0:00:00.0 S?: The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of Mother's Market and Kitchen. Mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

0:00:12.0 Kimberly King: Hello, I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the Mother's Market Podcast, a show dedicated to the truth, beauty and goodness of the human condition. On today's episode, there's been quite a bit of stress and pressure put on women over the past few months, having to work, teach kids at home and keep up with everything else that can drain even the most prepared. We are all about women's health, so listen close, and you may be able to get some tips on finding balance.

0:00:40.7 KK: And first up, Jessica Mulligan is the founder of Winged Women's Wellness and has spent her life in wellness. She was an instrumental force in bringing ingestible collagen to North America, and is now on a mission to do the same in promoting products that tailor to a woman's body, physical and mental health. And we're here also joined by Timothy Mount, co-founder of Winged Women's Wellness and Tim is a Certified Clinical Nutritionist, a Certified Master Herbalist, and over the past decade in the natural products industry, Tim has presented at many of the leading natural health conventions and has been featured on over 30 of the top natural health radio shows nationwide. Tim is the formulator of the Winged product line and sees the body through the lens of the functional and holistic medicine, which views the body as an interconnect system by supporting the whole body with targeted nutrients, and he believes he can help women be the best versions of themselves. I love having both of you on here today. We welcome you to the Mother's Market Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

0:01:41.4 Jessica Mulligan: Thanks, Kimberly.

0:01:41.7 Timothy Mount: Thank you so much.

0:01:44.8 KK: Yeah, Jess, starting with you, why don't you fill our audience in a little bit on your mission and your work before we get to today's show topic?

0:01:50.8 JM: Oh, awesome. Thank you for asking. So Winged is a... We launched in 2019, next week is our two-year anniversary. And our entire brand is really built around creating products and community that help empower women. So all of our products are formulated specifically for a woman's body and really tailored to our unique hormonal surges and different need states. So everything that Winged does is rooted in mood, with the idea that when a woman feels good and she isn't bogged down with feeling stressed or anxious, that she's unstoppable.

0:02:30.1 KK: I love that. Wow, no time like the present. I'm sure with that coming through COVID and then just all the changes that women go through anyway, so... Yay for you. Today we're talking about women's health, of course. And so, Jessica, I'm gonna start with you again, we all know that the last year or so has been so stressful for all of us, but can you put into perspective, especially in regard to the change in women's lives during this pandemic?

0:02:56.8 JM: Yeah, sure. Yeah, exactly. COVID has been... Has wreaked havoc on all of us. There aren't many people that are exempt from that, but women in particular have really had a heavier burden than men. And just during COVID, there was one-and-a-half million men that left the workforce compared to 2.8 million women. And the reason that is, is because women, because of cultural and societal norms are thought to be the nurturers and often are. And so they took on the role of homeschooling, of really keeping this new norm together. And just with the pressure of this entirely new thing where they're homeschooling their kids, they have to leave their job, a lot of women kept their job, but they're still taking on that extra responsibility, it has really... Yeah, it's put a huge burden on us. And a lot of women are suffering from mental health, mental wellness right now in terms of anxiety, depression, and insomnia.

0:04:08.9 KK: Good for you for recognizing that. And you're so right, it's a... We've always sort of been able to multi-task, but we've been tasked to be the teachers now, homeschooling, working and balancing the family. So I think it's, again, the timing that you are presenting with your women's wellness is perfect. You mentioned women's experiencing stress differently than men, can you talk a little bit about that, expand on that, and is their research about women with stress?

0:04:38.3 JM: Yeah, to put it simply, and Tim's gonna get really... My partner Tim, who is this incredible master herbalist and also really is specialized in hormonal health, so he'll get into more of that later, but we have different hormonal surges and throughout the month our pre-ovulation, just all through the different phases, our estrogen and progesterone swings really it can swing from high to low very rapidly. So because of that, we do experience stress differently. Also, what we talked about earlier, the multitasking pre-COVID, we take on so much more. Sorry to the men out there, we love you, we know you're doing... [chuckle] you're doing the best you can, but women take on more, we take on more.

0:05:29.6 KK: Yes, yes we do.

[laughter]

0:05:33.4 JM: There are very few exceptions that I've met in my life where that is untrue. But yeah, so all of this really lends to us being more stressed out, and so statistically, women are twice as likely as men to experience anxiety disorders, to experience depression disorders and insomnia. So all three of these things also, PTSD and migraines. We're twice as likely as men to experience all of those things. We are stressed out. We need a little more help or maybe a nanny. [laughter]

0:06:03.6 KK: Right, exactly. And maybe a drink every now and then too.

