703: Kava: A Paradigm Shift in Mental Health and Modern Recreation With Cameron George

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and this episode is all about Kava and a paradigm shift in mental health and modern recreation. This is something I’ve been experimenting with lately and I wanted to have someone on to get to go deep on this topic. And I’m here with Cameron George, who is a researcher, writer, and entrepreneur and the founder of a company called TRU KAVA, which is striving to set the industry standard for quality, safe education around Kava within the mass market. And their product is the one I’ve tried. It’s focused on developing scalable, user-friendly products that deliver the full therapeutic action of traditional Kava, which is the only form that’s been highly prized in the South Pacific Islands for over 3,000 years.

And Cameron has also spent years working with a network of several thousand functional medicine physicians with whom he’s conducted research, developed products, and many multi-therapeutic protocols related to neuro-rehabilitation and chronic disease. And while collaborating with these researchers and physicians, he’s assisted in the development of many multi-therapeutic protocols for anxiety, mood disorders, PTSD, autoimmune conditions, and more. He’s super well-researched in a lot of these. And like I said, Kava is something I’ve been experimenting with lately and wanted to share my own experimentation around and resources around the health benefits and understanding of this very traditional substance. So let’s join and learn from Cameron. Cameron, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Cameron: Katie, anytime.

Katie: Well, I am very excited to go deep on kava today, because this is something I’ve been experimenting with in the last couple of months myself. But before we jump into that, of which I know you are an expert, I also have a note from your bio that you used to own monkeys and piranhas, and I have got to hear this story first.

Cameron: Yeah, I always debate whether or not I throw that in there. Sometimes it comes up in conversation and then people ask me about it because I talked about it. It’s kind of a pivotal piece or I guess extension of my story of how kind of I originated in this world, in the functional medicine world leading into the product development world and into the regenerative medicine, all that kind of stuff. I was sick, I had a total collapse of my health in my early 20’s, but part of that process that led me there involved exposure to a lot of different environmental toxins, but also exposure to a handful of pharmaceutical drugs that I was prescribed that definitely had a less than desirable effect on my health. personality and level of impulsivity. We’ll just say that, right?

Because one of those, and we can even go into this because this is relevant to some of the conversation on how, you know, kava and other natural compounds affect children with attention deficit. But one of the drugs that I was prescribed early on before I ever stepped into this world was Adderall. So it’s an amphetamine-based drug. Most people are very aware of it. Whenever I got on that drug, it was a total disaster for me. So it kind of brought all my preexisting kind of proclivity towards impulsivity, like to a maximum.

So basically when, you know, long story short, I was a, I was a kid in college, 20 year old kid in college at the time and was working multiple jobs and I was involved in Tech and selling all kinds of audio stereo equipment through various different platforms. I was making a lot of money and I got on this drug and I was highly impulsive. I went on these crazy buying sprees. One of the things that I bought were a slew of different zoo animals. If you were to walk into my apartment at that age, it would have looked like a strange mixture between Breaking Bad and Ace Ventura, probably. It was like a- There was all kinds of chaos going on, which was kind of what that process led to. But there was also a very funny side of it looking back now because I’m not in it right.

But during that period of time, yes, I owned multiple monkeys. I owned huge dogs, monkeys. I owned all kinds of reptiles. And yes, I had a fish tank full of piranhas in my living space. So, you know, that’s obviously completely unsustainable. So it didn’t last forever. I found good homes for most everything, you know, but I definitely have had some experience there, you know, I don’t know many other people that have had those kinds of things at that age under that context, right? But I definitely learned a lot about keeping, keeping primates the do’s and don’ts and maybe not even to do it at all. So. So.

Katie: That is quite the story. And to my knowledge, you are the first podcast guest to have owned monkeys or piranhas. And you touched on it a little bit, but you mentioned your own health story. And I know that your health story is actually a part of the conversation we’re going to have about kava today. So for people who don’t already know your story, can you give us a little background of your kind of journey with that and how you discovered kava?

Cameron: Yeah, absolutely. You know, like a lot of people, I guess in our world and even outside of anybody’s sort of the health, wellness, personal development, you know, anybody who’s trying to solve large personal problems on any level, you know, it’s pretty common for people to have, you know, sort of wounded healer journeys or what I would call like a pain to purpose, you know, trajectory, right? Where you have a, you know, you’re living a, you know, some kind of a seemingly normal kind of mundane life existence in some area, which I’m from a part of the country where there wasn’t, it was, it’s pretty calm place, you know, it’s Arkansas.

And then all of a sudden, some circumstances come about, you know, some really either tragic or, you know, difficult circumstances. You have a total collapse of your health like I did, or some sort of massive trauma, and it totally changes your trajectory on things. It forces, kind of forces you to go inwards, to, you know, do a lot of internal work, to look outside of yourself and your immediate environment for answers for survival, because desperation and inspiration are the two main pathways to growth in a person’s life. And, you know, desperation is the strongest because it’s linked to our survival instinct, you know, and so I had to look outside of my normal scope. I’m you know for answers and it led to this total collapse in my health was basically one of these autoimmune syndromes these kind of these neurotoxic autoimmune based spectrum illnesses that are so common today that have probably, any person who has one. It’s like these unexplainable illnesses. All the illnesses that we see popping up at epidemic levels today, all the neurological, neurodegenerative, cancer, autoimmune disease, they all have an autoimmune and toxicity and inflammation component to them.

And at the time that I, you know, experienced it, it was far less common. But today it’s extremely common because of many things that are going on in the environment, you know, pesticides in the food, things that we put on our skin, things that we breathe, things that we eat that accumulate in our bodies. but then also just a collection of different stressors and traumas that are affecting all of us collectively as a whole.

