supplements? Well, now when it comes to supplements, you know, I'm not going to be specific about any particular supplement, but you can see lots and lots of them aimed at the stress response system because, you know, everybody's pretty stressed. But If you look at them, the majority tend to have a collection of B vitamins, probably some vitamin C, some minerals, and then they might have some amino acids. And then they may, they may stop there, or they may have a plant or 2, some botanical components. And some are very complex and have a little of everything. So why would they do that? What are they trying to get at when they make a supplement for stress response to support your stress response? Like, how do you do that? Well, if you dial this back, and, and this is one of those things that, um, uh, because I'm just giving information again, this is not medical advice, and I'm just trying to describe how's your body normally do it? What does it use to normally transact all of this business? And so what would you know, a supplemental approach be trying to recreate, that's how I'm going to go about talking about it. Now, remember we talked about how, how we eat and the timing of eating and, you know, eating with, you know, low glycemic index and all that, that's important. Well, that's sort of the start because that can either— the way you eat can either make your stress system more taxed or less, but it can also feed these nutrients better or worse. Moving your muscles around can help you with metabolism. and stuff, all that stuff we talked about. Well, if you look at it, why would the most of them have some B vitamins and usually vitamin C? Well, one of the interesting things is vitamin C. We talked a lot in 2020 about COVID and vitamin C. I just put a new newsletter out about COVID and vitamin C. You can go on the website or go to either my Instagram or Facebook and get that new newsletter. But vitamin C, what I usually say about it is our humans don't make our own vitamin C, which is true. So we have to get it from eating it, right? And we need it. It's water soluble, so we don't store it. And I always say, for the most part. Well, the reason I say for the most part is that the one place that you do store a little bit of vitamin C, and there's a couple other little places that are kind of Microscopic is in the adrenal glands, and is actually research that looked at do the adrenal what do the adrenal glands do with the vitamin C that they have? Why would the adrenal glands store vitamin C, especially in humans where we don't make our own and we don't tend to store it anywhere else? Well, it turns out that if you get a stress signal, whether it's a normal stressor like the morning curve of waking up where your brain. says, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna wake the system up and the adrenals put out some corticoids, some of the steroids, or you get an outside stressor running from a bear or something like that. It turns out that that signal makes your adrenal glands dump out, uh, I don't know, it's, it's not all of their vitamin C, but some of their stored vitamin C. So the adrenal glands actually do that. Now, the research that looked at that was looking at all sorts of things around stress response, et cetera. But the interesting thing about that was that it's probably dumped out for local use, let's say. So it's not, it's not like changing your blood levels in the rest of your body. But vitamin C, it turns out, is really critically important as a cofactor in a number of processes. Yeah. One is in the middle part of the adrenals, the adrenal medulla, in the chromaffin tissue. Vitamin C is going to be helpful in certain parts of that little chain or cascade making the dopamine-norepinephrine precursors to make your adrenaline or your epinephrine. Vitamin C is also critically responsible for some of the steps in getting rid of these things, especially adrenaline. And so if your body's having a stress response, it might not be bad to have some of the vitamin C mobilized. So vitamin C is a part of kind of both sides of the ledger. So what about the B vitamins? Now, B vitamins are also water soluble. We don't store them in our body, right? And the thing with the B vitamins to consider is because they're water soluble, again, we have to you know, eat them, get them in our food, et cetera. And so they tend to show up in a lot of supplements as well. And so when we're thinking about the B vitamins, sometimes you look at these stress response, you know, or adrenal supports or whatever you're looking at there in the supplement world. And they may look like they have sort of a B complex in them, which is probably not a bad way to go, but sometimes they'll have like a lot of extra of a You know, 2 B vitamins or something. So some of the common ones are, there might be a lot of vitamin B5, known as pantothenic acid. And one of the reasons for that is that on the— remember, there's the 2 players, there's the hormone and the neurotransmitter types. On the hormone side, the movement of the cholesterol skeleton around and getting enough fats to, you know, do the assembly and all kinds of things. Vitamin B5, the water-soluble B5 or pantothenic acid, is critical in certain parts of the movement of fats across cell membranes and also giving the energy to synthesize some of these things. So vitamin B5 is often used in that way to support adrenal things. Now, interestingly, on the other side, on the metabolism side, vitamin B5 doesn't do a lot with a lot of the getting rid of these products, but it gets involved in certain places. And you see this with the body and biochemistry where a lot of times the things that are on the, the making it side, the synthetic side, are on the getting rid of it side as well, or the elimination or metabolism side. Yeah. So B5 is a common one that you see. Another one that you see a lot is vitamin B6, and that's sometimes called pyridoxine or pyridoxal-5-phosphate is the active form. You see those a lot in these formulas, and B6 is used in a lot of places. It's involved in the synthesis side of a number of things, but it's especially involved in the elimination side. Vitamin B6 and then things