In this episode, I am speaking with Dr. Lee Know about CB2 products for pain, sleep issues, and anxiety.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Dr. Know and I discuss:
- Terpenes and cannabis, and their interaction with the endocannabinoid system
- The significance of CB2 receptors in regulating inflammation and chronic diseases
- The relevance of the endocannabinoid system in human health
- The difference between CB2 products and CBD oil
- The potential benefits of Terpenes products for serious chronic diseases (including neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s)
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Transcript
Ari: Dr. Lee Know, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It’s been a long while since we talked. You were last on my podcast five years ago in August of 2018. You’re someone that I have always had a lot of respect for your work, and it’s wonderful to reconnect with you after five years of not talking.
Dr. Know: It’s hard to believe, but I’m happy to be back and chatting with you again.
Ari: Your episode that we did five years ago is one of my most popular episodes of all time. I think it has– I don’t know how many, tens of thousands of views on YouTube and that’s just the YouTube side of it. There’s also tons and tons of audio downloads on iTunes. Where are you now– actually, for people who are unfamiliar with your work, you wrote a book on mitochondria that came out, in 2017 or 18?
Dr. Know: 2018. That’s the most recent edition of it. Initially, that was self-published back in 2014. Then it got picked up by a publisher and republished in 2018.
Dr. Lee Know’s current focus on mitochondria
Ari: This was a hugely influential book on me. This was something that was very educational for me to read your book on mitochondria and I learned a lot from it. Where are you now at with your relationship with mitochondria, your study of mitochondria, and all of that?
Dr. Know: When I was in the process of having that book republished in 2018, I had already started another company. My passion for mitochondria spans many years before the publishing of that book and continues to this day. One of the things that I had done in that time was start a company and that has really taken the bulk of my attention. Even though I’m still passionate about the mitochondria, and I still dabble in looking at the research.
It’s one of those things where running a business that’s growing it keeps me occupied to the point where I really have very little time to pursue other interests, unfortunately. My business is doing well and I’m passionate about that. Super interesting stuff as well. Something’s got to give and one of the things was the mitochondria. Like I said, I still do keep up to date here and there.
Cannanda and cannabis
Ari: The business that you’re alluding to here is Cannanda, which is a cannabis-focused business.
Dr. Know: Not so much cannabis. We started out as an ancillary cannabis business or looking to target the needs of medical cannabis users. We’ve since somewhat left that space and see ourselves as almost a standalone business. Not dealing so much with cannabis or the medical cannabis users, but dealing with anyone that’s essentially experiencing pain, sleep issues, and anxiety as the three main health issues we target. Of course, we do help a lot of other people dealing with other health conditions as well.
Ari: The distinction between– is cannabis referring specifically to marijuana or is it inclusive of hemp? Forgive me as I’m certainly not an expert in that world.
Dr. Know: Right. Cannabis would include both. Both the recreational side, the medicinal side as well as hemp, and of course hemp has many uses including nutritious food. That term covers everything. In terms of the ingredients that we use, we use hemp for some of our ingredients, but we also base our entire line on a class of compounds called terpenes, which we extract. Due to the way the regulations are in Canada, we extract our terpenes from non-cannabis sources. That makes our products completely legal in the Canadian marketplace and around the world as well.
When you think of terpenes, they’re essentially flavor and fragrance molecules. Typically extracted from essential oils. It should be legal everywhere, but the source where you get those terpenes from can make your product legal or illegal. It’s crazy because when you think of a molecule, the human body doesn’t care where it comes from, whether it’s in orange or cannabis. From a regulatory point of view, it does make a big difference. For us to have our products legal, not just in Canada, but around the world, we extract our terpenes from non-cannabis sources.
The uses of terpenes, cannabis, and cannabinoids
Ari: Okay. Let’s zoom out for people who maybe are not knowledgeable of this whole space of terpenes, and cannabis, and the cannabinoids. Let’s just big picture. Basically, what you do is you take certain extracts of certain plants that are designed to do what? What’s the end goal of these extracts?