There’s a lot of contributing factors, but basically my kind of collapse was, there was a lot of things in it. I had dental amalgam fillings, so I had. Big time mercury exposure early on, I probably had a susceptible genetic framework that gave me a smaller sized stress bucket, if you will. Everybody kind of has metaphorically a stress bucket, right? You know, physical, mental, emotional stress. Each stressor is a drop in the bucket and some people have genetically smaller buckets than others. Once the bucket fills up though, so to speak, from the metaphor standpoint, you start expressing the symptoms of your genetic weakness. And that’s kind of the story of chronic disease, right? You know, so I had some genetic susceptibility. There’s no question about it. Then, like I said, mercury exposure, this apartment that I was in with all these animals, you know, and everything, as there was some different toxic exposures there, mold exposure, and then pharmaceutical drugs, a whole host of things came together. I called it the perfect storm and just had this collapse of my health.

And I ended up having to start from scratch, go back to Health 101. What happened to me? I had to investigate that literally for years to figure out, okay, drugs and surgeries are not going to get me out of this, right? Because my life was basically over as I knew it. You know, I was completely debilitated, you know, at one point, mid-20’s and couldn’t even walk for a long period of time, couldn’t even move around or go anywhere or do anything.

So I spent the better part of like about eight years doing nothing but scouring medical and scientific literature to try to kind of realized just go back to square one, first of all, what had happened, but I had to understand like what constitutes health and how I lost it, right? And it wasn’t just one simple thing or some, you know, some one-off explanation of like, oh, it just happened genetically or something. It’s like, no, there was more to it than that. So it wasn’t one individual thing that got me sick and it certainly wasn’t one individual thing that got me well. It was a multi-therapeutic approach that I had to learn this sort of art form of how integrate enough strategies together to start to teeter my body in my life away from disease and towards health. I had to basically it comes down to out with the bad and with the good. I had to, you know, engage in a comprehensive process for cellular detox, for detoxing myself, getting rid of what accumulated in my body, you know, chemical wise, and then integrate nutritional strategies, supplement strategies, dietary strategies, fasting, different things like that. And then regenerative medicine strategies to heal a lot of the damage that had occurred there.

But this process was about 7 to 10 years. So basically my entire early adulthood, you know, into my early 30’s was basically just a day to day, you know, minute to minute, second to second battle, you know, trying to figure this stuff out.

But it was a massive education for me. Before it happened, I was a highly functioning person and got brought down to virtually no function and that was where all my focus was. And so I kind of got integrated into the functional medicine world as a result because the network of doctors that I ended up working with after going everywhere trying to get help and piecing together information, hired me on to do some work. And I started in product development. I started in the research side of things. I started basically being hired as a consultant to curate information and, you know, and all kinds of stuff and started working in multiple different areas of the functional medicine, biohacking, personal development space and had come across kava during my process. And it was we’ll get into that, how it was a crucial leverage point that allowed me. I don’t know if I would have gotten well without it. because it was a very, it was one factor that was really powerful.

And that’s, you know, TRU KAVA was born because, you know, kava basically wasn’t available in the marketplace and in the mass market in a way that it is in its origin culture. And there’s some stipulations to getting the right stuff and it just wasn’t available and I saw how life-changing that it could be and how culturally significant it could be both mentally, emotionally, and as far as facilitating human connection in a really healthy way across culturally. So yeah, that was kind of my process. That’s how I got into this whole thing and that’s how I’m right here today.

Katie: Yeah, I feel like many of us in this world have an origin story that involves quite the personal journey. And I know I have that as well. But I think kava is unique in the US. Like you said, it’s been known other places for a very long time, but I love that it’s breaking into the US. And I feel like it’s at the perfect time as well, as there seems to be a movement away from alcohol. Not that it’s necessarily going to act in the same way as alcohol, but it shares some cool benefits and often some cool feelings that go along with it that people often prefer, I’m finding, even to alcohol.

I would guess for some people listening, it’s actually a new potentially word, something they have not tried or even maybe heard of. So can you define what kava is and where it comes from? And then we’ll go into the benefits. And I know there’s a lot of nuance when it comes to sourcing and how it’s made and things to be aware of in that realm. But to start off broad, tell us what kava is?

Cameron: Yeah. So, so kava is a natural sort of plant-based food elixir, a drink that’s prepared from the roots of a medicinal plant called Piper methysticum. It’s, Piper methysticum means intoxicating pepper. It’s a, you know, it’s a plant in the pepper family that grows exclusively in South Pacific island chains in Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia. So islands like Vanuatu, which, which Vanuatu a lot of people haven’t heard of, but everyone’s heard of Fiji. You know, Fiji and Vanuatu right next to each other. Tonga, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, even Hawaii, right? It grows exclusively in this part of the world. And it’s been a foundational part of the social fabric and the religious and spiritual fabric of these islands for over 3000 years.

It has deep, deep roots there, no pun intended. And in the sense of it’s, it’s consumed as regularly, they use it for everything in these cultures. It’s their most sacred food slash medicine. They don’t distinguish between the two. It’s a food and a medicine in this food form. And that’s going to become important in the conversation because there are variant forms that are not as effective or potentially safe. But it’s used for everything in these islands. It’s used for weddings, funerals, spiritual ceremonies, social gatherings. These, the indigenous people of the South Pacific, which are really locked more into nature than we are in a lot of ways, because it’s still very, you know, third world to some degree. You still go into these villages where they still have a chief. And, you know, everything is about kava. If you, if you’re a visitor in the village, they’ll do a kava ceremony in a big bowl, you know, where they’ll have someone squeeze it and actually make it traditionally out of the roots and they’ll pass it around. And there’s a whole sort of spiritual ceremony around it.

