Megan Rand

Tag: adrenal health

  • Medicinal Teas for Adrenal and Overall Health

    Medicinal Teas for Adrenal and Overall Health

     

    When we think of supplementation, we often think of pills, capsules and tinctures. But another method of introducing a variety of nutrients and unlocking the healing powers of nature is by consuming herbal teas. Medicinal teas have many different uses, but today we are going to talk about how tea can help support mineral balance, detoxification and support the immune system.

     

    Below is a list of teas that I keep in my cabinet and rotate as needed. Don’t get overwhelmed by how many options you have! Just start by adding one new tea at a time and eventually you will have an arsenal to lean on when you need them. My favorite way to consume most of my teas is to blend them in my Vitamix with some coconut oil, collagen, ginger, cinnamon and honey!

     

    Nettle Tea

    Nettle tea is loaded with minerals that are essential for restoring your adrenal health and is also helpful to combat inflammation. I have been drinking nettle tea consistently during my pregnancy because it is easy to become depleted of essential minerals while growing another human inside of you. Although nettle tea is not the only change I have made, this pregnancy has been much easier than my first!

     

    Licorice Root Tea

    Licorice root tea can be very helpful if you have low cortisol levels (your stress hormone).   Low cortisol levels are common in the later stages of adrenal dysfunction. If you have checked your salivary cortisol pattern with functional lab work, than you might be aware that certain times of the day your cortisol levels are struggling to reach the functional range. At this time of day, licorice tea can be used to help boost your mood and energy.   This tea is not for everyone and is contraindicated for those with high blood pressure.

     

    It is important to note that it is always necessary to keep trying to understand the underlying cause of any imbalance or symptoms. In the meantime using medicinal teas as a temporary boost can help you give you the energy or focus you need to keep working on your health.

     

    Ginger Turmeric Tea

    This tea is one of my favorites (as maybe you could have guessed by my business name). Ginger and turmeric are anti-inflammatory, powerful antioxidants and support the immune system. Drinking daily ginger turmeric tea was an important part of my protocol to restore adrenal function.

     

    You can easily make it yourself by steeping the ginger and turmeric roots in boiling water. I can usually find ginger root year round at the grocery store, but turmeric seems to depend on the time of the year. If you do not have access to the roots, feel free to substitute with powdered ginger or turmeric. I chop a 1” section of ginger root and1/4” section of turmeric root, add boiling water, and let steep for 5-10 minutes.

     

    Chaga Tea

    Chaga is a mushroom that is traditionally used in Chinese medicine. It is excellent for detoxification as it nourishes kidneys and liver. It is also loaded with anti-oxidants and minerals as well as vitamins including calcium, iron, manganese, and vitamins B, K, and D2.

     

    This my favorite recipe for drinking Chaga Tea:

     

    Chaga Chai Tea

     

    2 Tbsp chaga mushroom powder (I get mine here)

    2 cups hot water or coconut/almond milk

    ½-1 Tbsp coconut oil or ghee

    ½” ginger root

    1 Tbsp collagen

    ½-1 tsp cinnamon and nutmeg

    1 tsp-1Tbsp raw manuka honey

     

    1) Mix the chaga powder, hot water or milk substitute and coconut oil in a mug and let steep for a few minutes while you prepare the rest of your ingredients.

     

    2) Blend the ginger, collagen, cinnamon, nutmeg, honey and chaga tea mixture together on high in a blender that is made for hot liquids*. Blend until your tea is smooth and frothy!

     

    *It can be dangerous to use a blender that is not approved for hot beverages since they can explode and burn you!

     

    Dandelion Root Tea

    Dandelion root is my favorite tea to support detoxification of the liver and kidneys! As well as helping to remove toxins, dandelion root tea also helps to re-establish your electrolyte balance. Since I don’t love the taste of the tea plain, I always mix this into a tea concoction just like I do with the chaga! Please make sure that you are also drinking plenty of water throughout the day after your dandelion root tea since it is a diuretic. I avoid dandelion root tea while pregnant and nursing because I do not want to force my body into detoxification sending unwanted toxins and metals into my milk supply or to my baby! Also, do not consume if you have a ragweed allergy.

     

    Burdock Root Tea

    This is another tea that despite its somewhat undesirable flavor, it has some great health benefits! Burdock root supports the liver and also cleanses and purifies the blood. This is a good tea if you struggle with skin issues like rashes or eczema, as this can improve circulation and detoxification to the area.