0:06:08.1 JM: Yes, a glass of wine.

[overlapping conversation]

0:06:11.1 KK: Oh my goodness... Ah right, exactly. But I feel like you've been living in my household here because I am a migraine sufferer. And of course the hormones. Don't even get me started. So I think this was meant to happen today.

0:06:22.4 JM: A hundred percent, and I'm not just living in your household, I'm living in my household and living in all of the women's that in my orbit that I know. And that's what this brand was created, like, what are, like, the real pain points of women right now and... Yeah, yeah.

0:06:36.7 KK: Well, good for you for listening and speaking up and doing something about it. So, I know literally, you had your own experience with stress, just can you talk a little bit about that, explain what happened and how you found relief and also talk about techniques and supplements and any other things that we can do as women.

0:06:57.4 JM: Okay. Yes. Well, I do have some knowledge and techniques because of what I went through a few years ago. So back story, my entire life, I had never thought twice about mental wellness, I was always very easy going, I could sleep anywhere. I fell asleep standing up once, I swear to God, my grandmother will tell you this is true. I just... My nickname was Smiley growing up, I was just a real even keeled kid, you know. And a couple of years ago, I had a series of life changes that happened really rapidly, and I experienced debilitating anxiety for about a year, and I until this point really didn't have a grasp on what anxiety was truly. You know, I might have said... I knew it a little bit from, like, embarrassment. Maybe you say something embarrassing and you're anxious about it.

0:07:49.3 JM: But I didn't know... I didn't really know what the physical feeling of anxiety was. And so for me, personally, it manifested in social anxiety. I was... I was really nervous in groups of people, I would get sweaty palms, but not just in people that I didn't know, I was even felt uncomfortable around friends and family. I felt like I couldn't authentically connect to anyone in my orbit, and I'm a person that built my life on about... You know... Connecting has always been easy. So that was terrifying. I was sitting straight up at night, I had horrible anxiety, I would sit up at 4 o'clock in the morning with a pounding chest, just like out of a dead sleep. I would just sit up scared, you know, it was just being stuck in fight or flight is what's happening when that happens.

0:08:33.7 JM: And there were a bunch of other things that I was going through, I felt so uncomfortable in my own skin. And during this process, I started talking, it was really therapeutic for me to talk to the women in my life. And I'm like, Am I... "Am I ever gonna feel okay again, like, what is happening right now?" And what I found was that... You know, I talked to everyone, I would talk to people on planes. And I'm like, I'm really feeling bad. Like, "Has this ever happened to you?" And all these women, you know, if they hadn't had it as severe as I did, which a lot of them did, they were still feeling anxious or overwhelmed almost every single day. And that's kind of the light bulb that went off for me like, "Wow, what is going on here?".

0:09:17.7 JM: So I started... You know, I was really desperate to feel better, I started... I went to an endocrinologist, I was like in therapy, I was in tapping, I was doing all these things and some of the techniques that worked for me... Well, first of all, I was sent this big box of products, and CBD was one of the things that I took that helped me sleep through the night for the first time in eight months, it was amazing. But I was also taking all these other female-specific herbs like evening primrose oil, Chaste tree berry, that helped me balance my hormones 'cause my hormones were all over the place during this period. And I slowly started to feel better, so that's what I would say like for people listening, I would definitely get labs done, get your blood work done. Look, if you're going through anything like this, please rule out that it's not a hormonal issue, and then... And with that also with your labs and your blood work, check your vitamin D, check your B-12, like that's the first thing you're gonna do.

0:10:14.1 JM: Take herbs and supplements and products that are formulated for you, you know, definitely if you're a woman, we are built differently than men. And then some of the other things I incorporated were just like this act of surrender. I would say a mantra to myself at night when I was really scared, and I would just repeat the word surrender, surrender, and that really helped because I realized that often anxiety is tied to just uncertainty, being scared of something that you don't know the outcome of, so surrendering to that really helps. And the last thing that I will say that really helped me, which sounds crazy, is running outside without music. That sounds so crazy, but what I would do is it would force me to smell the salt water in the air, it would force me to notice the birds, it would... My senses came alive and it really, really helped, so that's what helped me, and I try to tell everyone I can that has any sort of... Is feeling anxious, and a lot of my friends have said those things have helped them too.