But then they also use it casually, but it’s, it’s used for everything. Kind of in like we consume coffee or alcohol. It honestly kind of takes some of the best effects of coffee, alcohol, CBD, all into this sort of natural food that is not necessarily, there’s a lot of different strains and varying types, but the general composition of the, of the general sort of strain mixture that like we use is not sedating, but it’s not, doesn’t make you jittery either. It sort of opens the mind. It has this nootropic quality to it where it opens the mind, but keeps you calm, centered and focused kind of like in an alpha state. I really consider it kind of the perfect state of mind for, for productivity, for learning, for opening up to people and engaging because it doesn’t like a lot of stimulants, stimulants kind of take you out of your emotional centers and put you more into exclusively a productivity kind of state of mind more so.

And, you know, kava really opens the mind and integrates the different parts of the brain. So you feel like you have access to more of your emotional framework, which induces empathy and stuff. So very simply though, when people ask me, what is kava? I tell them that its most prime sort of identity is it’s a social drink that builds mental health and performance, which that’s what differentiates it from alcohol or many other substances. It really isn’t a category of its own because a lot of people, you know, you know, the word recreation, when it comes to things that you ingest is kind of carries a lot of baggage with it and is typically kind of seen as, as, you know, something that carries some level of guilt with it, right? Because like things that we do, like drugs and alcohol that are not good for us, you know, but many people, of course, alcohol, you know, do them and it’s sort of like, we’re willing to take on, you know, something that is really not healthy in any, in any way, you know, there’s no health benefit to it. But we’re willing to accept it to kind of get the effects on our nervous system short term and to be able to loosen up and that social lubrication effect.

And so kava is kind of a new concept. It’s an old concept that’s, that’s being brought into the new world, or sort of a rediscovery of an old concept of it really is a more efficient alcohol from a standpoint of it’s something that actually improves mental health and improves health overall, it is highly medicinal and gives you that recreational effect without the functional impairment or the addiction. So not only is it a great sort of, we see it as being sort of the alcohol of the future as we’re starting as a culture on many fronts, starting to become more open and conscious and looking at the long-term implications of many of the things that we do, not just the short-term.

Going back full circle with like a lot of these principles like paleo diets and different things. Part of that, we think that kava is actually really that sort of reconnection with this is going to be more so of what we see in the future. And alcohol more and more as time goes on is going to develop more of that reputation, kind of like cigarettes, where it’s not like it’s going away, but we just are all aware that this is not good and we sort of limit our and many people are not using it at all, which is really amazing because statistically we’re starting to see for the first time ever, like you mentioned, an actual significant percentage of individuals moving away from alcohol, even in the 18 to 24 year old demographic, which is, you know, college kids, right? I mean, it’s just because we’re just kind of choosing to move away from it because we are starting to see that along with the amount of neurological and psychological illnesses that we have, that alcohol is not something that not only doesn’t help those things, but also makes them much, much worse. And we’re just starting to really become aware of the long-term net negative impact of having it as a core part of our sort of daily, you know, social structure.

So we’ve kind of seen this from the beginning as not just another compound that you take, like magnesium, that’s like stress relieving, there’s those one-dimensional effects to it. But we really see it as sort of a cultural shift in the way that we connect, you know, socially as humans, because kava not only is sort of like alcohol without the drunkenness, but it also has, like I mentioned before, these sort of mild entheogenic effects. Entheogenic, usually people associate with like psychedelics, but this doesn’t take you into that kind of altered state. It’s like enhanced sobriety. You feel like you’re more of who you really are. But entheogenic just literally means the divine within. That’s what the, that’s what indigenous people, that’s what the word entheogenic means.

But basically that means that it brings out feelings of empathy and you feel like you’re more of yourself, like you’re in the best state of mind for yourself, which, you know, a lot of the highest values and aspirations in any given culture across history when you study anthropology and different things, you know, come out of the social networks in the altered states of consciousness that cultures uphold the most, meaning usually social networks and social environments in any culture have to do with some form of an altered state, even whether it’s dance or drum circles in African countries or substances we ingest. And for us, it’s alcohol and nicotine right now.

But a lot of our aspirations come out of the quality of that state of mind that we’re in whenever we connect with each other, right? So we believe that kava eventually could become as common as a cup of coffee. And when it does, it can have these really powerful net positive benefits on the entire culture when many people are using it, just like it has in the South Pacific where mental illness is much lower there and they’re really tight knit in these tight communities, largely because of the contribution that kava has made.

Katie: Yeah, this is so fascinating to your point. I think there’s like a beautiful, one of the reasons people in the past have liked alcohol so much is there’s a ritual around it and there’s that community sharing of an experience and a beverage to drink together. And I feel like at the conference where I got to speak with you, that kava became such a cool alternative to that because it allows you to have that same ritual, the same experience, the shared experience without the potential downsides.

And even a good friend of mine, Todd White, who has a wine company and I respect and love him dearly, he talks very clearly about the potential, the toxicity of alcohol, then it’s objectively toxic. And I think for that reason, we’re seeing, like you said, a lot of people wanting to find alternatives, at least for most of the time, to alcohol consumption. And we know, especially regular alcohol consumption does things like deplete dopamine and cause anxiety states. And it has a harmful effect on the body on the long term, whereas it sounds like from my conversations with you, kava actually has a lot of even compounding benefits to the body over time.

And that when it’s made correctly and consumed correctly, it actually is very health supporting but I know from talking to you that there are caveats to that and that it can be prepared in ways that make it less beneficial and that that’s where some of the safety concerns have come from in the past. So I would love for you to break that down and address some of those concerns and myths surrounding kava, especially if it’s not made in the right form or not consumed in the right way.

