Today we are honored to welcome to the show Sage Dammers, founder of Addictive Wellness. Sage discusses his journey into the wellness industry, stemming from personal health challenges and a passion for creating health-boosting products such as delicious chocolate bars that are both delicious and packed with adaptogenic herbs which promote an optimized lifestyle!
Sage elaborates on his experiences with using herbs such as reishi, astragalus, cordyceps, and ashwagandha to improve overall wellbeing. The discussion touches on the importance of ingredient quality, challenges in mainstream medicine, and why you should take in news re: your health and lifestyle from mainstream sources with a hefty grain of salt!
The episode offers insights into the benefits of adaptogens and encourages listeners to explore healthier lifestyle choices incrementally.
In this interview with Sage Dammers, you'll discover:
02:41 The Health Benefits of Cacao
05:59 Understanding Candida
09:20 The Birth of Addictive Wellness
10:13 Elixir Bars and Global Ventures
18:36 The Concept of Adaptogenic Herbs
21:55 Balancing Energy and Calm with Adaptogens
22:13 The Science Behind Adaptogens
24:46 Ashwagandha: The Versatile Adaptogen
26:19 Chaga Mushroom and Other Noteworthy Adaptogens
29:10 Challenges with Mainstream Health Systems
32:04 Navigating Health Information and Resources
37:50 Practical Tips for Using Adaptogens
40:15 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Resources mentioned:
Addictive Wellness
Boundless by Ben Greenfield (audiobook narrated by James Newcomb)
About the guest:
Sage Dammers is the co-founder, CEO, product formulator, and chocolatier of Addictive Wellness. Fueled by a passionate desire to help people live the ultimate life and create a better world, Sage began as a teenager seeking out information that no mainstream school could offer in the areas of nutrition and traditional herbal systems of indigenous cultures.
He built his knowledge of superfood nutrition and traditional herbal systems, especially Taoist tonic herbalism. He has worked with and trained under the world’s leading master herbalists and nutrition and longevity experts in Costa Rica, Australia, Bali, China, and America.
The devil doesn't want you to listen to this!
Napoleon Hill's Outwitting the Devil is now available in audiobook format, narrated by Yours Truly.
Visit my website, jamesdnewcomb.com to get instant access to the audios!
Conscience Living in a Zunktout World. You're listening to Barvosh Donk with James D. Newcomb, brought to you by Grandma Petruno. Hey folks, welcome to the show, and I want to preface our interview with the person I'm going to introduce in just a couple of minutes by saying that this morning it was really intense morning for me. It was just something that I was thinking about, it was something that was weighing heavily on my mind, and I finally accomplished the thing that I was working on accomplishing, and I was exhausted. It was 12 o'clock noon, and I was tired just because I was focusing so hard on this one thing, and so I laid down on my couch in our living room, and I slept like, you know, like I haven't slept in a long time. I woke up really refreshed because I really needed it, I was just really stressed out about this thing that I was doing, and I was like, oh my goodness, I'm talking with Sage Dammers in just like two hours, what am I going to do? How am I going to get to the point where I can function on an interview? Well what I did was I went to my table, and I put in my mouth something that had arrived yesterday, and it was a gift from Sage, it was from his company, Addictive Wellness. It was a piece of chocolate, and the label on the box was energy. I put this piece of chocolate in my mouth, it was delicious, it's succulent, it's wonderful, and the reason that I have the level of energy that I have right now, as I'm recording this, that I'm able to function as a podcast host, partly due to the great innovation and the recipe that has been invented, brought to the market by our guest, Sage Dammers. Welcome, Sage, good to have you. Thank you so much for having me on, and thank you for sharing your experience with the chocolate. It always puts such a big smile on my face. One to hear the people are enjoying it just from a flavor and food experience, but then to hear that it actually helps you in your life, that's really the icing on the cake. And that's the thing is about these things, we are conditioned to think that if it tastes horrible, then it's good for you, and if it tastes good, then it's probably bad for you. And that may have been true a couple of decades ago, but there's been so many innovations with the way that ingredients are formulated, and yours is, of course, no exception. The chocolate was absolutely wonderful, and as I understand it, it's sugar free, isn't it? Right, and that was one of the reasons I made it that way is one, because as I was developing the chocolate, I was dealing with my own health issues in my late teens, early 20s, dealing with Candida after having been on pretty much daily antibiotics for most of my teenage years from like 14 to 18, pretty much, was on daily antibiotics, because I had skin issues, I didn't know what to deal with, and the doctor didn't know how to deal with it, so they just threw antibiotics at me, didn't tell me it can wreck your gut health and leave you with all sorts of problems. So I needed something that would be sugar free, and there were some other decent healthy chocolates