like magnesium, the mineral, vitamin C. Sometimes they all work together in getting rid of some of these things. So again, you think of feeding the system, cover as many bases as you can. Another thing you see a lot in these, and maybe normal amounts, maybe a little extra, kind of like they do with B5, is vitamin B3. And that's usually in the form of niacinamide. So vitamin B3 comes in 2 chemical flavors, if you will. It's considered one nutrient, but it kind of has 2 forms. There's niacin, which you might have taken and then you flush. That's a— it's uncomfortable if you've— if you don't know that's coming. Niacin in high doses is prescribed for cholesterol issues and sometimes other things. And then there's its cousin, very, very close, called niacinamide. And it doesn't make you flush. It binds to all the same basic receptors. And niacinamide is often the one that's used in these particular supplements because it has a good affinity towards, you know, the brain and the nervous system and the adrenals, et cetera. Well, why would the B3, the niacin or niacinamide family, be important? Well, It's used all over the place in the stress response system. So for example, to get the enzymes so that you make all of the pieces to make the, you know, dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, or adrenaline, etc., up at the very beginning, you use a lot of vitamin B3 there. Use a lot of vitamin B3 in really in most of your neurotransmitter pathways on one side or the other. In some of the elimination pathways, there's a requirement for that. But then on the other side, if you look at the steroid side, the cortisol side, just to keep it simple, remember that's a bigger molecule, bigger process. Well, much like we use vitamin B5, pantothenic acid, for the putting things together and, you know, using it to help with all the energy requirements, vitamin B3 is taken And it— a pair of vitamin B3 will be put together and they'll be linked together by a sugar linkage. And there's a molecule nowadays, it's commonly talked about, so more people know about it, called NAD or nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. So it's 2 B3s hung together. Well, NAD is a A big source of energy. And it's, it's a, it's part of the energy currency. So if you think about both sides, the neurotransmitters and the steroids require a lot of energy for production, but the steroids really take a lot of energy. The nicotinamide, the B3 niacin family to feed the NAD system, big thing that's required. So you often see usually niacinamide form. Okay. One thing I would say, if you're looking at supplements, you know, small doses of niacin versus niacinamide, you might not notice, but there are people who are natural, they flush easily. Okay. And so if you've ever taken plain niacin and you flushed, you already know what that's like. It's, you know, it's very, very hot. It's like you fell in the pepper patch or something. Well, Well, if you've had that happen, it can happen even at lower doses. And a lot of times if you take even a lower dose on an empty stomach, you'll notice that you flush. It's pretty uncomfortable. So you might just want to watch that. And it's either niacin, just ends shorter word, or niacinamide ends in -amide. The niacinamide form won't make you flush and you'll still get the same same sort of neurological benefits, et cetera. Now, so, and there's other B vitamins such as B1 and B2, thiamine and riboflavin. And then there's some important ones that are related, like folates, folic acid relatives, and vitamin B12. Well, they come in in the last step of making the adrenaline or epinephrine. There's an enzyme there called N-methyltransferase, and that's methyltransfer enzymes usually use folic acid, B12, or both. It turns out that they, they use those, so you'll often see them there. Now, just one side note about B vitamins. Why would an adrenal support, you know, or a stress response support supplement Either they tend to fall in the category of very specific B vitamins or a lot of B vitamins. Well, the reason usually is, and this is just looking at it from a chemical point of view, if they have very specific B vitamins in them and maybe some of the plants, the herbs we're going to talk about in a second here, that's usually designed for somebody who's already getting other nutrients. They're on a multivitamin and a, you know, B complex or something like that. So they're Their bases are covered there. So the supplement designer is thinking, well, you're already taking a multivitamin or multivitamin and a B complex. This is just for the stress support. So there might be a lot of, say, the pantothenic acid, the B5, and some B6 and B3, and some minerals and stuff, and maybe herbs. The other side would be people or supplement designers looking at, well, The person's— this is going to be on top of just their regular diet, so they're going to have all the B vitamins in there, maybe with a little extra of those ones that we talked about. Now, it's important when you go beyond your diet with B vitamins that they do come in some kind of balance, because if you're taking like a lot of one B vitamin, um, they never work alone. Right. And so what's normally said, you know, is if you're going to increase the amount of one B vitamin, you should probably increase the other ones to go with it. Why would that be? Well, if you take a lot of one B vitamin, think of it where— remember this thing where you're either making, using, or eliminating these things? Well, what if that one B vitamin is involved in a making pathway and elimination pathway, and all you're getting is that one B vitamin? It's going to speed up those pathways it's involved in. Yeah. But they, as I say, they never work alone. So there might be 2 or 3 other vitamins that work with it. And so you're taking a lot of one, the other 2 or 3 you're not taking, you can actually deplete the other ones. So normally in these, if you're looking at a well-rounded idea beyond what you're eating for food, you should be having the rest of the B vitamins along with it. Now the next thing that you will see in these, and this is sometimes You know, people will think, oh, well, wonder why that's in