Cameron: Yeah, absolutely. This is a question I get every single day. And it’s one of those things, just like with anything in life, the devil’s in the details and context matters, because it’s just like, well, let me just start here. A lot of people understand, at least vaguely the situation with other plant compounds like cannabis, right? We’re all familiar with cannabis. Most of us pretty much are familiar with CBD and hemp at this point. And we know that there’s a pretty drastic difference between sort of super hybridized, highly psychoactive THC cannabis, right? Like actually marijuana, like smoking marijuana versus the male portion of the plant that’s hemp where you can extract high levels of just CBD, which is basically a food substance that is highly medicinal, not as prominent and noticeable in its effects as something like kava, but still has effects on the nervous system, anxiety, the endocannabinoid system. It’s basically a food. I mean, anybody can certainly take it.

And that’s always been the case, but it wasn’t. of cannabis was just branded as the psychoactive substance that was wrongfully put as a schedule one substance, which shouldn’t have been there, but certainly has its pros and cons and the level of psychoactivity and has its level at which it can become slightly problematic even in the marijuana form. So I mean, everybody can understand that.

And there’s a story that’s almost very similar with kava as well. You know, I mean, so basically kava has been consumed in this food form. So I’ll just explain a little bit more about what the food form is, right? So I told you that it was in, or I mentioned just a minute ago that, um, that the kava is prepared from the roots of this plant and the pepper family that grows in South Pacific Island cultures. It has, it’s almost like a shrub that grows like three to six meters above the ground and has these beautiful heart shaped leaves. Um, so it’s a very recognizable plant, almost like these like bamboo looking stalks and stems that are really beautiful.

It’s prepared by harvesting the plant and only the roots of the plants are used. So there’s only a certain part of the plant that is used by indigenous people that has been used safely daily, um, to produce this drink by squeezing it and kneading it into a bowl of warm to cold water and producing this elixir that kind of looks like mud in its traditional form. Our form doesn’t look like that. But, but it’s just, it’s this sort of brown liquid. It’s basically like a juice from these roots. So it’s a whole food beverage. Like coffee is a whole food. Coffee is the water and pressure extracted, uh, you know, it, it solution, uh, from coffee or arabica beans and kava is the water and pressure extracted food solution from Piper methysticum. Right. So it’s a food in that form. And that form is the form that I described that, that indigenous people have used literally in Vanuatu. 90% of the culture consumes kava daily and has for 3000 years, you know, it’s, there’s, it’s just such, and there have never been any safety, any, any statistically significant safety concerns with it, uh, and people’s livers aren’t dropping out anything. It’s actually been very pro health across the board.

Now. In recent years, and if people Google kava today, they’ll see claims even from seemingly reputable websites. I’m not saying that they’re not reputable, but they’re all following this narrative that’s not following it back to the origin of the issue. But you’ll see claims trying to associate kava with some level of liver toxicity, right? So people will see that. And it’s important for people to understand that. You can go to our website and other places and you can actually see the studies and breaking down of exactly what I’m talking about here. But basically, though, all of those of those issues originated from the first time ever in history, in 2001 to 2002, a pharmaceutical company in Germany, you know, decided they were going to try to patent isolates from kava, like most pharmaceutical companies do, because you can’t patent a whole food. So what they’re trying to do is to create a concentrate of isolated compounds from the kava plant because they saw that kava was starting to pick up some steam. And they said that this is a viable alternative to Benzodiazepine medications like Xanax for anxiety.

So anyways, they produced a compound and didn’t adhere to these traditional preparation methodologies that the indigenous people had figured out over years. So they weren’t like looking and screening the material that they were buying, you know, from islands to make sure that it was 100 percent root material like you’re supposed to consume. And then they extracted it with these heavy solvents that were that they thought was improving upon it, making it stronger. But all they ended up with was something that was no more kava than caffeine powder is coffee, right? Or cocaine is coca tea. In Peru, coca tea is actually a medicinal drink that’s made out of coca leaves that is, you know, it’s about as addictive maybe as coffee. And it’s not hugely problematic. But if you isolate the active alkaloid, the most active alkaloid from coca, it’s cocaine. And you end up with an extremely damaging substance. Caffeine powder can put you into the hospital if you were to buy a canister on Amazon and eat half of it. Coffee won’t do that, right?

So basically what they made was a substance that was actually not kava by definition. and then did some clinical trials with it. Most of the participants in these initial clinical trials were actually coming off of alcohol. So they already had compromised liver function and there was a lot of them that were on high doses of acetaminophen, which also depletes liver enzymes, etc. And they created basically a few dozen cases of liver toxicity, one case of liver failure, and then there was even somebody who died in one case.

And so this was an enigma because this had never been seen before. And basically they got a lot of press around it. And honestly, there was probably some pharmaceutical company sort of tinkering to try to slander the name of kava because of its ability to take market share away from certain drugs. We can’t prove that, but it definitely is very, it looks like that that could have been the case.

But anyways, we don’t know that for sure, but we do know that they got a lot of media coverage in Germany and then one case in Switzerland. And it led to many countries around the world having a knee-jerk reaction and banning kava for sale all at once. The U.S.A. never banned kava ever. They just issued a disclaimer because they said they knew that there wasn’t sufficient evidence that kind of said you may want to be careful. It’s a disclaimer like be careful with this. Don’t consume over a certain amount, etc, which wasn’t really justified. But they did it.

So anyways, over over, you know, the 15, 16, 17 years since then, you know, longer than that now. But, but, you know, since then, it that’s it’s been fully vetted out in the scientific literature. It’s been well, well studied. And basically even the WHO has taken a position that this is almost certainly absolutely a quality control issue. And we’ve even been part of developing what’s called an international quality standard with the WHO that they solidified in 2020 that differentiates food grade kava from kava like products that are extracts.

