Podcast 249: Herbalists’ Views on the Top-Selling Herbs (Part 5): Ginkgo, Guarana, Maca

15 May, 2025

In our fifth installment in this series, we address the facts & fictions about ginkgo, guarana, and maca supplements in commerce! These were #13, 14, and 15 on the top-selling herbs list for 2023 (the most recent data).

This series is all about sharing a practicing herbalist’s understanding of herbs which are very popular as commercial supplements and other mass-market products. We want to share the perspectives of both traditional and contemporary herbal practice, so people can understand that these are “good for” more than just what’s on their labels.

It’s too easy for herbs to be boxed in to smaller and smaller ranges of application when they’re commercialized. This is an antidote to that movement!

For practicing herbalists & clinicians, it’s very important to know well those herbs which are most commonly consumed. Your clients will ask you about them, or be taking them before they even visit you – so you’ve got to know what they do! You might be able to give advice about a better remedy, or a compensation for some effect of the plant. This can help your clients just as much as a new recommendation, so don’t neglect it.

If you’re new to herbalism, this can also serve as an inoculation against “herban legends” and misinformation – which is rampant on today’s internet.

13. Ginkgo – Ginkgo biloba

14. Guarana – Paullinia cupana

15. Maca – Lepidium meyenii

Find the previous episode of this series here:

Whether you’re a brand-new beginner or an herbalist with experience, it’s always helpful to study the herbs in depth! Our comprehensive presentation of herbal allies is in our Holistic Herbalism Materia Medica course. It includes detailed profiles of 100 medicinal herbs!

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Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.

Episode Transcript

Ryn (00:14):
Hi. I’m Ryn. And I’m here at Commonwealth Holistic Herbalism in Boston, Massachusetts and on the internet everywhere, thanks to the power of the podcast. All right. So, today we are continuing our series of herbalists’ views on the top selling herbs in commerce in the United States. Today we’re going to be talking about ginkgo, guarana and maca. Yes. So, previous episodes in this series are right here in the feed. There’s also links to each of the prior episodes in the show notes. So, if you want to learn more about green tea, fenugreek, ivy leaf, wheatgrass, beetroot, ginger, apple cider vinegar, cranberry, and the others, then… Yeah, psyllium, elderberry, turmeric, and ashwagandha, those are the ones. If you want to learn more about those, then check out previous episodes in this series. And if you’re here for the ginkgo, and the maca, and the guarana, then listen on. Before I jump in, I just want to give you my reclaimer. It’s where I remind you that I’m not a doctor. I’m an herbalist and a holistic health educator. The idea is discussed in this podcast do not constitute medical advice. No state or federal authority licenses herbalist in the US. So, these discussions are for educational purposes only. I want to remind you that good health doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. Good health doesn’t exist as one objective standard. It’s influenced by your individual needs, experiences, and goals. So, keep in mind I’m not trying to present a single dogmatic right way that you must adhere to. Everyone’s body is different. So, the things I’m talking about may or may not apply directly to you. But I hope that they’ll give you some new information to think about and some ideas to research further. Finding your way to better health is both your right and your own personal responsibility. That doesn’t mean you’re alone on the journey, and it doesn’t mean that you’re to blame for your current state of health. But it does mean that the final decision when you’re considering any course of action, whether it’s discussed on the internet or prescribed by a physician, that’s always your choice to make.

Ryn (02:21):
All right. So, this series again is just to look at the herbs that are most popular in commerce. We’re talking about supplements more so than bags of tea or bulk herbs at the apothecary shops, right? Capsules and gummies and that kind of thing are the primary products that are making the big bucks, making the big sales, and getting to you that way. And the goal with this sequence is just that I want folks to be well-informed about these very popular herbs. To be able to speak about them intelligently when people ask you questions, because they are going to. If you’re an herbalist, if you’re a local community herbalist, or a family herb expert, or whatever level you’re at, or whatever kind of practice you’ve got, people are going to ask you about these plants. So, I thought it would be a good idea to give you a bit of an herbalist perspective, both as a counterpoint and sometimes as a correction to the things that are being told to people in terms of marketing, and product placement, and advertising, and stuff like that.