there. You'll see minerals might be, you know, bigger name brand ones like magnesium or something, or some trace minerals might be in there. Like say, you know, zinc or selenium or something of that nature. You think, well, why is that in there? Well, the B vitamins are like vitamin C, they're water soluble. And they are mostly used, you know, so when I talk about making, using, or eliminating, right? So, you know, synthesis, metabolism, and elimination. The currency of those transactions is usually done by enzymes. Enzymes, these big protein molecules, but they operate at their best speed when they have cofactors. So you hear about cofactors, coenzymes, etc. Well, coenzymes or cofactors are Almost always, with some exceptions, almost always 2 parts. So they call them an organic and inorganic part. And all that means is there's usually a B vitamin and it's paired with an inorganic part, a mineral. So most coenzymes or cofactors are a B vitamin mineral together, and then they go and they sit at the site on usually the activation site on the enzyme, and so it operates properly. So if that's making something, you make it more efficiently. If it's using it, you use it more efficiently. If it's eliminating it, you eliminate more efficiently. If you only have the mineral or the vitamin and you're missing the other one, it's incomplete and it slows down. And if you don't have either one, it slows down even more. Okay, so minerals as part of the cofactor system are critical to making everything work to the degree that we've actually had patients where they were taking all the right, you know, B vitamins to support something and all this, and they didn't seem to be getting the clinical effect. And all we did was increase the amount of minerals going into their world, and suddenly everything started to work. It's literally that remarkable sometimes. So often, especially in these more balanced ones that, you know, they don't know if you're taking a multivitamin or not and have a lot of stuff, there'll be some of the minerals. For example, in many places where vitamin B6, so P5P or pyridoxine, the B6 vitamin, in many places it works as a cofactor, magnesium is almost always with it. There's over 100 enzymes in humans that that use those 2 together. So they're, you know, they, they run together. So just like I was saying, if you give a lot of one vitamin, one B vitamin, you can use up other ones because you're not giving the other ones. Same with the minerals. If you're speeding up these processes and your diet doesn't have enough trace minerals and other stuff in it, you might get deficient. So that's why they would put minerals in there as well. Now, That kind of covers the nutrient things. Now remember, number one, this is not medical advice. I'm just telling you how these things work and why people put things in supplements the way they do, etc. Number 2, remember that the base is super important. So that's what and how you eat. Talked about that last time. Moving your muscles around to increase the good metabolism. And then of course the brain, both directions, like what's coming in, but also how you're processing the stressors. But the supplemental things beyond what you eat can sometimes be helpful to kind of get the genie back in the bottle. Remember, when your stress response is out of balance, it's less a disease. It's not like, you know, having Cushing's disease or Addison's or something, and it's more of an imbalance and an overuse. And so it's like I was saying, it's a lot like either your You know, you're out of shape and your muscles work, you're not dead, they just don't work that well, or you overtrain and now it's, you know, painful, or you have to rest and something. It's kind of like that. So when you think about it, these nutrients are important. So if they're going to put those in a supplement, then that's great. But then you see, if you look at, you know, 10 stress support supplements, let's say, You're going to see a core group of plant medicines in them. And so I'm going to go through kind of the, the big 5. Now there's a bunch of other ones. So for those of you who are really into herbs, I'm not going to get into all of them because the list goes on and on. But I wanted to talk about the ones you most commonly see and, you know, why you would see those sorts of things. So the first thing I want to say is, if you look at stress response and plant medicines. This, this goes back literally, if you look at Chinese medical traditions, or Ayurvedic medical traditions, or native medical traditions from almost anywhere, they use plant medicine, goes back thousands of years. So this is nothing new. Okay, nothing at all new. But if you look and say, well, where did modern science come up with the idea that, you know, we might want to look at using this plant for stress response or something like that? Well, there's a couple of things. One of them is that there's a number of things in the world of the drug world, the pharmacology world that, you know, originally came from chemicals that were You know, extracted from plants. And that's kind of one part of the pharmacognosy part of pharmacology. Not really going to talk about that because that's a whole other— it gets a little deeper a little quicker. But then there are just things that were observed, and then they decided to study them. Now, there's a lot of things in the world that cause science to focus and speed up. If you're listening in 2021, so this is the live version of this is February 25th, 2021. We have lived through 2020 with COVID-19 coronavirus. What you've seen if you watch research, if you look at my research summaries, is there are things published in a shorter amount of time than, than you normally ever see. Yeah. So there's research done, there's research funded, okay? When there's emergencies and all this stuff going on, research speeds up and gets funded. It gets very laser-focused, okay? The other thing beyond pandemics and infections and stuff like that that will speed up research and development are wars, okay? That's, you know, humans. We, we have infectious diseases and we also have wars. Humans do a lot of that. And so if you look back at the research