0:11:19.9 KK: I really liked that, especially what you just last said about being outside, vitamin D, but also smelling. I was just on a power walk with my girlfriend today, and literally there was a truck of clippings of mowed lawn. I was like, "Oh my gosh... " It just brought me... It energized me, I love that. And that's just fresh air and being out... Life vibrant again, isn't it?

0:11:42.9 JM: A hundred percent.

0:11:47.0 KK: Oh, Well, I'm so glad that you're taking your pain and turning it into something positive for others, because I know a lot of women are listening right now and going, "Wow, I'm exactly going through that." And I know for that just your story, thank you for sharing that and being vulnerable and doing something about that. It sounds like, yeah, you're on a mission to spread a word about stress and how it affects women, and I know you've differentiated that a little bit with men as well, but you're really talking, speaking from the heart. You... Talk a little bit about how you go about with the herbs, herbal supplements, and how do you find out what's right for you, you mentioned a couple of them, that are evening primrose, but how do you do that? But you said labs and blood work, but do you have to go somewhere to find that out?

0:12:31.3 JM: There's a lot of resources online, which is really great that you can look at. And Tim, my partner, who's gonna talk in a few minutes, he actually taught me that, that when you get your blood work done, you might get it back and you're reading it and you're saying, "Wow, everything is in the normal range," but what you wanna research is what is actually the optimal range, because normal is not a good predictor for anything really. It just means you're like, "You still have a beating heart," and maybe I'm going, no, you really wanna be in the optimal range. So, research that and you can... It's as easy as Googling optimal levels of vitamin D blood work and making sure you're in the optimal range. And then I would hook up with a naturopath in your area, get on Yelp, put in naturopath, find it. If resources are tight and money's tight and you can't afford to go to a naturopath, 'cause they're not cheap, the internet is amazing. It's a double-edged sword, of course.

0:13:29.5 JM: But you can find trusted resources out there. If any women that are listening wanna actually DM or email us, I'm Jess@wingedwellness.com. And our Instagram is wingedwomen.com. And if you have any specific questions, even if a source you find online is reliable and you want us to take a look, we're happy to. I don't know that I could tell you 100%, but we're happy to help in any way. But it's... Yeah, it's just kind of really fleshing, fleshing that out, like what is causing the problem? Is it a dietary thing? Is it an environmental thing? And you just have to get to the root of the problem.

0:14:07.5 KK: Great information, and I again, really appreciate that you really are meeting women where they're at right now, where we're at, so thank you. And this is so interesting, we have to take a quick break, so stay with us more when we come right back. Thank you.

0:14:19.8 S?: Welcome back to the Mother's Market Podcast. And we wanna remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching Mother's Market or download the show from our website, www.mothersmarket.com, click the link for podcast and listen to past shows. Plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at www.mothersmarket.com.

0:14:43.6 KK: And now back to our interview with Jessica Mulligan and Timothy Mount, and we're talking about women's health issues. Your company is Winged Women's Wellness, and it's been so interesting speaking with Jess, but now we're gonna talk to Tim. Maybe Tim, you could give us your perspective on what is natural health.

0:15:01.5 TM: Yeah, sure. So Jess related an experience that she had, just with her anxiety and Jess and I have been friends for a decade now. And she would call me up and I felt so bad, and always wanted to figure out a way to help. And one of the ways that Winged was started was by some of these conversations that Jess and I had. And knowing each other so well, she knew that I had a background in natural health, and my experience in natural health was a bit different than a lot of other people.

0:15:34.0 TM: There's different ways that you can study, and some people will do ayurvedic medicine or traditional Western herbs, some people, which is great, really follow Western medicine. But I always felt like there was something missing. And so my experience was, when I was really young, my mother got cancer, she got leukemia. She's still alive today, this is 32 years later. And I had to basically take her health into my own hands as I got older. She didn't really... She went through chemo, she had some recovery, but she kept having this relapsing bout of leukemia over and over again, and she kept having to get treatment and nothing was actually getting cured. Nothing was getting fixed and they were keeping her alive, so I really from the bottom of my heart love Western medicine, but I started looking into, "Hey, what could be causing... What's the root cause of what's going on, why is she having these issues?"