#13 Ginkgo: Cognitive Support

Ryn (03:23):
So, then let’s talk about ginkgo. Ginkgo had a good year. The data we’re looking at here is from 2023. I’ve got the market report that I’m drawing from for this sequence in the links in the show note there. But yeah, so ginkgo saw an increase of 42% over the prior year sales. In all of the contemporary mainstream and commercial contexts that you’re going to encounter ginkgo, the main thing that people are selling it for and buying it for is cognitive support. All your thinky parts, you know? And the herb has a pretty good reputation, even amongst lay people and popular press, as an agent that can support good cognitive function, good, clear thinking. It can be helpful with problems like brain fog and even can be helpful in more severe issues like dementia, and senility, and Alzheimer’s.

Ryn (04:19):
Now, if you look at ginkgo capsules and products. If you look at a number of different products lined up against each other on Amazon or some other website. You’ll notice that if you look closely at them – you look at the supplement facts label – a lot of them are made in a similar way. And it’s what I call the 24/6 standard or 24/6 benchmark. What they would say is in my capsule is an extract of ginkgo. And what we’ve done is we’ve standardized this to contain 24% ginkgo flavone glycosides. Or sometimes that’s written ginkgolides but same group, right? And 6% terpene lactones. So, these are two groups of constituents that are found in ginkgo. Each one, the ginkgolides and the terpenes, has multiple members. But some or several members of each group have been found to be beneficial, have been found to be major contributors to its medicinal actions. So, when you make an extract of ginkgo like this, you have a much higher proportion of those constituents than you would get in the leaf or a tea made from the leaf of the plant. In essence, this kind of concentration represents a concentration level of about 50-to-one. So, if you imagine that your standard herbal tincture is often prepared at a one to five strength, this would be 250 times stronger than that if you were to have it as a liquid remedy, right? Most of the time these end up as little capsules. Or it’s like a resinous substance that’s inside of a capsule, and you swallow that down. But those are kind of two ways to express the same thing. A 50-to-one concentration, right? We made an extract of ginkgo. We then concentrate it down 50 times. Or we just set this target, and we say we’re going to make our extracts and then analyze it. And once we guarantee 24% ginkgo flavone glycosides and 6% terpene lactone, that’s where we’re going to say good. Put that in the capsules and ship it out, right?

Ryn (06:34):
Now remember, standardization here doesn’t mean that there is one standard that everybody must meet if they want to have a good product. It doesn’t mean that there’s a pharmacopeia book that says if you want to make a good ginkgo extract, it should be a 50-to-one concentrate. And it should have this percentage of ginkgolides and this percentage of terpenes. The word standard tends to make people think that. But standardization in the herbal products industry just means we, the individual company, have decided we will prepare our product in such a way that we meet these minimum representations each time. And we will do that through the process. The concentration process should guarantee that. We’ll also assess. We’ll take each batch. We’ll take a sample. We’ll check. We’ll make sure we hit those targets. That’s what we’ve got. With ginkgo we have an example of an herb where the standardization process used by multiple manufacturers turns out to be the same. And this is in contrast to certain herbs where this company might standardize to 10% of that constituent. That company standardizes to 5% of that constituent. And this third company standardizes to a whole different constituent in the same herb, right? So, for some plants the standardization is much more variable from company to company. With ginkgo it’s fairly consistent. You tend to see either ginkgo products that are extracted ginkgo made to this 24/6 standard, or ginkgo products that are just powder in a shell, right? That’s pretty much going to represent the whole field of products that are out there.

Ryn (08:13):
And so we want to wonder, well, why? Why are all these different companies deciding to make it in a similar way? Is it because they’re colluding with each other as part of a vast conspiracy? No, probably not. Is it because… Oh, here it is. It’s because there are scientific studies that have been done on 50-to-one ginkgo leaf extract concentrates. And those have found significant benefit for dementia, and Alzheimer’s, and other problems like that, or other things that it was being studied to accomplish in human health. And so in this case what I see is that companies have noticed that those studies exist. They have said well, we can make a product that’s done the way they made it in that study. And then anybody who’s well educated is going to know that this is an effective product. If somebody is literally checking abstracts and comparing the methods. Digging in past the abstract to the full text and getting the methods section out of there. And saying how did you prepare your ginkgo that was successful in this trial? They would see a product like ours from our company. Okay. So, that’s what those product makers are saying to themselves, and why this has become, I guess we’d call it a defacto standard or a defacto consistent preparation method amongst different manufacturers. All right. So, just some thoughts about the products you’re going to find there. Now, those ginkgo extracts, right, those ones that are made this way. They’re very well-proven to enhance circulation primarily to the head, to the brain itself, but also to the periphery, to the surface layer of your body in addition.