out there, but they were all using either something like maybe maple sugar or coconut palm sugar, and even though these are certainly miles better than a white, highly processed sugar, they still are going to hit a point at which it's like, "Okay, that's too much sugar. I'm feeding these opportunistic organisms in my system that are causing me so much suffering. I got it back off, even though the chocolate itself is healthy, the presence of sugar put a ceiling on how much chocolate I could enjoy." I wanted to remove that because I don't want anybody limiting my chocolate intake. And chocolate gets a bit of a bad rap because it's actually the sugar that makes the Hershey's chocolate. It's probably the most famous. That gets a bad rap because we think of it as unhealthy, but chocolate itself, well the cacao bean is actually more of a berry than it's not a sugar at all. Yeah, cacao in its purest form has the possibility to be a spectacular health food. This was really mind-boggling to me when I first discovered it, and this is around that same time, late teenage years, because I had only heard of chocolate as a junk food. I never heard that it could have any health-boosting properties. I grew up in a very health-oriented family, and they hadn't even talked about it in this regard. But my parents had a wellness center, and suddenly I saw that they were selling cacao powder on the shelf, and first this was weird to me because I was familiar with the term cocoa. Cacao is a slightly different word that I was like, "Did they misspell that? What's going on here?" And then I said, "Mom, why are you selling this? What place does this have here?" And I started learning that cacao in its pure state is the highest natural source of magnesium amongst foods. It's the highest natural source of antioxidants. It's great for chromium, which is very important for balancing blood sugar. It's the number one trace mineral that people in the West are chronically deficient in, almost 80% of people. And then you have also lots of other things like iron and zinc, but you get into some more exotic compounds as well, some neurotransmitter compounds that affect your mental chemistry. Things like serotonin, the stress-defense chemical, you have anandamide, the loveless chemical. And so there's so much going on in here that people who are having just a highly processed Hershey's bar with lots of sugar in there, lots of other processing ingredients to make it ultra shelf stable and be able to just sit there for years until somebody grabs it at the gas station. There may be having a fraction of the potential experience of what chocolate can really deliver. And I wanted people to have the whole thing. Can you educate me a little bit on what exactly is Candida? And you said that you had that when you were younger. And I think you said cacao was something that you used to treat it? Not directly to treat it per se, but so Candida is Candida albicans. One could consider opportunistic organism. It's a fungus that exists in the body in small amounts naturally. And it actually in those small amounts is helpful with digestion and nutrient absorption. However, if you, something like you take a lot of antibiotics and these can wipe out a lot of your beneficial gut flora, a lot of the beneficial bacteria living in your gut allow for other bacteria to grow or other other fungi, et cetera, to grow much stronger and throw off the healthy balance. Candida is one of those things that we see very often taking over the gut microbiome when all those good guys have been cleared out. It's like sort of you have maybe some unsavory characters in our society that even though they're not the best, they played their weird little unique role. But if you took out all the good guys, you took out all the police out of a town. Now these unsavory characters are going to flourish and gain too much control. And now you've got a problem Candida feeds on sugar and it can create all kinds of health problems, but the more sugar you feed it, the more it grows. And a part of the basic program to recover from Candida is you have to stop feeding. You stop feeding it and then you take things to help kill it off. And then you take things in the form of probiotics and fermented foods to help replenish the beneficial bacteria in the gut. So I wanted to enjoy raw chocolate because I was so excited to learn about this and it was the most exciting thing to me at the time. But if I'm going to have a chocolate, it was going to be sweetened with something, right? And all these sweeteners were turning it from something that could be really great for me into something that I couldn't have very much of otherwise my Candida situation would flare up. So that's why I realized, okay, if I'm going to enjoy this, I have to make it sugar free. Otherwise they can only have one bite here or there without causing myself some issues. What gives the sweetness in the chocolates for addictive wellness? So yeah, of course it has to be sweet, right? That's how we like to enjoy chocolate. So we sweeten it with a combination of two things. We use organic aluos, which is a fermented product that has sweet flavor. It occurs naturally in many different fruits and vegetables that we consume on a daily basis and it adds sweetness, but it's not fully absorbed by the body. So it tastes sweet on the tongue, but it doesn't get absorbed so it doesn't really affect your blood sugar in any meaningful way. So effectively just goes through you. And then