The Real Health Podcast

Welcome back to another episode of the Real Health Podcast. What if I were to tell you there's a spice, something that's been around for thousands of years that in clinical trials performs as well as antidepressants with obviously fewer side effects. When we talk about this spice, it is one of the most researched when it comes to depression and anxiety and mood disorders. It should be widely considered as a part of your supplement regimen if you deal with any depression, anxiety, OCD, or any psychiatric based disorders. It's a game changer.

And clinically it's proven to be effective. Sometimes it's hard. It's hard to figure out like, hey, this really doing anything? This one I can tell you for sure. It does, it does great, great things.

So let's dive into another episode of Real Health Podcast as we talk through depression and anxiety. Hey, just a plug, keep an eye out, in March we will be doing a hormone one hundred one workshop in office at our West location. If you live in Knoxville or the surrounding area and you wanna learn more about how to optimize hormones, males, we'll talk about testosterone optimization. If you've been considering testosterone replacement therapy, what are other strategies that are more effective than TRT? Women, we'll talk about transition seasons.

So, how to transition well after kids or fertility outcomes or how to transition well and getting you set up for menopause. So we'll be talking through that hormone workshop, sixty minutes of just jam packed information to help you on your health journey. So keep an eye on that as we look to that workshop here in a little over a month. So, saffron. That's what we're talking about today.

It's not hype. It's human clinical research. And we'll talk through depression, anxiety, and how saffron even compares to SSRIs. And then at the end I'll throw in a little bit of a stack for you to consider how to stack a couple other nutrients to the regimen to really create a good recipe to help people if you're dealing with any type of depression, anxiety or mood disorders. And so, let's talk through saffron because it's historically, saffron is historically used, well, it's a culinary dish, right?

Like you see it in culinary dishes. But it's historically used for mood, calmness, sleep and even pain and inflammation. A lot of saffron is actually supplemented with turmeric. And it has even a greater synergistic effect when combined with turmeric. And interesting enough, saffron affects pain and inflammation.

And it does through affecting the brain specifically. But here we're not talking about adding it to a culinary dish. It's not enough in terms of its potency. The polyphenols in saffron need to be dosed in a specific way to realize the benefits of it. So, we're gonna talk about how to dose it, okay?

But right now, we see saffron has some of the strongest evidence of any botanical for mild to moderate depression. It's been studied multiple randomized, double blind, placebo controlled studies. The typical design is about six to eight weeks and they use about thirty milligrams of saffron. Outcomes measured using like the standard depression scales is that saffron obviously significantly outperformed the placebo. So that's good.

But the effect sizes are clinically meaningful. They're not subtle. This isn't like a feel better supplement. These are changes compared to what we see and expect from strong medications. When you look at how saffron compared versus the big antidepressants, head to head trials compared Saffronza Prozac and Celexa.

And they had similar reductions in depressive symptoms. There was no statistically different result in the groups. So, the groups that are treated with classical antidepressants and the group that was treated with saffron, they both displayed improvement in depressive symptoms. Obviously the great thing about saffron is the side effects are about negligible, right? It's not a medication that has a side effect.

So, when we even look at saffron and compare it to anxiety, anxiety outcomes are even more variable than depression. The meta analysis show improvements in anxiety scores and stress and emotional well-being. And so, the important distinction here though is it was treated for like anxious depression and stress related mood symptoms. So, this would be in that mild to moderate category. Obviously, when you look at severe anxiety disorders, panic disorders, OCD or PANDAS, we really have to figure out, okay, what's driving this?

And we look at neurological autoimmunity, we look at infections as being potential drivers as well as genetics and environmental exposures and past histories of traumas. There's a lot to unpack there. But when we're talking about anxious depression or stress related mood disorders, which affect virtually everyone to some degree sometime in their life, Sefron is just a clinical pearl. And it seems to work better and best when anxiety is driven by neuroinflammation. So this is something we talk about a lot.