And so now by world classification standpoint, it was to differentiate those two. So anyways, I say all that just so that listeners really understand that it actually is it’s not really a controversy in the scientific community anymore. And the form that we use is the food form that has always been consumed safely. You know, we even have a pathway, you know, we’re in the process of getting grass approval on it right now in the United States. We’re going through the process of full talk studies, all that kind of stuff to demonstrate that.

But the so it is it is the form that has been consumed safely. And that’s something that’s very important to understand, especially if people are giving it to to younger people, to children and people are taking it in a family context. It’s just important to know right out of the gate that in the reason just to digress a little bit, the reason why that the root part of the plant is the only one that you consume is that the leaves and stems of kava have plant that the plant produces to defend itself from pests that are slightly stressful to the human GI tract and to the human liver, not even super bad.

But what happened was is that whenever you source material that’s not root material and you get these alkaloids and then you use solvents like they did, it concentrates those super concentrated irritants. And now you have something that could possibly be toxic to a person who’s vulnerable. So that was basically the situation with that. And so what we use every we control every step of the process with our growth, our harvesting, our storage and everything, making sure that we don’t have any mold growth on our cover roots. We use 100 percent root material. Everything is third party lab tested, both for active constituents and for biological industrial contaminants. It’s all grown without the use of any pesticides or anything. So it’s basically as pristine as it gets when it comes to facilitating kava like you would get if you were an indigenous person from Vanuatu or from Fiji.

Katie: That’s so fascinating. And it seems like a recurring story when it comes to products trying to be patented and marketed and sold in ways they can’t be when they’re just a plant. I know this is, kava is not the only place where that’s happened, like you alluded to.

I’d love to also hear of like, because you mentioned this is a very traditional beverage and one that’s been safely consumed for thousands of years in other places. I would love to hear your take on its application in the modern world. You alluded to your own story with ADHD, and it seems like there’s a lot of potential use of cases where this can benefit people in various phases of life and with various things going on in their lives. And I know you’ve done a lot of work and research and study around this as well. So how do you see kava integrating and fitting into the modern world, especially in the U.S., now that it’s becoming more widespread?

Cameron: Well, this is what’s so cool about kava, right? Or any other plant medicine, right? We think of, from the pharmaceutical model, we kind of grew up under this thing that where, if we have an ailment, we go to our physician, he looks at our symptoms and gives us a corresponding drug for our symptoms, right? Which is usually a disaster because these are molecules that are not innate to the body. So they don’t have the kind of collective intelligence that makes them fully biologically compatible, which is why every drug that you see is on a commercial and TV has a hundred side effects that they list as they’re playing happy music in the background, you know, is, you know, because it’s, it’s, these are not molecules that are there, they’re foreign to the body. And so they have a singular mechanism that pushes the body in one direction. And the problem with that is if you, if you think of all of the catalytic sort of signaling processes that are going, the billions that are going on, trillions that are going on in your body at one time, think of them as like the steps on an assembly line, right? Your body is like this very intricate, like, you know, assembly line of steps and things that are happening in it.

And if you go in and you know, say you go into a factory where you’re producing a product and you go in, say, like, like we do with the drug where you have one singular molecule that affects one receptor or one hormone and you go in and you start changing something on one step. It can throw off the entire assembly line. If you add something in and no, what, not everybody’s on the same page. And so everybody’s kind of in chaos. You get your effect, but then long-term it starts to, it can throw off the whole system leading to all these downstream side effects.

With plant medicines, what makes them so cool is, is that they actually stem out of the same biological intelligence that we do. It’s nature, call it whatever you like to, you know, Universe, God, Gaia, any of that kind of stuff, but it comes from the ecology, right? And so they’re shaped from that same. And whenever we have plants that we’ve adapted to form a relationship with, certain plants are biologically compatible with us because either we’ve learned how to use them to get past their defenses, or just like you form a relationship with a human, you can form a relationship with plants. And the indigenous people of the South Pacific have done that with kava.

But just like cannabis, we’ve learned in the past however many years, how you hear about like CBD does all these things because it affects the endocannabinoid system, the intelligence of our body. So it’s not just inflammation, it’s not just anxiety, it affects the immune system, all these pathways. Call us the same way. Kava has an intelligence to it that it affects the nervous system and the immune system as a whole. That’s how one substance can do so many things is that it has a complex array of active constituents that affect and communicate with every step in that assembly line. It works from a systems approach to get the whole system working more efficiently.

I set up that just so people can understand because when you start to list these effects, people are like, how can one thing do so many things? But basically, kava, we know it’s actually one of the most well studied plant compounds in the world outside of cannabis and ginseng and reishi mushroom. And it’s kind of funny because not a lot of people know about it, but everybody knows about it in the scientific community pretty much. Right. And there’s a huge gap right there that we’re trying to fill.

But, you know, so basically, kava has been shown to affect and assist almost almost every neuro and tissue protective pathway that we know of. Right. So that’s all the major neurotransmission systems, meaning the brain feel good chemicals in the brain, the chemicals that control stress, that control inflammation and stuff. So its main claim to fame is its effect on the GABA system. And the GABA system is like the breaks of the nervous system. Right. That’s what alcohol binds to. It binds to GABA receptors. And that’s what lowers your adrenaline levels, lowers your stress hormones, allows you to just open up. It kind of gives you that like that breathe, like relaxed type of a feeling.

But, you know, kava affects that system powerfully. But it affects in a totally different way than a pharmaceutical. Instead of going in like interrupting the assembly line and down regulating it, the body saying, OK, there’s a foreign molecule doing this. Shut it off, suppress it. So it ends up using up your stores of GABA. So it’s like borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today. You know, like that’s what pharmaceuticals are like, you know. Yeah, you get the effect today, but then you need twice as much tomorrow to get the same effect and it creates addiction. You know, kava actually helps to wake up and restore that system. So the more you use it, the less you even need to use it.