Dr. Know: Our most recognized and bestselling line of products is called Cannanda CB2. The CB2 if you’re familiar with the endocannabinoid system refers to the CB2 receptor. When we think of the endocannabinoid system, which is typically seen as the master regulator of balance in the body or homeostasis, what happens is it’s a system that jumps into action anytime a process goes off balance. What it does is it tries to bring that back into balance. If something’s too high, it brings it back down. If something’s too low, it tries to bring it back up.
Now, it does so through the activation of these receptors, and the two main ones that we talk about are CB1 and CB2 receptors. Now, CB1 receptor is the one that’s mainly found in the brain and the central nervous system. When we activate it, we fill the intoxication in. When we think of cannabis in the sense of recreational use in THC and people getting high, it’s because it activates that CB1 receptor.
On the other hand, we have CB2 receptors. CB2 receptors predominantly exist in the peripheries outside the central nervous system, and has an incredible anti-inflammatory effect and that’s one of the main ways it works. When we activate CB2 receptors we bring about a lot of the health benefits associated with cannabis, but none of the psychoactive or the intoxicating effects associated with cannabis. So all the health benefits, but none of the high.
Benefits of activating the CB2 receptor
Ari: What are those health benefits? What do we get by activating the CB2 receptor?
Dr. Know: Like I said, it’s mainly related to the anti-inflammatory benefits, and as you already know inflammation is an underlying factor in pretty much all degenerative conditions. Everything from neurological degeneration, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, MS, to cardiovascular disease, including congestive heart failure, high blood pressure, cholesterol issues. We see inflammation associated with things related to metabolism like the way the pancreas works, and insulin secretion, insulin sensitivity, the way the liver processes toxins and functions. The list really goes on.
The crazy thing is, is that when you look at the endocannabinoid system and the presence of CB2 receptors, it’s found in pretty much every single tissue and organ in the body. That’s one of the reasons why when we look at the health benefits associated with CB2 receptor activation, it spans pretty much every condition that exists. Again, that makes sense because it’s found everywhere in the body. The research is fairly new and it’s developing.
A lot of research is going on and I think one of the things that we’re going to see coming forward is so many more health conditions can be helped by the activation of these receptors. At this point, there’s still enough research to show that you know what, if you’re dealing with any sort of health ailment, activating the CB2 receptors is likely a good idea and has been shown to bring things back into balance or at least help kickstart the body in its healing process.
Keys to activating the CB2 receptor
Ari: I think of human health and physiology through an evolutionary lens, through the lens of evolutionary biology. One of the things I like to do to assess whether something is logical or not, whether it makes sense to me is ask where is the precedent, the ancestral precedent for this. Or where is the the need for this based on the mismatch between how modern humans live versus how humans lived ancestrally. The modern environment versus the ancestral environment. As an example, it’s like what’s the need for red and near-infrared light therapy? Most modern humans are getting way less sunlight than we used to. It’s very straightforward.
There’s many other examples of that heat and cold and feeding windows and intermittent fasting and breath-holding practices. We have these ancestral precedents and these things make sense in that kind of context. What is your understanding of the endocannabinoid system or CB2 receptor activation through that kind of lens? How does it make sense viewing it from that lens that modern humans need to spend more time activating or doing more things activating the endocannabinoid system or CB2 in particular?
Dr. Know: You know what, that’s an awesome question. It’s something I’ve never ever been asked before, and admittedly, something I’ve not really thought of previously. I will say that the endocannabinoid system is an anciently preserved system in all vertebrates. Basically, any animal that has a backbone will have an endocannabinoid system. It’s been with us for hundreds of millions of years. Now, when it comes to how humans– our modern lifestyle might be somewhat deficient in activating the CB2 receptors and tonifying the endocannabinoid system.
I’m thinking off the top of my head here, but I guess, one of the things and this relates back to the terpenes that we talked about. The main terpene in our CB2 line is beta-caryophyllene. Beta-caryophyllene is what we call a selective CB2 agonist. It activates the CB2 receptors without activating CB1 receptors. Again, that’s one of the reasons why you get all the health benefits associated with cannabis, but none of the intoxication.
Terpenes as the main molecules in essential oils are volatile compounds, so they evaporate quite readily. Our modern way of growing and distributing food where we grow things in another continent, prior to its peak ripeness, transported it thousands of miles to sit on a store shelf or a produce section. All those terpenes are just going to constantly evaporate. By the time you actually ingest those foods, the amount of terpenes that you’re ingesting is a fraction of what you would normally get if you were to eat that fruit fresh or that food fresh.