the other thing we use is monk fruit. And this is an herb also known as lohang guo that's been used in the Chinese herbal system as a great chitonic and energy tonic and a lung tonic going back hundreds and hundreds of years. But it also has this great sugar free sweetness to it that comes from the mogger sides. These are different compounds in there that have the sweet flavor, but it doesn't affect your blood sugar whatsoever. So we wanted to find a way to make it totally sugar free so you can enjoy it. So your heart's content, but that it was going to be still super healthy. The requirement was that these added sweeteners have to make it even healthier than if it was just pure cacao unsweetened. We wanted it's going to actually take it further in a positive direction. Okay. When did addictive wellness begin? Tell us about like the founding origins, like the maybe there was a light bulb moment that you had where you said, okay, this is like I found my calling. Addictive wellness is it. Tell us about that. And if you could, as much as you're comfortable, preface that with some of the ideas that you might have had in the wellness industry or maybe some businesses that you had that for whatever reason, they didn't work out too well. I just want to hear a little bit about the history of your business. Absolutely. So to rewind to what I was doing directly before starting addictive wellness is what year did that start? So addictive wellness, this November will be 10 years. So 10 years? November of 2014. Yeah. Wow. Congratulations. It is no small feed. That's really well done. Thank you. Thank you so much. So before this, I was doing some consulting work, setting up tonic elixir bars in five star hotels. I really loved the business and social concept of the elixir bar being a place where people come to have delicious drinks, ice creams, tonics and elixir bar is not necessarily like a health food bar. You're talking about a literal bar where you get drinks, right? Well, yes, yes, you know, so yeah, it's in the physical shape of a bar, but there's no alcohol there except for maybe what you find in some herbal tinctures. What's served there is herbal creations in terms of like hot herbal drinks that are designed to recreate things that normally are good for you, like whether it's a hot chocolate or a super healthy herbal infused coffee drink or maybe somebody comes in craving an ice cream. And so you make them a acai mousse ice cream or a chocolate ice cream or caramel ice cream, all sugar free, packed with the most powerful super foods, adaptogenic herbs, et cetera. So this was an idea that was really pioneered before me was pioneered at the original Air One location in Los Angeles. If you go there now, they still have elixir bars, but it's not the same as it once was. It used to be that you would come in and you would have like a little five minute mini consultation with an herbal specialist and they would kind of figure out what's going on with you, what are the challenges, what are you looking to work on, what flavors do you love and you would get something custom made for you by this specialist. And it would be an incredible food experience just from a flavor texture whole sensory perspective, but also would be spectacularly healthy. And this bar created this incredible social circle around it that kind of peaked, I would say in the timeframe of 2005 to 2011. And it was so cool because it was kind of like people would compare it to cheers and how there is this, you know, this group of regulars that are always at the bar. And it was people who are all passionate about health and wellness, people who are passionate about self improvement, people are passionate about evolving themselves, becoming better versions of themselves, supporting each other on their own health journeys. And it was kind of like the conversations that would happen in that kind of a setting were so special and so unique and you see people connect who had never met before over their passions for health and wellness. So I love this idea. And there's and there's certain chemicals that are released into the brain as I understand in situations like that social settings, serotonin dopamine, I'm not I'm not an expert on it. I'm not a neuroscientist either, but we definitely under undervalue a lot of times the importance of amazing social interactions for overall wellbeing. Okay, and to clarify an elixir bar is like a social setting where you're sitting around having drinks, non-alcoholic drinks versus like an energy bar. That's what I want to clarify. Yeah, but they're they're not they're not boring drinks there. Yeah. And it's not an energy bar. It's not like a snack. It's a physical place that you go. And so we did I set up the first one I got connected with a gentleman who ran one of the nicest hotels in all of Paris, the Royal Monso, and went over there to do this little extra bar. And I was a little bit intimidated because I was thinking, okay, I'm a young guy. I've got all these ideas about health and wellness. So what I think is great and what I think tastes good, but I'm going into this world of French cuisine at an elite five star hotel. How am I going to convince these guys to incorporate my weird California crazy stuff into what they're doing, which has such deeply entrenched heritage and cultural aspects to it. And so I was thinking about this the hallway there. And when I got there, the first evening, I had a quick meeting kind of get together chat with the two of the