And now you’re just getting effects that then feel good after a while, which is great because, you know, you’re talking about something that can give you therapeutic immediate relief from anxiety, from stress, you know, but also helps to restore your body’s parasympathetic nervous system, natural ability to, you know, fend it off over time, which is totally different. So not only is it a great alternative to the pharmaceutical and to alcohol, but it actually helps as an off ramp for people who are trying to get off those things. So not only is it a drug, it really is like an anti drug, right? It really, really helps on the restorative. It works underneath the hood at the same time as fixing the surface level issue. So that’s anxiety, right?

So the reason why that’s significant and it’s funny because I alluded to kava’s psychological effects earlier and the indigenous people really see kava more as a psychological medicine because they don’t have the kind of chronic physical epidemic ailments that we do, right? They’re starting to know because we’ve brought those to them. But they don’t have it, you know, historically, they’ve been connected with nature. They’ve been eating naturally and all that. So they’re pretty healthy. But they see it as a heart opener, a mind opener, a connector, something that opens up the mind, allows you to kind of see the big picture in your life and and all of those effects, which those are all there.

But today, it’s all of that is incredibly relevant because of all the of all the mental illness, the isolation, the, you know, the lack of good human authentic connection, all those things. So that’s huge. That’s where it’s relevant today. But we also have it also has all these amazing applications and it’s perfectly sort of surfacing at this time in history. We have a massive epidemic of stress and brain related nervous system related conditions of all kinds.

But not only do we just have that are plaguing us, but we’re addicted to all kinds of chemicals in our food, like MSG, that like give us this this elated. That’s why we drive through McDonald’s three times a day or whatever, you know, if we’re, you know, in an addiction process. But also, we’re addicted to many pharmaceuticals that are incredibly hard to get off that are creating this dyshomeostasis in the brain that one drug leads to the next and you end up on 10 medications that you’re a psychiatrist and everything’s getting worse. And it’s just it’s a bad game to play, because again, borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today, it’s not restoring anything. It’s virtually impossible to create homeostatic balance in your brain with, you know, manipulating your brain chemistry with exogenous drugs. So you can get short-term benefit, but it’s a disastrous model across most categories. And trust me, I’ve been there. I had monkeys, right? You know, so.

So it has all these amazing applications for today’s stress-related conditions. But so obviously Anxiety, you know, sleep disorders, it helps to improve deep and restorative sleep, depression, it has effects on the GABA system, but it also has powerful effects on the dopamine system and the serotonin system and acetylcholine.

But the dopamine is particularly interesting because it affects the brain. It’s a monoamine oxidase B inhibitor that’s reversible and naturally, so it naturally elevates what we call synaptic levels of dopamine in the brain without having to put glucose in, which is normally how we get dopamine hits, like by eating sugar or by doing things that stimulate us, social media, you know, food, sex, I mean, any of that stuff, you know, that stimulates dopamine that keeps people in these loops. Kava helps to satiate that fix on dopamine, but without creating that addictive spiral that depletes it, leading you to take more. So it really is an amazing sort of pattern interrupt for addictions of all kinds at satiating cravings while bringing homeostasis and balance to the brain.

But what that also does, a lot of the ADHD medications and things that we intervene to force people to focus at the cost of other functions in the brain, it also fills that as well too. So we have many, many kids, many, many kids who have amazing results with utilizing kava to kind of put the brain in this state to where they can sort of navigate their psychological and emotional environment more freely, be good to their brain, but also help them focus.

So it’s definitely has some application on that front across, you know, attention deficits, you know, the depression, anxiety spectrum illnesses. And for myself too, whenever I was sick, I was having 10 seizures a day and it virtually stopped my seizures because it’s helped to stop that excess sporadic firing in the brain from this glutamate storm that comes from autoimmune illnesses. So it has all of those applications too as well. In addition, inflammation is too. Athletes are using it not only for the deeper recovery because, you know, alcohol benzodiazepine medications and cannabis will calm you down, but they actually interrupt your deep and REM sleep and kava improves it. So that’s another domain that kava is more effective in. So those parameters plus the psychological parameter, which I think is the most powerful of, you know, facilitating authentic, deeper human connection at scale without. crushing your brain chemistry, or putting you into an escapist sort of loop, those are really what make it a powerful transformative substance for our modern world.

Katie: Yeah. And as you were explaining that, I was definitely thinking of the ways this could be helpful for people with emotional trauma like I had in unpacking that. And also for moms especially who we know deal with a lot of overwhelm and a lot of those mental things that you talked about. And so I can see this being very useful, especially in those particular groups of people who might be listening.

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And I know from our previous conversations, you also have worked very hard and you’ve touched on this to make TRU KAVA different. But I also would love for you to just specifically explain how TRU KAVA is different because there are now a lot of kava products entering the market. And I think it’s helpful for people to be aware of what to look for in a good kava product and what sets you guys apart.

Cameron: Yeah, absolutely. Well just to touch on your point about, you know, about kava and women, you know, for a second. This is something that, I mean, kava, the good thing about kava and what indigenous people have wrote about, talked about, you know, if you go down to the South Pacific and speak with them, or even if you go into the scientific literature as well, is that there really is one of those special compounds that it has the greatest therapeutic effect to drawback ratio of any medicinal plant that I’ve worked with, and that’s saying, I’ve worked with a lot.

You know, there’s really heavy hitting, like powerful, like, video. psychedelic compounds like that, that have their possible benefit in like clinical settings and all of that, that just like hits you over the head with a sledgehammer, but there’s so many risks there, right? And so it needs this medical space to navigate it. And then you’ve just got more subtle adaptogens like ginsengs and things, and you know, Chinese herbs that are great, but you don’t get this like powerful visceral effect, this sort of psychoactive effect. Kava is able to deliver that, deliver these acute effects, but while keeping you into a state of total functionality and enhanced functionality at the same time.