Ari: That’s super interesting. That’s the exact kind of thing that I’d be looking for to justify, to create a rationale for this. Ancestrally humans picked a fruit and ate it. Now, you get a fruit, but it sits around for days or weeks and is transported thousands of miles before you eat the fruit. What happens chemically to that fruit before it arrives to you? Now, there’s some connection between that and the endocannabinoid system. Now, things start to make sense to me.
Dr. Know: When you think of a fresh fruit and you pick it off the tree, you can just smell the aroma. It’s so potent. It’s so fresh. You buy that same fruit off a produce section in your grocery store, it almost has no smell. Again, beta-caryophyllene being such a potent activator of CB2 receptors and found in many different fruits and spices, you can imagine that our ancestors were consuming a lot more of these compounds than we do today.
Of course, without those compounds, we’re getting a lot less activation of those CB2 receptors, which– very similar to what I talk about in my book on the mitochondria where a lot of the underlying processes show mitochondrial dysfunction. A lot of the same health conditions are also showing a dysfunction of the endocannabinoid system or a suboptimal activation of those receptors. This is probably one of the reasons why that could be happening.
The endocannabinoid system and how it regulates physiology
Ari: Very interesting. Can you go deeper in what the endocannabinoid system does? How it’s involved in regulating physiology and some of the mechanisms of how this works irrespective of any exogenous compounds. How is this working internally and what systems, what mechanisms is it modulating to have those effects?
Dr. Know: As I mentioned, it starts with something going off balance. When that happens certain chemical signals are released. As an example, in the situation of inflammation, certain inflammatory compounds are released, and that wakes up the endocannabinoid system to alert it that there’s something going on here. We need to address this. The endocannabinoid system is often seen as a modulation function. What happens often is that things are a little bit too active. Whether it’s the inflammation is too active or the nervous system is too active, and it works through what we call a retrograde signaling.
Typically, what happens is the presynaptic neuron sends a message down to the postsynaptic neuron, but the endocannabinoid system works in the reverse. When it sees that there’s too much nervous system signals going down the nervous system chain, it sends a signal retroactively through a retrograde signaling. It goes from the postsynaptic neuron to the presynaptic neuron to tone down that signaling and tame that overactive nervous system. Whether it’s nerve signals or things related to inflammation.
Ari: Very interesting.
Dr. Know: The other thing I should mention is that we do have our own endocannabinoids. These are compounds that our bodies produce that activate these receptors. As you mentioned, outside of exogenous cannabinoids or compounds that activate these receptors, our bodies would naturally produce these compounds. To go back to touch upon your previous question about what might be happening, where we have this endocannabinoid system dysfunction or deficiency now versus before. There’s a lot of different things that could be going on.
The endocannabinoid system is somewhat complex. One of the things that we see is some of these enzymes that are involved in the endocannabinoid system that break down our endocannabinoids for some reason what we’re seeing is sometimes they’re a lot more active than usual. It’s too active in breaking down these endocannabinoids. These endocannabinoids which do have a health benefit and can bring about that balancing function they’re broken down too quickly, so they’re not able to have that impact.
The other thing is that we have something else called fatty acid-binding protein. These are proteins that bind our endocannabinoids when they’re finished doing their job and then usher them out of our system. Again, for some reason, what we’re seeing is in various situation, we have an excess amount of these fatty acid-binding proteins. Again, it neutralizes the endocannabinoids, so we can’t do our job. That’s probably one of the reasons why certain exogenous compounds can come into play. I’ll touch upon CBD. I will also make it very clear that our products are not CBD. Our products we call it CB2, but it’s predominantly based on beta-caryophyllene.
CBD, however, what’s interesting is even though it’s a cannabinoid actually it doesn’t even activate CB2 or CB1 receptors but does seem to have an influence on the endocannabinoid system in different or indirect ways. One of those ways is suggested to be to bind that fatty acid-binding protein. It takes up or occupies the fatty acid binding protein so it can’t bind to our endocannabinoids and take them out of our system. CBD does seem to have some utility with respect to the endocannabinoids system, but again, somewhat indirect. One of the reasons why I think exogenous sources of those types of compounds can help.