around some of these plants I'm going to talk about, um, World War II especially was a big time where they started looking at, well, traditionally this plant is used for sleep or stress response or whatever, uh, and it's very abundant. Could this be something that we could use to enhance the the soldiers, you know, or the, the war machine really. So if you look back, there's often a lot of research around, you know, enhancement of the soldiers in a war, and it's done on both sides, etc. So if you look back at that, there's a term called adaptogen. So if you study, you know, tradition— traditional herbal medical traditions, there's In English, it's adaptogen. There's something similar to that in every tradition. And it literally kind of means bringing things back to balance or kind of back to the middle. So adaptogenic herbs kind of got a big splash in the medical literature starting, you know, before and mostly during World War II. Start to see that term. Now, it's not as much goes on after after wars, but you see in countries where they traditionally use herbal medicine more research about this. You may see less, say, in the US and more in Asian countries and in a lot of European countries, etc. So the first one— these don't go in any particular order— is an herb that you see a lot called astragalus. Okay, and there's a longer name, but astragalus. Hongkui is its other name, but astragalus is usually how we see it. And astragalus is one of these that's both an adaptogen for the nervous system, but it's also very helpful with certain immune properties. Remember I said that the stress response and the immune response intertangle? That happens. So astragalus is one. It's got a large amount of research around it. And so that's why you would tend to see that one in there. There's another one called schisandra, okay, which is common names are like 5-flavor fruit or magnolia berry. But schisandra is another one that you commonly see in these. And that's probably one of the more common, you know, adaptogenic herbs. It's sort of a, you know, pure kind of fits right in the middle of that adaptogenic space. Then there's one called Siberian ginseng, also known as Eleutherococcus, and then there's different species. But Siberian ginseng, the thing you have to look at with the ginseng family, and there's lots of research around the ginseng family because certain members of it are used in cancer And some are used in stress response, and some are used for immune things elsewhere. And there's a lot of different ginsengs, okay, in the world. This is particularly the eleuthero form of Siberian ginseng, and that's the form you often see in these sorts of stress response formulas as well. Then there is a plant called rhodiola, okay? It's not rhododendron or any of the other ones, rhodiola. And it, it's kind of one of these plants that has the same scientific and common name usually. Rhodiola is one that's sort of famous for acting in 2 different directions based on, you know, how much of it a person would take. But Rhodiola is often seen in these formulas. Then there's one that's very popular nowadays, and it's very useful and largely comes from the Ayurvedic traditions. And that's called ashwagandha. Ashwagandha is— its technical name is Withania. It's also known as Indian ginseng or winter cherry, but it's one of these that's more of an adaptogen than anything else. Ashwagandha is sort of a little like astragalus where it does a whole bunch of other things as well. So those are sort of the big 5. There's a lot of other plants that might be in there. But here's the way to look at it. You want to do your basics. You want to work on the basics of food, muscle, and brain. You want to make sure your diet is rich in nutrients and low in junk. Then, in my opinion, you're better off starting with a multivitamin, multimineral that covers a lot of the bases. Then if you want to add some of these things, things, I would really seek the advice of somebody who does this sort of thing, whether it's a specialized nutritionist, naturopathic doctor, functional medicine doctor, chiropractors, Chinese medicine practitioners, Ayurvedic practitioners, on and on. There's a million people who do this sort of stuff. If you're going to get real specific, because here's what will happen the more specific you get, you start adding maybe a lot of an herb, Or something else? Well, number one, there are some herbs that might not be for you, and it'd be good if you knew that and had a professional helping you. But the other thing is, sometimes in the beginning, if your stress response is all over the map and you start taking this, and it might be the right stuff, you may get out of balance and you may feel not so good and need things rebalanced. That's when it's good to get some professional help. But we're running really low on time here, about to get the electronic hook, as I like to call it. And so I want to just sum up by saying First, we— this is part 2 of 2 parts on what to do about stress. This show, we talked about the transactional nature of making both the hormonal side and the adrenaline side of the stress response, and how there's the making that requires a lot, there's the use that requires a lot, and then the elimination or metabolism that requires a lot. And you want to build from the bottom up. So you want the, the basics of you know, food, muscle, and brain. And you want to have, you know, supplemental nutrients that are very broad and then get more specific. And the more specific you get, in my opinion, you should really work with somebody who does that sort of medicine and get some specific advice. But we are out of time now for Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. I will see you all on the radio or podcast next week. We're going to have an interview with somebody who just came out with a new book about sea Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, something I speak about sometimes. This is someone I've worked with and they have a great new book. So we'll be— watch the promotions for that coming up next week. But this is Dr. Paul Anderson for Medicine and Health with Dr. Anderson, and I will see you all on the radio next week.