But with women specifically, it’s interesting. It is a compound that there’s virtually something in it for everybody. It has this sort of productivity sort of component to it because of how it affects dopamine. When people take certain strains of Kava, we have a product called KAVAPLEX Mind that is more towards this, but this dopamine effect, it’s a performance enhancer. And so everybody’s interested in that, but maybe like, you know, we have, that’s maybe on the masculine side of things, you know, like we have a lot of people for athletic recovery or for just productivity, folks and all that kind of stuff.

But also it has this really deeply calming and nourishing and centering aspect and how it helps to reset and nourish the emotional framework. You know, when you talk about the average mom who’s incredibly like stressed out and especially, God forbid, maybe on a host of different medications that are leading down that sort of cycle of dependency and or using alcohol, medication or this or that. or just don’t feel like themselves because, you know, if the average person was just take women in this scenario that are overworked and maybe you’re a single mom or in this that, and you’re in your head all the time because you’re just in that sort of go, go, go, get things done, do things. It’s difficult to get out of that because you’re kind of in this beta reactive sympathetic mode, it’s difficult to recover, it’s difficult, you don’t feel like yourself, you feel like a robot after a while, right? So it’s difficult at the end of the day to connect with people in your environment, to connect with your family, to get into that sort of nourishing mindset.

And kava is actually one of those things that’s like really, really great for opening up the mind and bringing you to a centered state of balance and retraining the brain to stay in there by itself because the longer you spend in there, you know, the parasympathetic state that we’re talking about is really the state where people get their introspective and reflective thinking. When you’re in your reactive like stress state, you’re focused on like the goal, one thing, right? The stress thing, running away from the tiger, fight or flight, that is useful. But the sort of intuitive side of us needs us to be, get in that relaxed state where we can sort of open up our mind, get out of that sort of beta part of our brain and get into that alpha, alpha, theta, where we can learn, where we can emotionally express, where we can connect with people in our environment, reflect so we can integrate the lessons that we learned through the day.

And that’s what a lot of people are struggling with that, that it’s constantly a rat race, it’s constantly type of thing. And a tool like kava is something that doesn’t steal from your brain, it just nourishes it, it gives it, and it helps to sort of facilitate that. And long-term, the indigenous people have talked about this forever, like I mentioned, they see it as a psychological medicine. The longer that you can spend in an introspective state, your brain will actually start to plasticize and become more efficient and complex because you’re basically working it out like you’re working out a muscle. And over time, you start to, you know, form new neurological structures in your brain that are more complex and more sort of system, big picture oriented when you’re in this sort of expanded state of mind. And so what the indigenous people have always observed is that it actually, it makes people more conscious and sort of more empathetic and more emotionally intelligent or it creates the opportunity for them to be, which is an amazing aspect of like, of just that side of things, right?

But also from the female standpoint, one of the applications that we’ve seen clinically that is just amazing is its ability to regulate hormones, you know, from, you know, during cycles and everything, right? It’s just from a standpoint and from just improving PMS symptoms across the board, there’s a lot that goes into it as far as just hormone regulation that whenever women are struggling, kava is one of those things that is known that can really be a massive game changer to just sort of like reorchestrate everything where it’s like a breather, you know? And so there’s so many applications from that, but as far as just accessing that side of your psyche that’s more emotionally open, that’s connecting, it’s nurturing, it’s nourishing, that’s from the feminine standpoint, it has a lot there because it comes in as sort of like this protector to some degree that helps you open up and this stabilizing agent.

And while even, you know, some forms also having that productivity state, that’s why it’s, it’s just like a really an amazing like optimal state of mind where you’re not tired, you’re not wired, but it really just helps to modulate and open the mind. It’s, you know, what kava symbolizes, and this is one thing about TRU KAVA too, and I’ll talk a little bit about why we’re different, which, you know, first of all, the main differentiating factor is that we do traditional kava. Most of the effects that I just now list as far as introspective thinking, you know, the depression types of things, the sort of dopamine effect, you lose all of those benefits, but probably 80, 90% of them in many cases with some of these extracts that people are using because kava heavily relies on the entourage effect of all the active constituents. It’s like, it’s like the active constituents in a plan are like the instruments in a musical orchestra, right? And the more instruments that you have, the deeper and fuller the experience and the overall sound. When you start to like do these extracts you. The entourage effect, you start to lose it because you start to use solvents that pull out certain constituents, like the instruments that play loudest. So you have one instrument playing really loud, but you lose that overall effect.

And when you do that with kava, like pretty much most of the products that are out there right now, there’s not many, but pretty much all of them are all extracts. They’re not traditional kava. And the magic is in traditional kava. When you get the extracts, it pretty much is just like a mild sedative, like chamomile tea. That’s what it ends up being when you extract with something like ethanol. We developed processes. It took years of R&D basically to facilitate and commercialize a stable form of traditional kava, just like they make in the bowl that I was telling you about where you can get these, these amazing effects.

And so that’s the main differentiator, plus the things that I mentioned earlier about everything is third-party lab tested. We have our own supply chain. We don’t go through somebody else so we can control every step of the process and it’s clean third-party lab tested, etc. Those are the main differentiating factors. The first one is to really stabilize it in a drink form, the like you would drink alcohol or tea, but it’s basically, we’re creating a new category, just like Kombucha is a category, just like coffee is a category, kava is its own thing. A lot of people, when people say, well, it’s a drug and alcohol alternative. And so they’re. that it carries this negative baggage when you say like, you think like it’s something you’re getting from a head shop, you’re just using something. No, it gives you a lot of what people are looking for in alcohol, right? That human connection thing, but without the drawbacks. It’s a totally new, not new, it’s a rediscovery of something that really the Indigenous people never stopped using.