When the brain is inflamed and has a lot of like oxidative stress and neurotransmitter imbalance, saffron seems to be the guy here that really works well. Turmeric as well. Turmeric reduces neurological inflammation. So especially when there's saffron combined with turmeric, can really get some amazing changes. Again, the dosing that we see is about thirty milligrams.

A lot of times it's split fifteen milligrams in the morning, fifteen milligrams at night, and the duration's about two months. If you really wanna start seeing the benefit, gotta take it daily for over a month and then we'll typically start seeing those benefits show up. It's important to work though with a healthcare practitioner dosing saffron. Is a disclaimer here, right? If you have previous history of using SSRIs, antidepressants, or you're on them, this is where working with clinical team is so important to help you navigate dosing and how to actually take saffron.

This is more of just, hey, let's be aware that this is a fantastic option for a lot of people. When you look at saffron, it's I was I was like, okay, what would I add to it? Right? Like if I'm trying to really enhance the stack of of you know, mood support, I thought about two others. So one of them is L Theanine and the other one is magnesium.

And the key concept to explain here is that saffron, what it does is it supports your monoamine neurotransmitter. So that's serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine. But there may be a situation where the patient's overstimulated or deficient in magnesium, or they're locked into synthetic dominance, right? And this is where stacking it comes into play. When you see a depletion in monoamine neurotransmitters, serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, These are very methylated based, okay?

And so working with saffron can be really helpful, but making sure your methylation pathways are also supported would be something to consider, particularly methylfolate does this really well. But when we look at some of these other systems of why there could be some mood disorders, L theanine is a fantastic calmer to the brain. Most of the patients, when they take about one hundred milligrams of L theanine, can really increase their alpha brain wave activity, improve their GABA signaling, and all of this is just gonna make you just feel better. It's gonna create a mental calmness and feel more emotionally regulated. One of the things I love about tea is caffeine is in tea and L theanine is in green tea.

And I feel different when I drink tea compared to when I just drink coffee. And L theanine, it doesn't stop, like doesn't blunt your emotions, it just smooths the system. And so L theanine is a really good modulator. It's been shown to help with anxious depression, when you're under a lot of stress and high cognitive load or if you're just packing and studying for an exam and you feel stressed and test anxiety, L theanine can be really, really effective for you. And then the third one to consider would be magnesium.

And magnesium is essential, essential for hormones of the brain, neurotransmitters, GABA, your NMDA receptors. It helps with stress control and it's a mineral that's essential for making brain energy, ATP. So it's part of the mitochondrial system. And so a deficiency in magnesium can specifically cause symptoms like anxiety, insomnia, low mood, irritability. That's why people, when they take magnesium at night, sleep better, right?

So if magnesium is low, literally the brain is more excited. It's more naturally stimulated. The resting point is higher, the threshold is lower, and it can make anxiety and depression hit harder. Saffron works at the neurotransmitter level, the monoamine neurotransmitters. Magnesium stabilizes the membrane of the nerves and it helps with specifically ATP production.

If you look at three amazing options for helping mood disorders, for calming the nervous system, to help regulation, you should absolutely consider saffron, and then consider L theanine and magnesium as other options. I'd say mood disorders are more prominent now than ever before. I don't think anyone is gonna walk through this earth without having some level of anxiety, feeling anxious, rather than jumping to a diagnosis with potential downside of years of medications that may not work, we should consider a lot of things in our environment. We should consider how much we're resting and how oversleeping and how much we're training and what foods we're putting in our body, all that matters. But if you want something to really help push you in a direction, you should absolutely consider saffron.

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And we value, we're gonna continue to give you the most valuable information in the shortest period of time. We're all living busy lives. So if we can give you something that's just a clinical pearl in under twenty minutes, it's our aim and it's focus. So thanks for listening to another episode of the Real Health Podcast. Our passion is to add value to your healthcare journey.

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