Ari: Interesting. Whereas beta-caryophyllene does act directly on CB2 receptors?
Dr. Dr. Know: That’s right. Yes. It’s known as what we call a full agonist. That means when it binds to the CB2 receptors, it’s going to elicit the maximum strength of a signal. THC I should also mention is a CB2 agonist as well as the CB1 receptor agonist, one of the reasons why THC gets you high. It does bind to the CB2 receptors, but it’s what we call a partial agonist. Even though THC can bind to those CBT receptors and still bring about the same benefits that our product does, the strength of the signal is somewhat muted because it’s a partial agonist.
Does Cannanda’s products make you high?
Ari: It’s worth mentioning this for people as soon as you talked about anything related to cannabinoids, can you get high from this? That’s one thing that people with no experience in this territory generally tend to think with anything related to hemp, or cannabinoid, anything is, “Oh, it’s like marijuana, it’s going to get me high.” Can you speak to that?
Dr. Know: That’s a great question. The answer with our product is absolutely not. I guess one of the things that it’s important to understand again is that it’s the CB1 receptors that give you that feeling of intoxication or that high. Because our product is an only a CBT receptor activator you won’t get that intoxication. That being said, sometimes people ask me, is it psychoactive? In a sense, our product is psychoactive in the true definition that it alters your psychology.
The way it does that is a lot of people will use it for things like anxiety, or when they’re feeling stressed it can help calm you. I would say even lavender, or GABA, or things like that, those are all in my opinion considered psychoactive because it does have an influence on your brain and the way you feel, but it’s not intoxicating. Like I said, it’s not going to get you intoxicated or high, just to make that distinction.
Can terpene and cannabinoid levels become toxic?
Ari: One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that anything can be overdone. When you dose something in too great of amounts you get toxic effects or you get negative side effects. This is true of literally everything. You can take the healthiest things in the world that I’m a huge advocate of like sun exposure or exercise. Even food and water become toxic. If you drink two gallons of water in the next 10 minutes you cause permanent brain damage and put yourself in a coma and maybe die.
Everything, including pure pristine water can be overdone. Of course, that’s true here too. Oftentimes, there’s no spacing on what the proper analogy is, whether a free lunch or something to that effect. Generally, there are some side effects when we start experimenting, especially with neurochemistry. I found that– let’s say you take a pill that alters your neurochemistry in a way that helps you focus, or alters your neurochemistry like caffeine or other stimulants in a way that gives you energy. What’s on the other side of that is my question.
Of course, we know with caffeine, or Adderall, or Ritalin, things of this nature there are very serious side effects on the other side of this. Caffeine, for example, alters your neurotransmitter systems with chronic daily use. It alters your neurotransmitter systems in a way that actually lower your baseline levels of energy, rather than raise them. It’s overstimulating this. Since the body has an intelligent dynamic system, it starts to adapt and it goes we’re being overstimulated. Let’s make adaptations that remove some of this excessive stimulation effect.
That actually creates the side effect of lowering your energy with chronic use of this thing that people are using to raise their energy. Similar things are true with really every substance that tends to alter neurochemistry. The question here and I think the distinction here is, is this something that is bringing the body back into balance, or is this something that is pushing the body out of balance like the use of stimulants as an example?
Dr. Know: Again, great question. I’m enjoying our conversation because you’re really touching upon a lot of different concepts, and things that I don’t usually get asked about. To answer your question, there’s actually a few different ways I can answer it. First of all, I’ll talk about tolerance. Tolerance is the natural adaptation to exposure to a particular substance. What normally happens is over chronic exposure or high exposure our bodies adapt, and it takes more of that substance to bring about the same effect.
Using coffee as an example. When I started drinking coffee in university, half a cup was sufficient, but as I drank coffee on a regular basis the amount I needed to get that same wakefulness increase. That is an example of tolerance. Same thing happens with the endocannabinoid system. What we’ve seen, especially with medical cannabis users as well as chronic recreational users, is that a small amount when you’re starting out is sufficient, but over time you’re using more and more.