chefs, not the head of food and beverage, but the two chefs who work directly underneath them. And they're actually pretty young guys. I would say like late twenties, maybe early thirties. And they initially were already more open minded than I expected that they would be. But I wanted to make sure that we didn't hit any resistance going forward. So we're just chatting, having a good time. And I said, okay, we've got all this inventory of different herbal ingredients here that we're going to start working with in the restaurant tomorrow. Let me just make you guys a drink. And then we'll call it a day, come back tomorrow and get things started. I knew they were both in relationships, young guys, very excited about life. And so I made these guys the most powerful aphrodisiac elixir that I possibly could. And I said, okay, go home, have a nice evening with your girlfriends. Come back tomorrow. We'll get started. And they were okay. Yeah, sure. Like whatever. California boy thinks he's going to give us something cool. We'll drink it, whatever. And they came back to the next day. Their eyes were open wide. They're like, what was in there? That was crazy. Our girlfriend couldn't believe that she wants me to drink that every day now. These guys' minds were just blown. And they were totally open to whatever I wanted them to try the whole rest of the time there. And so we did this first one in Paris, which is a spectacular experience. From there, the next opportunity came up to doing in Sydney at a little boutique hotel there where it was one of those crazy situations where every single room has its own butler. So we were training the butlers of each room to be able to make herbal elixirs customized to the needs and desires of their clients. And this was a lot of fun. I was excited about this concept of introducing these adaptogenic herbs and health and wellness in a delicious form to this market of world travelers that may otherwise have never come across this. But I also realized at the same time, this is going to mean a lot of time away from home. This is going to mean a lot of time on planes. This is going to only reach a certain number of people just because of the physical limitations of a single brick and mortar establishment that I'm doing each one of these trainings. And all along, I had been making chocolate as a personal hobby, passion, something I love sharing with friends because I found this was the easiest way to get friends excited about healthy eating. If you give them the most delicious health food possible, healthy chocolate, that's a much easier way to get them started than to try to give them shots of wheatgrass or something gross. I didn't have wheatgrass before this interview to Sage. I was doing, as a hobby, I always thought, oh, this will be just a fun thing to share with others. But as I continued improving my recipe in my spare time over the years, and more people are asking for it, they're saying, oh, I'm having this event, can I buy some from you to offer this event? A friend of my girlfriends was doing some partnership with Dole, the Pineapple Company, and she wanted for the pitch event to them to have me make our chocolates with Pineapple in the center, which is a fun flavor combination I never would have otherwise thought of. And it started to think like, OK, this is really picking up some momentum of its own there. There's clearly a desire for this. This is a physical product that could potentially reach a much wider audience faster than I would be able to just flying around the world and trying to make elixirs for people. Maybe it's time to start looking at this as a serious business. So I didn't take it halfheartedly, really spent the time to put a serious business plan together, plan out the next couple of product lines that I would thought would come after that, work out all the financial forecasts, and see what it would really take for us to get this going. And we didn't want to go the route of taking some big outside investment, because we wanted to really keep control over the quality. My fear was really that if we brought in some outside investor, inevitably, the pressure would come to see, OK, I see you using this cacao that may be of the elite quality in the world. But you could save 75% of your ingredient costs if you dropped to this other source. And nobody but you will know the difference. You're obsessed. Self cares. Change it. And I didn't want to ever be put in that situation because, like I said, I'm obsessed about the quality of what I create. You've used the term adaptogenic a couple of times in our time together. And that it's one of those terms where people may have heard of the term used around here and here and there, whatever social settings they might have been. But maybe we don't know exactly what it means. It does adaptogenic mean. And how does it relate to your business and the wellness things that we're putting into our bodies? Oh, yeah. So the concept of adaptogenic herbs goes back thousands of years into early Taoistonic herbalism and traditional Chinese herbalism, although the term adaption wasn't actually coined until the mid 1900s by a Russian scientist, Dr. Nikolay Lazarev. This is a guy who, during the wars, his whole focus of his work was researching performance enhancing drugs that could be given to soldiers to maximize short-term performance. Even if it was at the cost of their long-term well-being. But after the wars, there wasn't such urgency about everything and immediacy