0:16:35.7 TM: And without getting into too much detail, it really turned out that after a ton of research, I realized that she had 14 huge metal fillings in her mouth, and she was a dental hygienist and around a bunch of mercury. And so with my modest means at the time in my 20s, I paid for her to get all of her teeth fixed and all of the mercury out. And lo and behold, the leukemia didn't come back again, she would have 10-12 years. And so that was my first experience of going, "Hey, what if we looked at root causes instead of just putting some band-aids on things?" And you always want to have that treatment in Western medicine that helps people when they're in a time of crisis. But I had always thought, what if we could prevent that? What if we could look at the body and before it actually fell off the cliff and was broken, what if we could do something about some of these root causes?

0:17:33.2 TM: So, at the time, I was a real estate agent, I had my own real estate brokerage, I was doing very well, but my passion really lied in this experience with my mom. And so I put myself back through school and I started with traditional herbalism and Clinical Nutrition, which was great. And I learned a tremendous amount about the body, but I didn't wanna stop there. I discovered a philosophy or a discipline called functional medicine, and functional medicine is kind of the best of both worlds. Herbology is great for long-term health, for nutrition, for helping with more chronic issues, whereas Western medicine is really good about fixes and understanding in detail about the body, functional medicine marries the two. It's a way of looking at the body as an interconnected system. It's saying, "Okay, well, you don't just have your nervous system, you don't just have your digestive system, those two can be connected." And so I started getting into functional medicine and I was gonna go back and be a doctor, but there weren't really any very specific paths to become a functional medicine doctor.

0:18:48.4 TM: So, I went and did my own trainings and I did my own research and got a ton of different certifications in functional medicine. And basically the idea is that instead of the body, waiting until the body is broken, we look at the body and where are things starting to become imbalanced? Are there different systems within the body that is causing one particular issue? Stress, for example, or anxiety as Jess has been talking about, it doesn't just have one cause, it's a number of different things. It could be somebody, what they're eating, it could be a mental stressor that's coming in, it could be their sleep patterns for anxiety. There are so many different ways to look at it, and then how do you then support somebody to feel better. It's one issue, but there could be a number of different causes and in different ways, kind of more of a symphony of a way to fix those problems.

0:19:47.8 TM: So, functional medicine, for example, if we were gonna look at somebody and they were gonna get a blood test, Jess was talking a lot about blood tests, your cholesterol could come back high, and here's kind of a very obvious difference between functional medicine versus western medicine. In functional, or in Western medicine, your cholesterol comes back high and they go, "You better take Lipitor, gotta get that cholesterol down because you're at an increased risk for heart disease," which is good, you're right. You do wanna get the cholesterol down. Functional Medicine says, "Why is the cholesterol high in the first place? What's causing that cholesterol to be high?" And people are like, "Oh, it's your diet, you're eating too many cheeseburgers." While in reality, 80% of the cholesterol that your body produces is internally, it has nothing to do with what you eat, only 20% is. So, in functional medicine, we go, well, if the body is producing 80% of your cholesterol, that's the real issue as to why your cholesterol is high.

0:20:42.6 TM: It turns out cholesterol is the mother of all hormones. And so if your cholesterol is high the body goes, "Hey, I better ramp up my cholesterol production really highly because I know I'm so stressed out and I need so many stress hormones that I need a ton of cholesterol in my body to produce enough cortisol enough with my stress hormone." And so that's when... That example for me was really a light bulb and I went, "Oh, okay, we don't wanna just artificially take Lipitor to bring your cholesterol down, what if you can manage stress and your body will say, "Hey, I don't need to produce the extra cholesterol." It'll naturally come down because I'm supporting my body and not causing that reaction to happen." So, that's kind of where I come from when I'm looking at products, looking at putting plans together to help people out. And I'm the formulator for Winged, so, that's kind of the perspective that I use when I'm formulating a product, is how can we look at these different systems, look at the root causes and really get at the cause of everything to stop those things from breaking in the end. Let's stop that issue before it actually becomes a major crisis in the body.

0:21:57.0 KK: You know what, I love that, Tim, and thank you for sharing your story as well. But literally, I love that you're finding the solutions of all of this, the root causes. So, you talked about stress, and it is pretty much everybody's story, especially in this past year. So, I think you have job security, A, but also talk about, what is stress? You talked about the hormones and literally you talked about... I know it's the Winged Women's Wellness, but I know it affects both men and women. But what is stress?