     

    Pau D’Arco

    Pau D’Arco is great to combat candida, yeast and even aspergillus (mold) which many of my clients have found growing in their homes. It also supports the immune system. Personally, this is a tea that I rotate in to keep candida at bay.

     

    Chamomile Tea

    I used to just think of chamomile tea as a bedtime tea, but it is much more beneficial than just helping you sleep at night. Chamomile helps to soothe the gastrointestinal tract and combat inflammation, which is important for restoring gut dysfunction and optimal health. Having a small chamomile tea with some raw maunka honey before bed great for sleep, just avoid drinking so much that you are up all night running to the bathroom!

     

    Lemon Balm & Lavender

    My good friend always served me fresh lemon balm and lavender tea with leaves picked from her yard! I became obsessed with this tea and later learned why the two herbs were so helpful to relieve my stress and anxiety. Lemon balm and lavender both have a calming effect that can help reduce anxiety and depression. You can read about the many benefits of lavender from the Wellness Mama!

     

     

    Teas have so many amazing properties to offer us! Start rotating new teas into your routine to support your health journey. Let me know which ones are your favorites!

     

  • Your Brain and Stress; Neurotransmitter Basics

    Your Brain and Stress; Neurotransmitter Basics

     

    Many people are becoming aware of the term adrenal fatigue and are starting to suspect that this might be something they are dealing with. But this term can be misleading, because more often that not, it is not as simple as supporting the adrenals to have your fatigue, inflammation and hormonal imbalances disappear. The adrenals gland themselves are often working just fine, but the communication channels and feedback loops might have become disrupted. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that deliver important and vital messages from the brain and the adrenal gland. These tiny messengers help you respond to stressors and if they become imbalanced, all sorts of symptoms will start to pop up because the correct messages are not being sent. Once I started looking at a neurotransmitter panel in conjunction with an adrenal/hormone panel, I saw a big shift for my clients. The combination of their hormone and neurotransmitter results helps to put the puzzle together as to where the breakdown is in the chain.

    What happens with our neurotransmitters during stress?

    In time of acute stress or when you are in a constant chronic state of low stress (not just mental/emotional stress but also hidden internal stressors such as food sensitivities, bacterial overgrowth or heavy metal toxicity) neurotransmitters can become depleted. Just having a thought or being scared will alert your brain to alter hormone and neurotransmitter production in response. The neurotransmitters are a part of the stress response cascade. Think about how often we are bombarded with negative imagery and high stress situations in our fast-paced lifestyle. By looking at the levels of different neurotransmitters as well as their relationship to each other, such as the ratio between serotonin and dopamine or norepinephrine and epinephrine, we can see how well your body is adapting to stress.

    We have both excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters and some play both roles depending on the situation. Since our body likes to remain in balance, we also function optimally when our excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters are balanced. For example, stimulants such as caffeine push dopamine into the synapse and dopamine acts as an excitatory agent, which improves our focus. You know how you have your coffee and then feel pretty productive for a while? Feeling productive is great except there is a price we pay for that focus. Your body must now send in some inhibitory neurotransmitters to reign in the excitatory neurotransmitters. Serotonin and GABA come to the rescue. This is not necessarily a problem, because this is one of the ways that our amazing body stays balanced, but when we abuse ourselves daily by artificially forcing productivity with excess caffeine consumption, we eventually end up depleted in serotonin and GABA. Among many other functions serotonin is important for a stable mood and GABA is nature’s valium-like substance, you can see where we end up without these precious resources. You always have to ask… is this short-term benefit of being able to focus and have energy worth the long-term risk of an instable mood?

    Here is an example of the neurotransmitter testing results that the Healthy Hormones Group Program will have access to. These are just clues to get an idea of the bigger picture because your neurotransmitter levels will change throughout the day. Testing and then retesting after a period of time after trying a protocol or therapy will help us to understand how your body is reacting.

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    Here is a quick explanation of the neurotransmitters that we will be looking at during the next Healthy Hormones group program:

    Serotonin – This is considered the master neurotransmitter and helps to keep balance between the excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters. Adequate levels is necessary for a stable mood.

    Dopamine – Key player in reward-seeking type of behavior such as pleasure, satisfaction and focus. Dopamine also influences muscle control and gastrointestinal motility. Really low or high dopamine levels is correlated with memory issues.

    Norepinephrine– Important to the fight-or-flight response and also helps to make epinephrine.

    Epinephrine– Also known as adrenaline which we all know well. Epinephrine prepares the body for fight-or-flight by increasing your heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate so that you can run away or fight off the danger. This will also elevate your ACTH which raises your cortisol

    GABA– Nature’s valium-like substance which also helps regulate muscle tone.