to the problems. He wanted to focus on his real area of passion, which was herbs that would enhance performance but also have a beneficial long-term impact on health. And he wanted to find herbs that would improve the body's own self-regulatory mechanisms. So your body is designed very intelligently to keep itself in balance. But sometimes things happen that are too stressful for your body and it gets thrown out of balance. Your body always wants to keep balance, but sometimes your roots aren't deep enough or your structure or your foundation is not strong enough to keep you from getting knocked over, whether that's getting sick or that's getting exhausted, whether that's getting more stressed than you should, whether it's so many things that can go wrong, sometimes the body can't quite handle it. And so the idea with adaptions is these are not single directional herbs. Many herbs will stimulate you and give you a lot of energy immediately. But if you take them in the evening, they're going to keep you up. Many herbs will either stimulate or suppress the immune system, but only in one specific direction. These kind of are predetermined as to what they're going to come in the body and do. The adaptogens don't come in already knowing what's going to happen. They're not automatically even going one way or the other. They are going to strengthen your body's own ability to regulate. And so if you're, let's say for example, with racing mushroom, the idea is that it comes in and your immune system is a bit overactive, it's going to help it wind back down. If it's underactive, it's going to help activate. And then you can look at something like Geinostema is a herbal vine coming from southern China. It's an incredible herb that almost nobody knows about. And if you're tired, it's going to help give you more energy. If you are overstimulated and stressed, it's going to calm you down. It's not a sedative and it's not a stimulant. It's just helping you feel really in a state of peaceful awareness and just lightly energized, but also relaxed at the same time to the point where you could take it first thing in the morning and have a great energized day, you could take it in the evening and it'll help you relax and go to bed. So it's not necessarily, I guess, maybe a good way to put it is, it's not like it's a predetermined outcome of taking these. Perfect word to use, right? Yeah, it's not predetermined. It's supporting your body's own intelligence to be able to handle things. It's like, if you think of your iPhone, it's got various sensors inside to detect what's going on. And it has certain programs like that it can respond to certain situations, right? If it's getting too hot, it might dim your screen. So if, and this is like, you're giving your body an operating system upgrade. So it's still got all the same sensors to detect what's going on, but now you're giving it stronger tools to work with to regulate what's going on in your body and respond to external stressors. So your body in the way that it's designed and created knows how to get back to that center of balance. And these herbs is what you're saying. It's what I'm picking up is that the herbs are going to assist the body. It's strengthening the own self-regulatory pre-existing mechanisms within your body to do their job better, effectively. You can look at something like an herb like quarter seps, for example, it's a great energy herb, people love taking it before they work out, it's not a stimulant, it has no caffeine in there. Why is it a great pre-workout? It's because it improves your oxygen utilization. So from the oxygen you breathe, more is going to make it to your blood, more is going to make it to your muscles, to your brain. So it's also helpful with focus, but it's not stimulating you per se. You could take your eye before you go to sleep, but because you have that oxygen there being absorbed now and getting throughout your body, you have more potential energy to utilize should the need arise. You've mentioned Reishi mushrooms, quarter seps, what are some other adaptogenic herbs? And again, these are things that we've probably heard of, but we don't know anything about, right? Absolutely. So another really great one, and I would say one of my favorites to start people out with is called a stragglers. This is a light yellow colored root, and it's a great energy tonic, maybe one of the best, and it has a very mild flavor to it. So when you consume this, it tastes like a light vanilla graham cracker kind of flavor, and some herbs have stronger flavors like Reishi mushroom, very bitter flavor, and it takes a little bit of an acquired taste to get used to it in the beginning. A stragglers is one you could give to anybody, even if they have no interest in health and no developed palate for healthy flavors, they're going to see like, wow, this actually tastes really nice. I could take this every day. So it's a great energy tonic. It's fantastic for the immune system as well. It was traditionally very popular amongst people who had to work physical labor jobs outdoors in the cold because it was said to strengthen the extremities, especially the arms and the legs, and also to improve the production of warmth in the body and help you deal with all those kind of cold temperatures. And it's a long tonic as well. And in the Chinese system, the way they looked at the functioning of the body, the lung health is reflected in the health of the skin. So in a sense, it's kind of also a beauty