0:22:32.3 TM: Yeah. So, stress is one of those things where people say, "Oh, I feel stressed." It's kind of this general concept, I think in a lot of people's minds, but they don't actually know, what is it? Okay, they know when they're stressed, but what's going on? Is it just some general concept? But when you actually look at it medically, there's a very specific definition, and the definition is when you have stress hormone circulating around in your body, and the stress hormone most detrimental is high cortisol levels. So, cortisol is released by your adrenal glands. They sit on top of the kidneys, and cortisol is actually really important on a day-to-day basis, but at low levels. So, a lot of people have heard fight or flight response, a lot of times that is more like adrenaline, which is another stress hormone, but usually that goes away. That's kind of a temporary thing. The real issue in today's world is when you have the other stress hormone cortisol at high levels, because you're feeling whatever the trigger is, you're feeling stressed, those high levels chronically on a day in and day-out basis, that's what causes a ton of damage in the body.

0:23:47.1 TM: And when those levels are elevated, it affects everything. Cortisol is just wreaking havoc on your body. And so the question then becomes, okay, we know what stress is, it's the chronic release, we're talking about chronic stress, the chronic release of cortisol and high cortisol levels. So, what can be done about it? First of all, why are you having those high cortisol levels? And then what can we do to help with that? And so there's a lot of common triggers, mental stress is very common these days. Jess was talking about staying home. I have a eight-year-old daughter, she's home from school, I'm trying to work, we're having a start-up business, and then I'm trying to get Zoom to work on her second grade class. Relationships and family and work, all of that. So mental triggers can actually cause a physical stress reaction. So, it doesn't have to be something that's physical to cause a physical stress reaction. So, you can have something happen in your life that will cause your body to release really high doses of cortisol.

0:24:54.8 TM: Dietary choices are a really big trigger, and there's two that I like to point out whenever I'm educating about stress. The first one is caffeine, and first of all, disclaimer here, I drink caffeine on a daily basis, so I am not trashing caffeine. So let's get that out of the way.

0:25:13.2 KK: I think we all do, right?

0:25:15.3 TM: It's good to know... Yeah, exactly. What does caffeine do? Well caffeine doesn't give you "energy". Energy is produced by the cells with glucose and blood sugar and... Caffeine is a stimulant. Well, caffeine actually releases... Causes your body to release cortisol, so you're almost artificially causing your body to release a stress hormone because cortisol actually will rev your body up, that's one of the things that happens when you drink a lot of caffeine. So I hear a lot of times when people drink too much coffee, they feel anxious. Well, that's why the caffeine is making you release cortisol, you're in fight or flight, and then you feel that feeling of anxiety. So it's a really common thing. So if you're addicted to that caffeine, if you're drinking two, three, four cups a day, you might wanna think about dialing that back a little bit.

0:26:07.1 TM: The other really big thing that causes cortisol release, especially chronically for a dietary choice are carbohydrates. And carbohydrates are not just sugar, so it's not just like eating dessert every day. It's actually pasta, rice, bread, those types of things, even complex carbohydrates. And it's kind of a complex interaction, but when you eat too much of either carbohydrates or just regular sugar, your body has a blood sugar spike, and then your body says, "Too much blood sugar, I need to pull it all out of my blood stream." And then the body goes, "Oh no, I over-reacted." Then you have low blood sugar, so that's the crash that people feel when they eat either a high carbohydrate diet or they have too much sugar. Well, when you have low blood sugar, guess what happens, your body releases a ton of cortisol. So carbohydrates are a really, really important thing to keep under control if you don't wanna cause a dietary stress response, so caffeine and carbohydrates I'd be really careful with.

0:27:16.4 TM: There's some other things too, like lifestyle choices can cause chronic stress. If you're not sleeping on a regular basis, going to bed every day at 10 o'clock and then waking up at six or seven or whatever, and getting your eight hours of sleep, when you start staying up really late on a Friday and Saturday night... And I do this too, but that disruption of the sleep wake cycle will cause you to have fatigue the next morning, and then what do you do? Well, you drink some caffeine, right, and then you drink another cup because you're still dragging. Okay, well then you have high cortisol throughout the whole day, then you can't get to bed the next day, right? And then you just feel tired the following day, and then you drink more caffeine. So it's kind of this self-perpetuating loop. So your lifestyle choices can cause a stress response as well. So those are some of the main things when we're talking about stress to be aware of, and just to try to get into this rhythm, make sure you do whatever you can to minimize work stress or family and relationship stress, careful of the caffeine, careful of the carbohydrates, and try to get on a good sleep cycle would be my top recommendations for people.