For certain medical cannabis users that we’ve come across, they’re using in the range of seven to 10 grams a day, which is a huge amount. Of course, that happens over a period of years, but basically, our bodies adapts to the point where you need more and more to get the same effect. What’s interesting is that even though we’ve seen that with CB1 receptors, numerous studies have shown that we don’t seem to see that with CB2 receptors. Tolerance doesn’t seem to develop for some reason at the level of CB2.
At least in a few number of studies that have been done, it doesn’t look like you can build up that tolerance with CB2 agonist. Staying with the one particular dose seems to be sufficient. The other thing I should mention is that when it comes to the endocannabinoid system it seems to operate– and again I’m focused more on the CB1 receptor. Again, that’s where a lot of the research that’s been done in answering this type of question revolves around. What we see is that the endocannabinoid system works on what they call a biphasic dose-response curve.
Most things, and I’ll use caffeine as an example, work on a linear dose-response curve. You take a small amount, you get a particular response. You take a large amount, you get the same response, but in a greater intensity. With the endocannabinoid system, we seem to have what– you can think of it as a U-shaped curve. You have a low dose brings about a certain response, but a high dose will actually bring about the opposite response.
I’ll use cannabis again from a recreational point of view as an example where– well, actually, maybe not so much a recreational point of view, but a lot of people do use cannabis as to address anxiety. Now, the thing is if you’re a novice user where your body has not adapted to that level of THC, or even if you’re a regular user but you just have way too much for your body, your body’s tolerance level it’s going to actually induce anxiety.
That’s a perfect example of that biphasic dose-response curve, where a small amount can bring about one response, but a larger amount brings about the opposite response. To bring the discussion back to the mitochondria. The mitochondria actually have CB1 receptors. This is preliminary research, just to let you know. There isn’t a lot, but the research that I did see shows in some situations activating CB1 receptors can actually induce the electron transport chain and make it more active.
In other situations, it can actually cause a reduction in the activity of the electron transport chain, which is the key component of oxidative phosphorylation or creating energy through the use of oxygen. When you look at these types of studies where the results are completely conflicting with each other, my immediate thought is– and going back to my understanding of the endocannabinoid system and that biphasic dose-response curve is that–
If you have a small amount of THC or anything that’s going to activate those CB1 receptors, you’re going to potentially increase the activity of the electron transport chain. Too much, you’re going to have the opposite effects. When it comes to using products like this, I think it is important to make sure that you’re using the right dose, and the right dose for you might not necessarily be the same right dose for the next person. It really is an individual thing. The last thing I’ll mention is and this is more specific to our products, is that every single product or ingredient that we use in our products has grass status are generally recognized as safe.
These ingredients are considered food ingredients. In terms of the amount that you would need to bring about say a toxic effect, it is quite high. Now, of course, you don’t ever want to overdo anything and that’s true with our products as well. That being said, we’ve not come across anyone that’s reported any toxic effects. Again, as long as you’re using it the way that we recommend, there shouldn’t be any issues with adverse effects or toxicity or anything like that. At least we haven’t come across that yet.
Ari: Separate from toxicity or some acute serious adverse effect that somebody takes it and really notices some really unpleasant effect. What I’m more thinking of is subtle adaptations that might not even be perceptible, but might be negative. As an example, five years ago in our last podcast, one of the things we spoke about with regards to mitochondria was some of the research Michael Ristow’s research out of Germany on antioxidants used around exercise.
How antioxidants may actually and many studies do indicate impair the adaptations that you get from exercise. This is something that somebody who’s actually taking those antioxidants and maybe thinking they’re doing a good thing, taking antioxidants right after they exercise or before they exercise, could do this for years without ever noticing anything negative. They would’ve actually impaired a lot of the metabolic benefits that they would’ve otherwise received from that exercise.
For people listening unfamiliar with this line of logic, basically, this revolves around hormetic stress and that the benefits of exercise and other hormetic stressors are in part, in large part mediated by the rise in reactive oxygen species or free radicals, oxidants that are produced in large amounts during the hormetic stress. When you take antioxidants close to that you actually suppress that, and therefore you suppress most or a lot of the benefits that you otherwise would’ve received by allowing your body to adapt to that stressor.