tonic. So a stragglers, okay, we've got Reishi cordyceps, a stragglers is Ashwagandha, one of the, oh, Ashwagandha is an adaption par excellence. So here we're leaving China and we're going over the other side of the Himalayas. And so here we see Ashwagandha as found in the Ayurvedic system. And this is really one of the quintessential adaptions. So it's great for stress and anxiety, but it also has been very well studied for improving energy and endurance supports healthy hormone production, whether you're looking at testosterone or DHEA or different estrogen and progesterone ratios. It's also good for supporting thyroid health and regulating metabolism. So Ashwagandha is a fantastic one. Actually, we use it in quite a few of our different functional chocolates because it's so multipurpose. You can find it in our energy chocolate or tranquility chocolate or a focused chocolate because it's great for the health of the brain and helping to regrow damaged neurorites in parts of the brain, especially where you've seen damage from things like heavy metal toxicity. All right. Any other adaptogenic herbs that we've missed? Oh, I mean, we can, we can go on and on. There's, there's about 60 to 80. Well, 60 to 80. Okay. We can always do an episode later going into more of them if you like, but so to, to look at some, just a few other popular noteworthy mentions, I would say also Chaga mushroom, which grows in many of the northern regions of the world. You can find it in some of the northern parts of the US, definitely in Canada, Northern Europe, places like Finland, mostly traditionally used in Russia. So the one that we use in our products comes from Siberia. And this grows primarily on birch trees, sometimes on beach trees. And it is a great immune tonic. It's high in melanin and it specifically really helps for different kind of fungal, bacterial inflammatory issues affecting the skin. So whether someone's dealing with acne, rosacea, eczema, it's really helpful, helps to protect from skin damage caused by the sun. And it's a powerful immune tonic for many different sorts of conditions. Grammar Petrelow is your go to full service publishing and marketing firm specializing in podcasts, copywriting, email marketing, website design, course creation and much more. If it involves clicking a button that says publish, we're here to help. Let us handle the technical side of things while you focus on creating and delivering value for your audience. With Grammar Petrelow, your vision becomes reality shared with grace, mercy and peace in truth and love. For the Grammar Petrelow difference today, visit GMPTL.org and receive a free gift just for checking us out. That's GM as in Mary, PTL.org. Obviously, we're throwing a lot at you in this conversation and nobody expects everybody to get everything the first time, but addictivewellness.com has not only has the products for sale and information about the products, but there's also a lot of educational materials. Videos, the social media channels have a lot to learn. So if anything is piking your interest from our short conversation here, then go to addictivewellness.com. That's where you can learn more about what we're talking about. Sage, you are a wealth of knowledge, of course. But sadly, so many people are not informed of these things. We're conditioned to think that whatever the doctor at the local hospital says is like the gospel and you have to listen to it and shame on you if you don't. If you disagree with your doctor, then it's just like you're committing a heresy in some ways. What can people do? Actually, this is what I want to ask is, what makes you upset about the mainstream understanding of wellness? What about your business goes against the grain with what people are taught is good for us? Well, the whole mainstream health apparatus, I would say, or disease care is one might tongue and cheat, call it, is a tricky situation. Because on one hand, you have doctors who signed up for this route of education, certainly wanting to do good, certainly wanting to help people. No kid who tells their mom, "I want to be a doctor when I grow up," is doing it because they're thinking, "I want to prescribe lots of drugs and I want to just manage people's symptoms." They're thinking, "People are unwell. I want to help them." They go into this with the absolute best of intentions. Then they end up being fed down a very specific path of education, a very specific approach of looking at the body and dealing with health and well-being. At that point, they're pretty well indoctrinated. They've got mega student loans that I'm sure they probably owe at that point, and they're not necessarily in a position to question the status quo. I don't entirely blame them, but I'm very grateful for those of them that do step outside a little bit and really question the things that they're being told and wonder whether there's a better way to go about this. You have, I think, the more questionable side of it is the pharmaceutical side where lots of shady things go on. I think that, to me, is where I get the most frustrated that a fraction of pharmaceutical actual studies get published, they only have to publish the ones that show the results that they want, and the amount of money in that system is tremendous, and the whole system between the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies and just all the shady doings. I don't even go too much in a deep, dark direction, but all the shady doings that happen between them and