Increased Circulatory & Neuroprotective Activity

Ryn (09:57):
So, ginkgo is not only an herb that is helpful for cognitive issues, and brain fog, and fuzzy thinking, and memory problems, and stuff like that. It can be helpful for those. But as an herbalist I look at this herb, and I think okay. How is it helping those functions? Well, it straight-up increases blood flow to your brain. And in addition to that, it does have some neuroprotective activity. It’s literally reducing the amount of oxidative stress and damage that occurs in your central nervous system. And so that also helps your brain function over time, right? So, between those actions: that neuroprotective effect, that circulatory stimulant effect especially up into the brain. Those account, I think, for the majority of the effects that we observe on mentality, thinking, cognitive activity. These circulatory effects of ginkgo, which contribute to those actions, can also express for other problems, right? So, ginkgo could be helpful for cold hands and feet. For impotence, right, which is most often a circulatory issue and not strictly a deficient testosterone problem the way most people assume. Some teachers of mine have said that at least 70% of impotence issues can be repaired by improving circulation. And ginkgo is a standard herb to work with for that purpose. So anyway, impotence, right? And then tinnitus, ringing in the ears, that can often be improved by ginkgo because of a circulatory effect, a movement of fluid. Altitude sickness, certain forms of headache, although ginkgo may exacerbate some headaches and solve others, right? It’s one of those divides. In general here, ginkgo is going to move blood toward the head. And so if the head is already full of blood. You know, red face, maybe it’s a heavy kind of a feeling in the head as you got your headache going on. You don’t want to bring more up, you want to drain it down. That would be a good time for betony, Stachys, instead of ginkgo. But if we had a pale faced deficient circulation to the brain and a headache at the same time, ginkgo is quite likely to be helpful there. You know, maybe we combine it with rosemary and tulsi, see what kind of action we get from that.

Ryn (12:12):
All right, so those are all things that are pretty reliably improved or influenced, let’s say, by a ginkgo extract or a capsule. I want to say that we do find ginkgo leaf tea or tincture to be not entirely powerless, right? They’re definitely milder than the concentrated extracts that those companies are selling. There’s no question about that. But it still can be a helpful addition to a circulatory formula first and foremost. And I’ll often put together formulas that are based on that idea of circulation. Maybe we’re combining ginkgo with damiana and yarrow, two other herbs that are really effective at increasing circulation of multiple fluids. Blood, yes, lymph, yes, extracellular fluid too. So, that trio is quite powerful at moving stuck fluid and can be applied for a number of different imbalances in the system.

Autumn Gold Leaves, Nuts & TB

Ryn (13:12):
Okay, another thing I wanted to mention about ginkgo here is that you will find some companies selling you yellow leaves. And sometimes those are sold as autumn gold ginkgo. Now, if you go searching on this, it can get a little confusing because there’s also a cultivar of Ginkgo biloba plant that is labeled autumn gold. And it’s just like this is a variety of the ginkgo that you can buy from the garden shop, and you can plant. And it will have beautiful, really yellow leaves in the autumn time. And it’ll just look great in your yard, right? But autumn gold is also sometimes used as a marketing phrase in the context of ginkgo supplements. And what they’re saying is that in this case, we actually waited for the leaves to get a little hint of yellowness or a little hint of gold color on them before we harvested. This is unusual because with most plants once that starts to happen, you’re like ah, you’re losing potency. You’re not as good as you were when you were deep green in the height of summer, right? With ginkgo, the ginkgolide, or the ginkgo flavone glycoside content increases in the late part of summer and the early part of autumn, right? And so this is an odd circumstance where a little bit of yellowing on the leaf of your ginkgo tree could actually be an indicator of greater chemical potency, right? So, if you see an herb shop or a prepared remedy, a tincture or something that says made with autumn gold ginkgo, that’s probably what they mean and why they chose to do that. Okay.