By minimizing the stress on the mitochondria, you also minimize their need for adaptation. Something like that. Even with coffee, coffee is an insidious thing precisely because most people will not notice the effects of that. Similarly, you could look at anti-inflammatory substances, there’s research similarly with exercise. You take anti-inflammatories close to weight training workouts and you will actually suppress some of the adaptation there.
Even with something– we all have this shared cultural narrative at this point. Inflammation is really bad, inflammation drives disease, but inflammation is also necessary and is an important part of repair to injuries, to damage tissues. What I’m thinking of here is if you’re constantly pushing hard on the anti-inflammatory switch, maybe you’re actually suppressing healthy inflammation in some cases.
Dr. Know: 100%, yes. As you were talking about that, then I understood your question and you’re a100% right. We talked about this during our podcast five years ago. That is one of the ways that the mitochondria adapts to things like exercise is through that oxidative stress. Then as you’re talking my immediate thought was going to inflammation because our product is such a great anti-inflammatory, we do know that acute inflammation in many circumstances is actually a beneficial thing. That’s what can somewhat kickstart our healing process.
Those signals are received by our body. Our bodies send in a number of other chemicals to start healing the body. If you’re going to tone that down, you’re going to blunt the response, that beneficial healing response, so 100%. With our product, one of the things that we really want to emphasize is that it’s at least with a lot of the research that’s been done around CBT receptor and inflammation, a lot of it revolves around chronic degenerative conditions. You don’t want to be taming inflammation in acute situations
Because our product is such a great anti-inflammatory, you’re taking it during those acute phases it’s probably going to have a blunting effect on the positive effects of those inflammatory compounds. It is one of those things where you– and this is true for pretty much everything, whether it’s exercise, certain nutrients, different foods. I think timing of taking anything or administering anything is incredibly important.
One of the things that you mentioned earlier was red light therapy or infrared therapy. One of the things that I came across more recently is with the retina being so dense in mitochondria can actually have a tremendous benefit from exposure to red light. What they found was that the timing of when you use that red light can make the difference between whether you’re going to get those benefits.
I don’t think it showed any negative effects. If you don’t use it during the right time, you’re just not going to see any benefit. Don’t quote me on this, but I think it was in the morning hours if you expose your retina to infrared light, that’s where the benefits are going to happen. You only need to do that once a week to get those benefits. 100% timing of nutrients or any sort of therapy is something that doesn’t get enough attention.
Ari: I’m glad you brought that up because I was actually going to switch to a timing discussion. One of the things that I’ve noticed for me personally, and I think that this is something that will have minimal amounts of translation for a lot of other people. Especially people who are largely sedentary and dealing with chronic disease, degenerative diseases of various kinds.
I’ve experimented with this principle of– the thought occurred to me. Maybe I’m overdoing it with some of the compounds that are anti-inflammatories. Because I’m so physically active I have days where I might surf for two to three hours in the morning, go play tennis for two hours, work out, or do surfing and capoeira or jujitsu, or rock climbing and weight training, all on the same day.
Some days I have three to five hours of exercise is very often pretty typical for me and in multiple bouts over the day. When I really overdo this too much, sometimes I’ll feel chronically inflamed and stiff. Some of that’s normal. You’re just doing some temporary tissue damage and inflammation in response to intense physical activity. I just had this intuition that maybe paradoxically this chronic inflammatory feeling that I have is actually related to too much use of anti-inflammatory agents.
I backed off some of the stuff that I’m using and experimented with not using some of the stuff that I would normally use, and I actually feel like it allowed for a healthy expression of inflammation to occur after a lot of this intense physical activity. Now I’m interested in experimenting more with timing. Maybe if I leave a break of several hours after the exercise and then introduce some of the anti-inflammatory agent’s maybe I can have mostly a beneficial effect.
Anyway, everything I’m talking about is mostly speculative. None of it it’s even reflected in my blood biomarkers. My inflammatory biomarkers are rock bottom, they’re extremely low. It’s all just a feel thing an intuition thing extrapolating from the same kinds of logic that we were just talking about with antioxidants, for example. I’m glad you mentioned the timing, because my hunch now is that timing of these things is really important.