the way that people are not really given much access to a real path to health. If someone is raising three kids, trying to put food on the table, trying to work a job or two, they don't have time to go out and search for the information. They're only going to have the information that's given to them maybe once every six months or maybe realistically, maybe once every couple of years, the time that they go to the doctor, or what they happen to catch a little bit when they're watching their mainstream news channel on TV or listening to something in the car, but at the same time, as much as that whole system is really sad and ruining people who are also in an amazing new age where we have access to so much more information, and people can, at least while they're on their way to work, listen to a health-related podcast and open their eyes and mind to some other ways of going about this. They can rediscover time or maybe some people, even if they're working manual labor, they can have their headphones in and be listening to educational information in this regard that they never would have been able to. If we go back even to the '90s, we didn't have this kind of information on the internet as well that if somebody had 30 minutes, they could go in and start doing a little bit of research themselves. It just wasn't an option. The source of information was the TV or your doctor, and that's it. What else are you going to do? As rough as it is, as corrupt and sad as this mainstream system is in some ways, it's also a pretty amazing time to live that people will have so much more direct access to information and can really help themselves a lot more easily. And it doesn't take that much work. It really doesn't take that much work. I edited Ben Greenfield's podcast for four and a half years, and that was lighted my eyes to so many things about it, really what gave me a little bit of a foundation of knowledge so I could have an interview like this with Sage Dammers. Ben has a great book called Boundless. Sage is probably going to give us some resources when we close up, but you have to... Here's another thing that frustrates me, Sage. There's so many different ways of presenting the truth, and you have to know who is really telling the truth. I was just talking with somebody this morning about politics, which is like my least favorite topic when it comes to the, you know, the premise, the circus with the Democrats and the Republicans, all the theater with that, and he was saying, how do you know who's telling the truth? How do you know? And I said, you know what? Everybody's got their agenda. The question is, are you going to follow their agenda? Are you going to follow your agenda? But I hear what you're saying, but at the same time, you have to be very careful with who you listen to. You have to be able to trust the people, the source of information out there online is so extensive that you could come up with whatever hair-brained health theory that you want. Exactly. And there'll be somebody out there making it sound good. And I've been to doctor's appointments with my son, who's 10 years old, and the doctors, are not wrong to have the attitude that they have because there's people that they spout out a lot of untested theories, and they promote it as the truth. So you just have to be careful. Who are some of the resources that you trust for your education? These days, for most of what I like to absorb information-wise, I'm looking directly at published studies. And the reason for this, and there's certainly many great educational people out there. As you mentioned, Ben Greenfield, fantastic people like Andrew Huberman, I think are doing great work. And I don't agree 100% of the time with 100% of what these people say. But I think the vast majority of what they're doing is fantastically positive in terms of the education that they're sharing. But for me, I like to look directly at the published research because it gets me there quicker. It takes time. So first, something gets suggested as a possibility, then it gets researched, then it kind of trickles out into the educational world, and then you hear about it, maybe it's been five years. And so I like to try to shortcut that process a little bit and really dig deep into the research journal side of things. I love sharing studies, even if they've been published 10, 20 years ago. But if I can share a study on Astroganda that just came out six months ago and present it in a way that I feel is going to make it more easily understandable and accessible to people, that gets me pretty excited. So that's the path that I take. For people, I think another great tool that they have available to them now with the development of AI is also the ability to better understand some of these studies because a lot of times you'll maybe read a news article about some new health news, right, something, oh, this food is actually not good for you. This food is great for you. This is turned out to be toxic. Whatever it is, a lot of times these articles are written with a lot of bias or written to be clickbait, written not representing the genuine finds of the study itself. And so the cool thing is that people, if you have a little bit of time to spend on your research, you can go seek out the original study. Sometimes it will be linked or at least referenced in the article that you would read in the headlines. So find that original study, copy and paste that whole study, paste it into chat GPT and say, please explain