Ryn (14:47):
Now, it’s worth saying that traditional medicine – and we’re pointing here specifically at traditional Chinese medicine – with ginkgo focused not so much on the leaves. In the older text you see occasional reference to the leaf, a couple of minor applications for it. But the primary part of the plant that’s most traditional was actually the fruits, or the seeds, or the nuts. In this context these are all kind of interchangeable terms. So, those have a very intense flavor and smell: acrid, astringent, kind of like vomit, okay? Yeah. And so when there are ginkgo trees in a city, they prefer vastly to plant only female trees – I’m sorry – only male trees that aren’t going to produce and then drop the seeds all over the sidewalks. Because they’ll crack, and kind of ooze, and people will stomp on them as they walk by. And the smell rises off of the hot concrete, and it’s not great. I know this because there are a couple spots in Boston where either somebody made a mistake, or they didn’t have the whole plan in place. Because there are ones that drop the fruits, and you definitely know it. But anyway, historically that was the part people would work with. And those sensory qualities, the acrid element and the astringent element, as always they tell us about the activity of this plant. In this case, we’re expecting both some degree of a relaxant, even more specifically a bronchodilator effect opening up the lungs. Acrid flavors tend to do that. And then from the astringency, a tonification specifically of the mucous membranes, right? So, you can imagine a condition in the lungs specifically where there was excess fluid production, excess mucus that we need to dry up and eliminate. And there was some constriction or some struggle in getting a full breath. This actually really well describes the conditions of tuberculosis. And ginkgo nuts or remedies prepared out of ginkgo seeds are a traditional remedy in Chinese medicine for that problem.

Ryn (16:57):
Tuberculosis is obviously a very severe situation, right? And it’s not an easy one to resolve. And traditional herbalists all around the world have struggled through the centuries to resolve this problem. It was a real major triumph when we found more powerful remedies to cope with that. And there’s some really interesting history around that. There’s a book Katja’s been reading lately called Black Angels, which is about black nurses who worked at a facility, a treatment facility for people who had tuberculosis just around the time that the cure, as it’s called, was being developed. And it was black nurses who worked there because the white nurses didn’t want to because it was so dangerous to work in a tuberculosis ward. So, that’s one. There are some other really interesting books out there. There’s a recent one called Everything is Tuberculosis, I think, by John Green. That’s also about the way that the resolution to that was developed, and the history and the tradition around that. So, I’m not here saying hey, if you know people with TB just go get them some ginkgo nuts, and they’ll be fine. It’s not as simple as that. But anywhere in the world where people were dealing with this, they would try to resolve the symptoms at the very least or improve comfort. And ginkgo nut was one of the agents that was used for that. In TCM, ginkgo nut was also used for other problems, usually respiratory in nature. And usually with that same kind of pattern of phlegm production, dampness, maybe also some restriction in breathing. So, certain manifestations of asthma would also have been indicators for ginkgo. All right. Now, all of that, again, is very different from the contemporary focus on the leaf and on cognitive function. But as often happens when we look at differences between ancient or traditional practice and modern marketing, there can be a strong divide. In this case it’s not just what we’re going to take it for. But what part we’re going to work with, and really the set of actions that we’re drawing on from the plant.

#14 Guarana: Caffeine & A Specific Headache Helper

Ryn (19:09):
All right. So, that’s some thoughts on Ginkgo. And our next up is going to be guarana. I want to say upfront I was very forcefully corrected in the way I used to pronounce guarana because I used to say guaRAna, guaRAna. And a friend of mine from South America said, no, no, no. You stop it. It’s guaraNA, it has a NA at the end of it. So, you’ll hear me say that, but that’s the reason why. And if you have a different pronunciation you prefer, that’s fine. You go with that. But we’re talking about guarana, Paullinia cupana. This one also had a pretty significant increase in sales in the year that was being documented. This was data from 2023. But a 36% increase. And I’m always interested in increases in sales of stimulant herbs when the market report comes on. Because they’re very revealing. A more fatigued, a more exhausted, a more depleted population is going to buy more stimulants. And so in some sense, this is a reflection of people getting worn down on a more systemic level and also turning to herbs as remedies for that feeling. So, guarana is one of the major caffeine herbs on the planet. It is there together with its friends: coffee, tea, cacao, kola nut, the caffeine hollies, right, which is yerba mate, guayusa, and yaupon. And then there’s guarana. And that’s essentially it in terms of herbs that have significant caffeine content, like enough that you could make tea out of them and feel stimulated, right? Now guarana is a very, I call it a clean caffeine source or maybe a simple caffeine source. It is significantly easier to extract the caffeine from guarana than it is from coffee or tea if you want to isolate the caffeine, okay? And part of this is really just because of the caffeine content of the plant.