    Glutamate– Important for memory and learning but can be damaging in excess leading to depression, seizures and damaging nervous tissue. This is often seen high for those with PTSD but you also have to watch that you are not accidentally consuming glutamate from MSG or DSG sources in food.

    Histamine – Helps to control sleep-wake cycle, energy production and memory recall. This reading on your lab is a window into inflammation and the higher the number the more mental fogginess, allergy symptoms and irritability you might be experiencing.

     

    If your neurotransmitters are all trending low in conjunction with low cortisol levels, than this is a sign you are in a chronic state of stress and are now in the tired and “burnt-out” phase.  At this point you will need a good amount of support to return to a healthy level.

    Ready to find out what is going on at a sub-clinical level before symptoms occur? Ready to get to the root of why you can’t seem to kick the anxiety or get your energy back? Come join us for the Healthy Hormones Group Program!!

  • Hormone Helping Coconut Chips

    Hormone Helping Coconut Chips

     

    As Alex of Dig Primal and I have been working on the content for our Healthy Hormones Group Program for the last few months, my favorite part of the process is that I get to learn the tips and tricks that she uses too! We all have different tools that we pick up along the way and I think that it is important to have a really varied toolbox for my clients. Each person that I work with is so uniquely different in their bio-individual and genetic makeup that often a suggestion that works amazingly for one person will leave another feeling sick. A supplement that gives me energy though the roof might cause you to fall asleep at your desk. That is all a part of the puzzle!! I love learning lots of different options, recipes and suggestions so that we can find the perfect combination for each person.

     

    Alex shared this recipe with me for Hormone Helping Coconut Chips and I can’t get enough! I love incorporating coconut flakes into my diet for a lot of reasons. For one, they have an amazing composition of healthy fats, protein, and fiber. Not only does this combination of macronutrients help keep you full longer after meals (which also helps prevent unhealthy snacking you weren’t actually intending), but fueling your body with such balanced caloric intake is great for the hormonal system. Additionally, the fatty acids found in coconut products directly play a role in healthy hormone synthesis so their presence in the diet greatly increases the success of all your other hormone-helping interventions; after all, it makes sense that if you don’t have the building blocks to create hormones, no amount of adjunctive therapies are going to help your cause in the long term.

     

    The spices found in this recipe work through a variety of mechanisms to help the endocrine and adrenal system along. Since glucose metabolism is a huge problem in people with hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal dysfunction (which is often simply referred to as “adrenal fatigue” but is actually an incredibly limited way to look at the problem since it encompasses so much more than the adrenals…no wonder people have a hard time treating it on their own!), the cayenne, turmeric, and cinnamon are in here to help with the proper use and balance of sugar in the body.

     

    As an added bonus, cayenne pepper and turmeric are incredibly effective in tempering the inflammatory response in the body due to stress, high glucose levels, and underlying hormonal imbalances (see how they all work off each other??), incorporating these spices into meals regularly can be really helpful.

     

    Ingredients:

     

    • 2 cups coconut flakes
    • ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
    • ¼ teaspoon ground turmeric
    • ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
    • ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
    • 1 tablespoon ghee (replace with coconut oil if you can’t tolerate dairy products)
    • 5 tablespoons raw honey

     

    Steps:

     

    1. Preheat your oven to 300 degrees.
    2. Place your coconut flakes into a medium-sized mixing bowl.
    3. Add in the cayenne pepper, ground turmeric, and ground cinnamon to the coconut flakes and stir well so that all the spices are well distributed (trust me when I say that you do not want a big bite of cayenne pepper down the line).
    4. Place the tablespoon of ghee (or coconut oil) into a small bowl and microwave it until the ghee has melted.
    5. Add the honey and vanilla extract to your melted ghee and mix them all together.
    6. Slowly pour your honey, ghee, and vanilla extract mixture of the spice-dusted coconut flakes. Mix it all together until everything is evenly distributed.
    7. Line a baking sheet with wax paper and evenly spread your coconut flake mixture over the entire area. You don’t want big clumps so take a few moments to spread it all out over the entire baking sheet.
    8. Bake in the oven for 5-7 minutes.
    9. Take out and let cool.
    10. I stored mine in a glass tupperware container.

     

    Want to learn more fun and delicious recipes that can also help support your adrenal glands and balance hormone? The Healthy Hormones Group Program is starting Sept 15th!!!

     

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