The Amazing Benefits of Anti-Aging Ashwagandha
What Is Ashwagandha?
Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera), also known as winter cherry, is a popular herbal remedy used to support overall health and vitality. If you’ve ever taken it as a root powder tea, you’d be familiar with its earthy, perhaps slightly nutty smell and taste. But what does ashwagandha do? It turns out that ashwagandha could be a rising star in a growing field: anti-aging and longevity promotion.
What Are The Traditional Uses Of Ashwagandha?
Ayurvedic medicine categorizes ashwagandha as a rasayana, a type of medicine that rejuvenates and revitalizes the body’s tissues. The rasayanas are known as adaptogens in Western herbal medicine, and both cultures list anti-aging benefits as an advantage of taking them.
Other traditional uses of ashwagandha are to treat anxiety, insomnia, neurological disorders, asthma, arthritis, goiter, and ulcers. It is taken either alone or in combination with other herbs.
What Are The Modern Indications For Ashwagandha?
Ashwagandha has been validated by a growing number of clinical trials, including those testing it for physical fitness, mental health benefits, and relief of menopausal symptoms.
Ashwagandha For Mental Health
Stress is a part of everyday life, but we don’t have to let it turn into chronic distress, anxiety, depression, or insomnia. Clinical trials show significant reduction in stress scores, including emotional, social, and physical symptoms, while taking ashwagandha. These benefits are linked to ashwagandha’s abilities to reduce cortisol, the main stress hormone.
Cortisol damages your brain’s natural capacity for regeneration, which may contribute to depression and poor memory. Although you need cortisol to wake up in the morning and stay alert throughout the day, it is meant to taper off during the afternoon and evening. Chronic stress keeps its levels high, leading to insomnia and further mental health issues as a result.
Immune-Boosting Properties Of Ashwagandha
Cold and flu season are never welcomed, especially when you’re already prone to infections, inflammation, and fatigue.
Thankfully, ashwagandha can give us an improved ability to fight infections, by stimulating the growth of certain immune cell types. They include those involved in the innate immune response, which acts fast and doesn’t need to “learn” about a new microbe, and the specific immune response, the more effective side that takes longer to respond. Although this involves a temporary increase in inflammation, it can protect you from developing chronic inflammation from unresolved infection later.
Ashwagandha For Menopause Relief
Countless women search for remedies that will at least reduce the severity of menopausal symptoms. However, if you have a family history of breast cancer or other estrogen-dependent illness, you may not feel safe using any hormone replacement therapy preparation.
Ashwagandha may relieve menopausal symptoms by safely increasing your body’s own production of estrogen. When 100 women took either 300mg of ashwagandha twice a day or a placebo for eight weeks, symptom categories that include hot flashes, dryness, anxiety, and muscle and joint complaints showed significant relief. Their estrogen levels rose, while FSH and LH fell.
FSH and LH stimulate the ovaries, and their higher levels during menopause lead to hot flashes and sweating. They eventually burn out as the ovaries fail to respond, so you perceive an improvement. As ashwagandha raises estrogen production, most likely by the adrenal glands, you produce less FSH And LH. It’s important to at least partially restore estrogen (and progesterone) levels during and after menopause, because of its supportive properties on your connective tissue, muscles, and brain.
Osteoporosis Prevention With Ashwagandha
Osteoporosis is a common but often disabling age-related condition that mainly affects women after menopause. This is because lack of estrogenic support reduces bone regeneration and allows the cells that break down old bone tissue to act with less restraint.
Ashwagandha may even protect your bones through pathways independent of estrogen. A lab study showed that ashwagandha extract was not only equal to estrogen in protecting bone strength, but that it achieved its results without stimulating estrogen receptors. By some measurements, it completely restored bone tissue to its youthful state, or even strengthened it beyond the original scores. However, it’s important to remember that ashwagandha treatment began in the equivalent to perimenopause, so get started right away.
Boost Your Cardio Fitness Using Ashwagandha
Your oxygen carrying capacity is an essential contributor to your overall health and longevity. More youthful levels of oxygen capacity are linked with lower mortality rates, greater independence, and less cardiovascular disease in the long-term, and better fitness and quality of life every day.
When physical activity alone isn’t enough to maintain your cardio fitness, ashwagandha may help. A review of clinical trials found that it significantly increased oxygen capacity in both athletes and non-athletes, with higher doses linked to greater benefits. The study showing the smallest benefit only lasted for two weeks, which is not long enough to see real results.
Ashwagandha Can Improve Physical Strength
Whether you prefer cardio or strength-based exercises, both are essential. Increased strength allows you to do things independently, from home maintenance to lifting heavy objects, and protects you later in life against injury and frailty. Beyond the everyday basics, it helps you achieve more in your chosen sport or workout routine.
Ashwagandha may be the perfect accompaniment to your workout routine. A trial involving young, healthy men found that it increased strength on the bench-press exercise from 26.4kg to an amazing 46kg. Their gains in muscle size were higher, too, by 8.6cm in their arms and 3.3cm in their chest muscles, compared to 5.3cm and 1.4cm in the placebo group.
These benefits may have been partly thanks to ashwagandha stimulating testosterone production. Treated men had levels of 96.2ng/dL, compared to only 18ng/dL. Although ashwagandha didn’t boost testosterone in the study on menopausal women, this may have been because aromatase converts it to estrogen. You can combine ashwagandha with aromatase-inhibiting herbs, such as damiana, increasing your zinc intake, and strength training. Aromatase is present at higher levels in fatty tissue, too, so ensure that you have a healthy body composition.
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References
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