Ryn (21:18):
So, guarana can be 4 to 6% caffeine by dry weight. Whereas coffee beans are more like 2%, and tea can be generally like around 3%. So, anyway, it’s just easier if you’re a large-scale manufacturer, and you can get access to a bunch of guarana plant, to make your isolated caffeine extract from that than from another plant. Now, if you had not just the caffeine from guarana but a whole plant extract, you do get other things from it. Especially in the group called methylxanthine alkaloids, which is just the group that contains caffeine, and also theophylline, and theobromine, and a couple of other friends, right? So, those are also beneficial constituents. They have anti-inflammatory effects. Theophylline is a bronchodilator that can aid breathing and oxygen uptake. Theobromine has a mild stimulating effect, but often is associated more with a bit of a mood boost. And you can think about chocolate or cacao there, Theobroma, theobromine, right? Cacao has a much stronger representation of theobromine compared to other caffeine plants. So, you know, it has all of those. And then also like green tea, guarana also contains the anti-inflammatory group called catechins. So, those are included in this plant as well. All right. Now, when it comes to medicinal effect, of course just getting stimulated, just having quote-unquote energy is a medicinal purpose or an intention that people can have for plants. And that certainly includes all the caffeine herbs. So, all right, that’s there.

Ryn (23:08):
Beyond that into like symptoms or discomforts, any of the caffeine herbs can be helpful for some, but again, not all, headaches. Caffeine is vasoconstrictive in your head and in your brain. So, it helps when you had what you call a vasodilatory headache. The blood vessels in your head are too open. Too much fluid is in them. There’s too much pressure in the area pushing on some nerves and causing some pain for you. So, if you then tighten those down, then you will squeeze out the excess fluid, and you’ll relieve the pain. Okay? The other kind of headache that caffeine herbs can help with is the headache from caffeine withdrawal, right? No surprise there, but that’s a source of headache that many people may experience. And it’s not the final solution to those headaches, but it is definitely an acute situation or an acute resolution for them. Now, if we look back in time, if we look to the 1800s, the eclectics and the physiomedicist herbalist of that period in the US, they were very precise in the way that they applied guarana to headache. They said this isn’t for headaches of all types. But it’s only for those that are associated with deficient cerebral circulation. Like I said earlier, blood flow to the brain. We can see a connection here between ginkgo and guarana. Both of them, and really all the caffeine herbs, are herbs that are going to increase blood flow to your brain.

Ryn (24:44):
So, the herbalist William Cook writing in a book called A Compendium of the New Materia Medica in 1896, he wrote about guarana that it “increases the cerebral circulation causing the face to flush, the brain to feel full, and the mind to be first excited and afterwards drowsy. It’s influence in sick headache…” And that’s a word they used at the time for migraine, okay? “Its influence there is promptly stimulating toward the brain. And as that influences frequently needed in the condition of cerebral anemia present in some attacks of this malady – not enough blood in the brain – guarana gives much relief in such cases. But is it of no use in cases having a gastric or hepatic origin, and where the face is already flushed with dilated vessels.” So, he’s saying here, some migraines and some other headaches are really due to indigestion or liver inflammation and other kinds of irritation like that. And you can often see that because the face is already kind of red and flushed. And if that’s true, don’t give that person guarana. Don’t give them ginkgo. Don’t give them rosemary, right? All of these would track directly with what’s being said here. You could also say if someone’s migraine is always proceeded by indigestion, then guarana is not the remedy for them. And honestly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to take somebody with disrupted digestion and throw caffeine herbs at them, right? That’s not really the best place for that. Okay. Yeah.

Ryn (26:17):
So yeah, again, when it comes to guarana, supplements are either just the caffeine extracted from the plant. And sometimes that does show up on labels as guarana extract, okay? But that could just be the caffeine. If it was a full-spectrum extract, you would also get the other methylxanthines, and you would get the catechins and so on. But a lot of extracts from guarana, it’s just caffeine straight up. If it’s a whole plant tincture or a whole plant extract in a capsule or something, you’ll get these other effects, and it will have a broader influence on your system. At that point it’s more similar to taking a green tea capsule or a green tea extract than just isolated caffeine. So, you can refer back to some things we said in the prior episode about green tea.