Dr. Know: I think outside of dose, when we talked about even water, too much water can cause some serious adverse effects. I think to a lesser degree that the timing of nutrients will have a huge influence on whether you have adverse effects or have positive effects. Yes, like I said, I think it’s something that doesn’t get enough attention. I don’t even think that the bulk of the research community understands the importance of this. I think the few studies that have come out that looked at this whether it’s the red light therapy with the retinal benefits, or the antioxidant intake and adaptation to exercise things like that.
There’s some early hints that this is something that we need to pay attention to. I think a lot of people just think that it’s not a relevant aspect or a variable in many situations. Which I’m going to guess if that research is done, we’re going to see that timing is actually a critical factor. Even when it comes to something like sleep like, some of the research I was seeing with sleep.
Depending on when you go to sleep– and again, this will vary depending on the individual and your own circadian rhythm. Depending on when you go to sleep and when you wake up has a huge influence. You could still sleep seven hours, eight hours, but when those sleep hours occur will influence how much of a benefit you get from sleep. Yes, I think it’s a variable that is going to be something that should be looked at and will be looked at, and we’re going to start to understand the importance of that sooner or later.
The optimal timing for using beta-caryophyllene products
Ari: If you had to guess based on your knowledge of this area and personal experimentation, what would you say would be the optimal timing for the use of beta-caryophyllene in your products?
Dr. Know: If I had to say, I would say in the evening. In the evening, the anti-inflammatory benefits are taking place or having an effect while you’re sleeping. Because sleep is so regenerative, I think that is the ideal time to have those benefits. Again, I’m speaking without 100% seeing any sort of research to confirm. This is just, again, going based on my feeling and my intuition. Throughout the day whether we’re exercising or anything like that, we are increasing those inflammatory markers– kick-starting the healing process.
At night we can start to tone down that inflammation or any sort of signaling so that our healing processes can start to kick into gear and start to regenerate. I know that has a huge benefit to things like brain health where depending on different phases of sleep we’re starting to clear out a lot of the junk in our brain so to speak. I think that a big part of that is related to the amount of inflammation that’s going on.
Ari: Dr. Know, I’ve really enjoyed this. Are there any final words that you want to leave people with? Maybe also can you let people know what kinds of things you’re hearing from users of this product, and what kinds of issues and symptoms people are generally reporting the most positive effects from.
Dr. Know: Yes. As I mentioned, I think the three main health conditions that people are using our products for, and the three main conditions that we see the most testimonials for are pain, sleep issues, and anxiety. When I look at the breadth of different conditions, I would say it ranges. It’s gotten to the point where nothing surprises me anymore. I hear a lot of these incredible stories.
Again, whether there’s research supported or not, again, it makes sense to me because our entire body is full of CBT receptors. I’ve heard amazing stories with respect to things like Alzheimer’s, people at late-stage Alzheimer’s, in a long-term care facility almost brought back to full health after a few months of using our product to migraine sufferers. In one situation, I remember the person telling me that they were on Botox injections for migraines that she’s had since she was a child. After using our products she’s off her Botox medication or injections.
Talk about the big C, but we even had success stories with that. I can’t say it was definitively diagnosed as that, but when you have an ongoing open sore that fails to heal for a couple of years, that is very suspect. Using our product after a few months the sore actually healed for the first time in a couple of years, and the lump under there decreased by half the size. We have a lot of different testimonials covering a range of different health conditions. Like I said, I think the vast bulk of the uses are using it for pain, sleep, and anxiety.
Ari: Awesome. Dr. Know, let people know where they can follow your work, or learn more about your company and your products.
Dr. Know: You can check out our website, it’s cannanda.com, that’s C-A-N-N-A-N-D-A dot com, and on Instagram as well, which is cannandacrew.
Ari: Awesome. Thank you so much, my friend. I look forward to our next conversation, hopefully not five years from now.
Dr. Know: Yes, that’s right. Thanks again for having me, Ari.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
01:09 – Guest intro
03:23 – Dr. Know’s current focus on mitochondria
07:10 – The uses of terpenes, cannabis, and cannabinoids
09:15 – Benefits of activating the CB2 receptor
11:11 – Keys to activating the CB2 receptor
16:20 – The endocannabinoid system and how it regulates physiology
22:12 – Does Cannanda’s products make you high?
23:39 – Can terpene and cannabinoid levels become toxic?
43:20 – The optimal timing for using beta-caryophyllene
Links
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