0:28:23.6 KK: That's so interesting Tim, and thank you for talking really about that cortisol where it's coming from and... The caffeine. Yeah, I'm gonna have to dial that way back, but...

0:28:33.4 TM: I'm on a caffeine detox right now, and I tell you it's not fun, I'll drink like a half a cup in the morning, but it takes a little while to get over it, but once you do, you start feeling better long-term. It really is worth it if you can get through that first week or so.

0:28:50.5 KK: Right, thank you. I'm gonna try that and everybody's gonna wanna get away from me. You mentioned adaptogens, which is a term many of our listeners may have heard of, but may not know exactly what an adaptogen is. Can you summarize what makes an adaptogen different from other nutrients and herbs?

0:29:05.8 TM: Yeah, So adaptogens are kind of what it sounds like. It helps your body... Yeah, it helps your body adapt. So adaptogens are very specific for helping with stress. So we've kind of established, most of us are stressed out, right, and we need some help and a few things happen. The glands that produce cortisol, especially at high levels on a consistent basis, week after week, month after month, they get tired, just like a muscle, if you were to overwork it every day, your muscle is just gonna get tired and essentially it's gonna break down. So supporting adrenal health is really important, and also controlling how much stress hormone cortisol is released from your adrenal hormones is also really important. So that's what adaptogens do, it's kind of this special class of herb that helps to support adrenal health. So if you're adrenal glands are fatigued, you can help to recover the vitality of those, so it's not feeling overwhelmed, you don't feel overwhelmed, and your body isn't running behind.

0:30:11.5 TM: And so with adaptogens, they have some very specific properties. So there's a ton of herbs, literally thousands of herbs out there, but there's very few that are considered adaptogens. So the first classification for an adaptogen is, it has to help control stress. The other qualification for you to use something as an adaptogen is it works on multiple body systems. So if I start talking about different adaptogens, which hopefully we'll get to a few of them that are my favorite, you can assume that everything that I'm talking about helps you deal with stress and help support your adrenal gland. Secondarily, it's gonna help with two, three other body systems, and again, in functional medicine, if cortisol is just wreaking havoc on your body, it breaks down your skin and the collagen in your skin, it imbalances hormones and hormonal production.

0:31:08.3 TM: It can cause inflammation throughout the body. There's just a ton of things that stress causes. So if you're gonna take an adaptogen, you wanna look at the secondary benefits. So it helps with stress and then maybe it helps with immune support or maybe it helps with hormonal balancing. The other qualifications are it has to be used for hundreds of years and it has to be very, very safe. So adaptogens should be taken long-term, it's not a quick fix. And that's really kind of an important thing I think in today's society is instant gratification, we want something to work the next day. Adaptogens... If your body has been breaking down from chronic stress for two, three, four years, it's gonna take some time to rebuild and rebalance the body. And so adaptogens will rebalance the body, it will help control stress and it will help you find homeostasis, but it might take a little bit of time.

0:32:10.0 KK: So, to the women, how do we decide which adaptogens are best for us? It sounds like you have some favorites, talk a little bit about that, what's good and combinations. And should we take 'em all at the same time?

0:32:24.4 TM: Yeah. So I'm a big fan of multiple adaptogens. There's no real one magic bullet that is gonna cure all ails in the body, right?

0:32:35.8 KK: Mm-hmm.

0:32:37.2 TM: Adaptogens help with stress, but then work on the secondary body systems. So I like to blend them together personally, so you're kind of covering the whole body. A few of my favorites, and we'll start with CBD because this one has been really popular and it's kind of this new-ish discovery. It's been around forever, CBD and hemp, but it recently became federally legal and so it started to come onto the market. You started to actually be able to buy CBD because it doesn't contain THC, there's no effect of getting high or anything like that. CBD has a very specific function in the body. This is kind of cool, it's something that I bet most people haven't heard of. So we're all probably familiar with our digestive system, with our nervous system, with our immune system, our circulatory system. There is actually a system in the body called the endocannabinoid system, it's called the ECS. It is an actual thing, it's kind of like nerves that go throughout our entire body, and it's found in every tissue of the body, and it has little receptor sites. The endocannabinoid system, the ECS, is very specific for creating homeostasis within the body.