#15 Maca: Inconclusive Effects on Reproductive Health

Ryn (26:59):
But for now, I’m going to go ahead and move on to maca. Maca is whew, maca is an herb that has definitely had its 15 minutes here in the United States. Maca popped up on the bestseller list a few years back, but it was kind of low. And then it began to move up and kind of leap up. And so now it’s all the way up to number 15 on the list. And we’re talking here about the species Lepidium meyenii, and it’s just always sold as maca, right? So, you know, this is a plant that is marketed as an adaptogen and often with a particular leaning in that realm towards reproductive health or sexual function. The idea like you’re stressed out. You’re having problems with libido. You’re having problems with vaginal dryness. You can take maca, and it will relieve your stress. And it will increase your interests and capacity for sex. So, that’s the major way that you see this marketed nowadays, it’s also sometimes referred to as Peruvian ginseng. And I find that more often the case when people are marketing towards athletic performance or athletic enhancement, right? This is going to make you stronger, faster, farther, you know, that kind of thing. So, there’s that kind of connection. And again, it’s often used with that reference back to ginseng because people know that. And they’re like oh, another ginseng. Let’s get that too. That could be good. Now, about these claims around reproductive effects, especially hormonal-based effects, the science on this is – to put it nicely – inconclusive.

Ryn (28:45):
So, when we look at specific studies, there’s some evidence that eating maca consistently over time can improve semen quality, like the health of the sperm and that kind of thing, or the concentration of them. There’s really inconclusive evidence regarding relief from menopausal symptoms. And there’s no really clear or direct action that’s been identified from this plant or its constituents on testosterone or other reproductive hormones. Occasionally you see reference to some supposed or theorized estrogenic activity of the plant. But honestly, that’s just by comparison to other herbs in the same group or the same family. And the estrogenic activity of these is pretty light. This is in the Brassicaceae family, the cruciferous vegetable family, like broccoli, and collards, and kale, and things like that. And those, again, if you get to a real microscopic level, and you point at some specific constituents. You can say oh, this has some degree of an estrogenic activity on these mouse tissues in a Petri dish, right? But it almost never has real relevance for hormonal elements in your body in the context of let’s boost your production of this. Or let’s give you a phyto-version, like a phytoestrogen. Let’s give you one of those directly. That’s not really what’s going on with maca. So, the thing is though, that those purposes with maca are very, very popular, right? People love the idea of taking a supplement and having better athletic performance, right? They love the idea of taking an herbal supplement, something all natural, and having a major improvement in their sex life. People are hyped about that. And so this has led to a really rapid increase in demand for this herb. That’s reflected right here in the market report, right? We see the increase in sales year-over-year. We see the herb making its way up the charts.

Biopiracy, Sourcing, & Quality Concerns

Ryn (30:54):
One of the results of this, and it’s one that we want to take really seriously, is that the original places where this plant has grown – largely around Peru and other country delineations within the Andes Mountains – there have been pretty significant consequences for the people there who have cultivated and grown this herb for generations. Including literal access to the herb for the people who grow it, especially on the level of it being a staple food, okay? So, what can be happening here is somebody comes in and says we’re going to buy all the maca you’ve got. We’re going to pay you enormous amounts for it. And we’re going to ship it overseas to an American supplement company or to other places in the world. And then the people there, they might get a little money, but maybe not really enough for all the work they’re going to make a nice product. And now they’re also not having access to their own traditional food. So, there’s some issues on that level. Most of the folks in Peru who are digging into this, ecologists and so on and also people involved in social justice work, are pointing more towards what they’re calling biopiracy, right? So, we’re talking here about illegal export of the plants and then mass cultivation of it in other countries, most notably in China. So, what essentially happened was folks in China said hey, there’s an herb that’s getting more popular in the global market. And right now it only grows in these mountainous regions in Peru, but hey, we’ve got mountainous regions in China. What if we go, and we get some. And we bring it over here and plant it. And then we sell a whole bunch of it. And while we’re at it, we can undercut them on price, and we can become the new world supplier.

Ryn (32:37):
So, that process has been running for many years now. And this has led to folks in Peru who are growing the herb in its original homeland who aren’t able to sell it or aren’t able to get the same price for it that they used to because there’s a flood of cheap products coming from China. People who are interested in that kind of a swoop in and make a bunch of money are rarely interested in getting you the best quality and the most well-cared for herbal products that they can make. So, this is similar to other ranges of newly popularized or 50 minutes of fame herbs being then cultivated on a mass scale in China to undercut the global market. And we’ve often seen issues of contamination associated with those products. Maybe they’re grown in fields where there’s heavy metal pollution. Maybe there’s a lot of pesticide application that’s not thoroughly removed, or cleaned, or can’t be from the finished material. And so there can be these kinds of contamination on those. All of this means be very picky about where your maca comes from. Ideally we would be getting this from yeah, organic because of the traceability to fields in Peru and related countries. But also ones where we know something about the social conditions of the workers, the growers, the field workers especially. The people who are on the ground planting, and growing, and harvesting this stuff. So, I would be looking for equal exchange, and fair trade, and certifications of that nature if I’m going to ever buy any maca.