the findings of the study to a layperson. What while there may be some biases built in there and every now and then you'll see it putting some caveats and things in the explanations. For the most part, you're going to get a pretty direct explanation of what was found there. It's going to help you sort through some of the scientific terminology and understand better without having to spend the whole time to go through it line by line. And this I think is just a fun way for the average person to get a little bit closer to the science without having to rely on some journalists who you don't know what their priorities or what their agenda really is. So I think that's fun. And I just quickly to jump back, I want to say that if somebody hears us talking about so many different adaptogens and they think, oh geez, that's so many, right, anytime you hear about different ways of taking on a healthy path, you don't have to do it all at once. You don't have to overhaul your entire life from one day to the next. If you do one thing from this podcast, you go try one herb. Try a stragglers. Don't do anything else. Just do pick one herb that we mentioned that sounds exciting to you. Maybe you try quarter steps. Try one. Do that for a month. See what your experience is like. Maybe it becomes a regular part of your lifestyle. Great. Maybe you don't love it. And that's okay too. But try one thing and then maybe it becomes just a normal part of your daily life. And then maybe you try another thing and you just sustainably build up. It doesn't have to be 40 different herbs and supplements from one day to the next. Yeah, you take baby steps into a healthy lifestyle like that. And a stragglers, I've seen that at the produce section at the grocery store. You can get it in a variety of ways, right? And there's going to be different levels of quality out there. You can find sliced a stragglers and then that, traditionally, they would give the children to actually chew on to help with dental health. But you really need to get the benefits out of it. You want to at least simmer it in hot water because the hot water is going to extract a lot of the active compounds out of there. And then another way of preparing it would be to make it into a tincture by soaking it in alcohol over a period of about six months and then straining off the stragglers and then you would simmer those in hot water and then boil down the hot water to concentrate it into like a syrup and then combine that with the alcohol extract and then you have a dual extract of a stragglers. And basically what we do with our products is we take a hot water, a stragglers extract and then that liquid is a spray dried. And so what comes out of there is a powder form that you can easily just mix with water, add to whatever food you're making, we put it in some of our chocolates and it's just an easy way to use it in a variety of ways. And the key thing here also is purity. So everything we do, we test for course for heavy metals to make sure that there's nothing crazy sneaking in there because these days you always got to be careful. Well, Sage, this has been great. And I have to confess that I was a little bit nervous walking into this interview. I was having some self doubts because this is not my area of expertise. I know a little bit about it. I know enough to be dangerous, but I had a little bit of apprehension about it. But I think it turned out OK. I thought we had a great time. I thought you did fantastic. I enjoyed our conversation thoroughly. Yeah, I'm glad that I didn't listen to the demon inside me saying you're no good. No, no, no, no, don't listen to the demons. Thank you to our mutual friend Ariana Summer, who is the host of the great podcast Super Humanized, who has a fabulous producer and addictivewellness.com is the resource that I'm going to recommend you guys listening. Go check out. And again, there's a lot of a lot of stuff that we talked about probably flew over your head and that's fine. Nobody expects you to get everything the first time, but go to addictivewellness.com. Check out some of the resources they have. Check out the products, of course, educate yourself a little bit on this and choose one. Take a little bit of a risk and choose one that you think is going to make your life better. And if I always tell people that if you want to support my show, then support the people who have the products that they're, you know, they're brought to the market. They come to discuss a little bit on the podcast. The way to help support the show is support Sage. Go to addictivewellness.com and Sage, is there anything else that we didn't miss that is like burning on your mind that we have to not just one other thing. One more thing I'd like to share is that, you know, as everyone can probably tell who's listening, I get pretty excited and have a good time talking about this stuff. So we also have a YouTube channel, addictive wellness with hundreds and hundreds of hours. Actually, I think by now of educational information about these different herbs, about different supplements, about a whole variety of health topics. So if you want to take a deeper dive in any one of these directions, you can always check it out there and leave a comment on one of our videos, letting me know that you heard this interview. It'd be fun. Addictivewellness.com and addictive wellness YouTube channel. Those are your two calls to action. Thank you guys for listening and thank you to our guest Sage. It's been a pleasure.