0:33:56.3 TM: So, what does CBD do? Well, our body produces cannabinoids that effect the endocannabinoid system. But because we're so stressed out, basically that ECS can't keep up, and we need to supplement and support that ECS, the endocannabinoid system, somehow as a supplement. So when you take CBD, it helps to support, nutritionally support, that ECS and then the ECS is able to do its job. And so what happens is, your body naturally just becomes more balanced. And so it's a real system, it's a real thing in the body, it was discovered back in the 1980s, and before we really never knew about it. So I really recommend CBD for everybody, personally, then we kind of build on that.

0:34:48.6 TM: Personally, I would look at ashwagandha, maca, an adaptogen called shatavari, which is very female-specific. Reishi and lion's mane are some of my favorites. And really, really quickly, I'll explain why, for each one. I won't get into too many details, but CBD helps with stress, I think of it kind of as the master adaptogen. But ashwagandha is really, really effective at strengthening the adrenal cortex, so people that are stressed out can help to support those adrenal glands very specifically. Maca, I think is great because it helps with female hormonal health and it's a very energizing herb. And adaptogen shatavari has been used literally for thousands of years in the east, it's a part of the asparagus family, actually. And its really good at not only controlling stress, but supports female hormonal balance and hormonal health, and reproductive organs. So, shatavari in particular is one that I would really recommend everyone look into. Lion's mane is great for not only stress, but also mood support and the nervous system, so brain functioning. And then reishi is excellent for stress and the immune system. So when you kinda combine some of these together, you get that total body effect where everything is helping with the stress response, but you're also getting those secondary benefits by supporting the other systems.

0:36:19.0 KK: Wow, I think that's interesting. I can't write fast enough with all these notes, that's great. Tell me a little bit about when and how someone should take an adaptogen and then also what benefits you will notice.

0:36:33.0 TM: Yeah, so as I mentioned, each adaptogen kinda has its own specific properties. They're all different plants and they all have different nutrients in them. And so when you're taking an adaptogen, I would be really familiar, and you can usually find this online, is know if it's like an energizing adaptogen, or kind of a sedating adaptogen, so you might wanna think about when you would take it. So, for example, maca or lion's mane would be really good in the morning because lion's mane is focusing, so you can focus throughout the day. Maca is energizing, so you can have energy throughout the day. But something like CBD is not really sedating, but a lot of people notice when they take CBD right before bed, it helps them sleep. So there are different times of day that you might wanna take each adaptogen and I would just kinda look it up.

0:37:35.7 TM: The other thing that I would focus on is, know yourself. Know what you're having issues with. Do you feel like your mood is all over the place, or are you feeling anxious? Well, you might wanna look at adaptogens for mood support or hormonal balancing. Are you feeling like you're stressed out? Well maybe you would wanna look at ashwagandha instead because that's very stress-specific and helps with the adrenal glands. Are you getting sick a lot? So you might wanna gravitate towards reishi.

0:38:07.7 KK: So once you know yourself and what your issues are, you might already have an idea about what your imbalance might be in the body, and then you can just do some research online and go, "Oh, okay." Google is an amazing thing, amazing tool. Adaptogens for immune support, and then reishi is probably gonna pop up number one. And so that might be a really good way to do it. But just remember that adaptogens are a slow build, so you're gonna start noticing things kind of subtly, maybe the first week or so that you take it, but give it a month. Give it two months. Give it three months. It's kind of like watching your hair grow, you wake up every morning and you're like, I think my hair is longer, I can't notice it, but after a month, you're like, "Wow, my hair is a lot longer than it was a month ago." It's kinda like growing hair, just stick with it, it's happening, but it's slowly, day-to-day happening.

0:39:01.2 KK: Oh, I like it. That's great advice, and I know you're right, we do get impatient and we want it to happen ASAP, but in the long term, I think we're gonna be healthier in the future.

0:39:11.0 KK: Thanks so much for your time, some really great advice and we really appreciate your knowledge and look forward to having you on the Mother's Market Podcast again. In the meantime, you can get more information on the website, which is wingedwellness.com, W-I-N-G-E-D wellness dot com. Thanks again so much, and we look forward to our next visit.

0:39:35.4 KK: If you wanna learn more health information, check out www.mothersmarket.com, get delicious recipes and health guidelines to keep your body in great shape. Thanks for listening to the Mother's Market Podcast and for shopping at Mother's Market.

0:39:47.5 S?: The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of Mother's Market and Kitchen. Mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.