Ryn (34:18):
For similar reasons we must also be careful about adulteration, right? So, contamination is some toxins, some poison, some pesticide got onto my herbal product and stayed there all the way until I ate it, right? That’s contamination. Adulteration is this person said they were going to sell me one thing, and it turns out they sold me something else. So remember, a lot of maca products are being sold for sexual performance, athletic performance, and even occasionally for weight loss. Just like anything else that gets popularized, somebody will tell you what’s going to help you lose weight, right? Remember, always be very, very skeptical about that category or those three categories of herbal supplements. Always be skeptical about weight loss, sexual performance, and athletic performance products. Because they’re the most likely to be adulterated, maybe just not with the herb you thought you were getting. It could be with a cheaper herb. It could be with a less effective herb. But also this is where we see most frequently adulteration with pharmaceuticals. You know, somebody sells you a product and says this is an all-natural sexual performance enhancement for male virility, right? And somebody buys it and takes it. And then it turns out that there might’ve been some herbal material in there, but there was also a bunch of Viagra just put right into the product. And they tried to sneak by and make sure nobody noticed. But, you know, sometimes people get caught. So again, that those categories of herbs – athletics, sexual enhancement, and weight loss – are most likely to be adulterated. And I would definitely be very cautious about where I get my maca products from because they could be susceptible to that kind of thing. Okay.

Hormonal Activity & Effects on Thyroid

Ryn (36:08):
I wanted to circle back though, right? I had said this plan is in the Brassicaceae. That it contains some gluco… Sorry, I want to mention that it contains some of these constituents called glucosinolates, which are pungent. And they give that kind of warmth, that mustardy heat that you get in a lot of the plants in that family, most notably mustard greens, right? But they’re there in all of the Brassicaceae plants. They’re also anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer. And as far as the liver and the hormone goes, this might be the place that this herb would be most effective in terms of altering your hormonal status. Because glucosinolates enhance livers elimination of call them spent or used-up hormones, right, or excess hormones that you don’t need in the system anymore. When we’re thinking about quote-unquote balancing hormones. Don’t only think about well, I’m too low on this one, so I’ve got to put more into my body. The ratios between hormones can be much more important than the gross amounts of each one in your body. And so some forms of hormonal imbalance can primarily be due to a deficiency in elimination. Maca, to the extent that it helps with hormonal issues, my take is that it would be helping primarily with the elimination of excess hormones that you don’t need in the system any longer. The glucosinolates in there can do that pretty well. There’s also some sterols which have similar activities on liver function. And there’s some alkaloids in this plant too that can enhance activity. So, I think that when people do see some improvements in hormonal patterns, maybe they’re even getting some blood draws done and seeing levels change. I think it’d be more on this range rather than something like a phytoestrogen plant, or something that’s triggering the production of a given hormone in your system. I don’t believe that’s the way that maca does what it does, right?

Ryn (38:08):
It’s worth saying that like other brassica plants, maca does have some constituents that can inhibit thyroid activity if you were to get large amounts of them over an extended period of time, right? So, this is true for any of the Brassicaceae plants, including spinach. If you were to eat just a lot of raw spinach all the time, every day for long periods, ultimately that can impede or inhibit the function of your thyroid. When it comes to maca, that activity could take place. But with any of these plants – the spinach, the others, or the maca – that effect is drastically mitigated by cooking. And maca is traditionally always consumed after cooking. So, contrast that with we slice it, we dry it, we grind it to powder, and we eat the powder. That’s done with a lot of traditional herbs, right? But not with maca. It’s always cooked, and I believe it always should be cooked. If you have raw maca powder from your herb shop, you should cook it before you consume it. Take some of that and stir it into a soup, or a stew, or a broth and take it that way. Rather than just mixing it up with almond butter and eating it as a food, right? Especially if you have any diminished thyroid function to begin with. I suppose there’s some argument to be made for people who have hyperthyroid, excessive thyroid activity. That they should just feel free to take unprocessed maca or unprocessed spinach and try to intentionally suppress thyroid function. I don’t usually advise people in that direction. I think there’s other ways to address that problem. But you do see that proposed every now and then.

Ryn (39:49):
In the marketplace, a lot of maca “powders” are actually processed. They are usually referred to as gelatinized maca. And usually the expression of why we’re doing that is just to reduce the amount of starch and some difficult to digest fibers that are present in there. And it’s certainly easier to digest “gelatinized maca” than straight-up dried powder. It dissolves better into drinks and stuff like that, so people tend to prefer it. A lot of the products you see that look like just powdered maca upfront. If you read the label carefully, you’ll see like oh, this is actually been “gelatinized.” By the way, this doesn’t mean that it contains gelatin, like animal source gelatin. It’s just a term for what you end up with.

Pigment Varieties of a Fancy Turnip

Ryn (40:33):
Yep. Okay. Oh yeah. One other note on maca. There are varieties, and they’re not species varieties, right? This is all Lepidium meyenii. But they’re what you call a phenotype or maybe even a chemotype. Which is to say that it’s all the same species, but they have different concentrations of certain chemicals. In this case focusing on pigments, right, so anthocyanins. And that means that some maca are going to be cream colored or a little golden yellow. Some are kind of greenish. And then we get like red, and purple, and blue, and black, right? And the further you go on that scale, the more of these pigment compounds – the anthocyanins – you’ve got. Those can contribute to medicinal activity. Anthocyanins turn up in any herb or fruit that we work with that’s blue, purple, red, in that range of colors. They’re nice anti-inflammatory agents. They’re supportive to vascular integrity and again, keeping inflammation down systemically in your body. And my understanding is that in traditional medicine of the mountains, there would be differentiations about which type of maca we work with for which individual problem. This is something that we see in a lot of traditional medicine. That there might be a key herb in a region that people work with. And they develop or they come to understand differentiations that are varieties of that plant. This happens with reishi, for instance. You can get some reishi that are very red, and some that are very black, and purple-ish, and other colors like that. And in traditional medicine there’s often an association of each color with a specific target or a specific problem that you would choose it for. So, if we go, and we all spend time with some Peruvian medicine people, I’m sure they could give us a lot of nuance about how to apply this. But again, all of that is totally lacking in the commercial presentation of these plants and the sales that are driving it in the modern world and pushing it up the sales charts. Okay?

Ryn (42:40):
Katja is not here with me today, but I can’t talk about maca without giving her perspective on this one. Which is to sum it up, it’s a fancy turnip. That’s it. This is primarily a nutritive item, which we expect to have the most pronounced effects in people who are broadly malnourished. Which remember, in the modern context may not mean underfed, right? Underfed and undernourished aren’t the same thing anymore, right? But this does describe a fair number of people in the modern society. And I think that in some cases, the people who have gotten the best results from their maca products probably could have gotten very fantastic results from improving the nutrient density of their diets or doing a few other foundational, baseline, good old fashioned, boring herbalism habit changes, and gotten at least as good a result as they got from their maca supplements.

Ryn (43:44):
Yeah. And so very generally speaking, if somebody’s super interested in maca. And they’re already taking it, and they love it. I’m not going to tell them to stop. But it’s never really going to be an herb that I’m going to recommend for all of the reasons I’ve kind of raised here today. We don’t think that it is as good at the things people believe commercially as those marketings would make it seem. Because of these concerns around the ecological and social impacts of overharvesting and overproduction of this plant on local populations. And because there are other ways to achieve most of what we think this plant can do. Like eat more leafy greens of any kind. And make sure you’re hitting all your nutrient targets in a broad, real food format. I think in most cases when people are working with maca, those interventions would do just as well. And they wouldn’t require some kind of boutique herb that may be quite expensive to work with. So, you can see how that tracks with our general bent towards accessible herbalism and our consideration of ecological and social factors in the choices we make. All right.

Ryn (44:59):
So, that’s going to be it for this episode. We’ll come back to this series again in the future. And I hope that you’ll tune in and join us for that. Before I sign off, I just want to remind you all that we have a whole school for herbalism. And you can find all of that online at online.commonwealthherbs.com. If you’re new to herbalism, you may want to specifically check out our Materia Medica course or the Family Herbalist Program, which includes that as well as our Medicine Making course. And those are places where we give you a nice deep dive into a hundred medicinal plants. And the Medicine Making course gives you a few dozen methods for preparing them into your own home remedies, so that you’re not reliant on commercial product makers to get your herbs to you in a form that you enjoy, and that it does the job for what you’ve got going on. All right. So again, you can find all of that at online.commonwealthherbs.com, and I hope you do. All right, that’s it for today. We’ll be back again with some more of these in the future. And in the meantime, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Drink some tea. And in praise of ginkgo and guarana, let’s keep those fluids moving, especially in the brain. All right. See you again soon.

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