But the main thing, I guess, that’s important about kava, what kava symbolizes and what I think it will symbolize in the coming years in the culture and what we’re all about with TRU KAVA started out, I founded it as mainly as an educational and advocacy campaign for the integration of kava into modern culture for its transformative effects. And then producing the products was just so that we can produce the best thing to integrate, right? So it came from pain to purpose, right? I wasn’t trying to get into it, you know, to just produce a product and slap something.

That’s what’s different because that’s what we are is we’re an information platform in community and spawning a movement around kava, which is completely different than just, you know, sourcing an extract ingredient, dropping it in something and just marketing it and blasting it out there. So we’re a one stop shop resource for all things kava in the larger conversations plug into.

But what kava symbolizes and what will it symbolize is just as important as what it is, because it symbolizes sort of a stake in the ground shift in the way that we socialize and And so it’s a tool for the mind to kind of be more open to the environmentality of how we approach socializing, connecting, being good to our minds, mental health, right? So whenever people see kava, to a lot of people, it symbolizes safety, it symbolizes optimism, it symbolizes connection, it symbolizes all of these things to people who are like recovering addicts now and more and more regular, you know, just people who aren’t going into the future.

So it’s a tool for the mind and it’s a tool for the heart that you can feel good about using. It’s not, you know, there isn’t no, it’s not, I’m not saying that it’s a silver bullet for everything, but it’s a great catalyst that opens you up to, because whenever you’re stressed out, whenever you’re sick, whenever you’re chronically ill, what I found and the reason why we use it in virtually every protocol and our doctors network that I’ve worked with is because people can be paralyzed by their stress and by their trauma. And you give someone something that acutely works to open them up and all of a sudden they can function better and integrate all the other practices and tools and strategies that will get them well long-term as far as a multi-therapeutic approach, because that’s really what it takes in life, right?

So just that’s a little bit about who we are and just what our mission is. what kind of differentiates us, you know, and, you know, where, where, where kava is really kind of a cut above or very different than most of the just one off compounds. It’s not just another compound. It really is an incredibly special sort of spiritual compound, you know, that’s highly revered. So that’s why I’m mostly excited about it.

Katie: Yeah, and like I said, I’ve been experimenting with it for the last couple of months and noticed some of these effects. I’ll definitely keep everybody posted with my continued experience with it, but I’m excited that this is now an option and available in, like you’ve explained so well, provides many of the same benefits as other things people have turned to in the past, but also a lot more upside, especially on a long-term compounding basis. So I’m grateful that it exists. I’m grateful for the work that you’ve done around it. And I will of course make sure there are links in the show notes for where people can find it and order it from you guys, as well as you have so many educational resources. And I know there’s so much more we didn’t even get a chance to get into in this episode, so I’ll put links in the show notes for you guys listening to keep learning about kava.

But a couple of questions I love to ask at the end of interviews, the first being if there’s a book or number of books that have profoundly impacted you personally, and if so, what they are and why?

Cameron: Interesting, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of those. I mean, I probably any of Weston Price’s work, whenever I first started getting into nutrition and physical degeneration and trying to figure out foundationally some of these sort of more, I guess you’d say paleolithic or natural principles of sort of eating off the landscape, which is transformative because food was a good entry point into all of these other categories of personal development for me. Those are good. In recent years, I really believe in the four pillars of health, exercise, nutrition, sleep, and mindset. If you get a B plus in all those categories, you’re gonna be doing pretty well because you gotta get the basics right if you wanna live well and be well. And I think that mindset is kind of the start because you have to have a sort of vision of things. And again, that’s one thing that I love about kava is that it helps to intervene and facilitate that mindset.

But if I had a book, I really love books like, in the work of people like Jordan Peterson that are out there that are really promoting personal responsibility, 12 ways, 12 Rules for Life. I guess this was his first one. That is a profound book for me. And I love that just because, anybody who’s out there like him or Tony Robbins or anybody like that, that’s promoting just personal responsibility and that the fact that everything in your life isn’t your fault, the things that happen to you, the terrible things, but everything is your responsibility. If you’re gonna shift it and change it, it does require a mindset, vision requires action. So guys like that and books like that are gonna be my go-to’s on that probably.

Katie: I love it. I will make sure that those are linked as well. And any parting advice for the listeners today that could be related to Kava and everything we’ve talked about or entirely unrelated life advice you find helpful.

Cameron: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, I would say I’d probably say in the, in the same breath of what I just touched on. I mean, you know, changing your life or improving your life, you know, is, I mean, when you think about it, when it comes down to it, like what else is more worth your time, right? It’s like, we only get a certain, certain, you know, uh, we’ve got a certain clock, right? We only get a certain small amount of time on this planet. And what I realized whenever I was sick is that. You know, there’s really nothing more important, you know, to do with your time, nothing more pertinent than to be involved in the process of facilitating and feeding life instead of, you know, disease, degeneration and death, right?

You know, in your own personal life and once you start to, you know, feed into your own personal circumstance and create abundance in every way, resource-wise, you know, resources, finances, knowledge, etc., then you can then extend that, you know, to your macro environment and you want to. The two things, this is one thing that’s been well studied too, that I think that definitely contribute most to people actually being fulfilled and happy, not just having pleasure, are growth and contribution, right? You know, growing and giving, right? If you’re growing, if you’re improving, if you’re doing something to grow, starting from mindset and chipping away at it, no matter how small or big, you’re going to be fulfilled and, you know, it’s going to give you meaning and purpose. And then if you have something to contribute, you know, then you’re going to be 10 times more fulfilled. And you can’t, you know, you have to grow so that you can give because you can’t give what you don’t have.

And, you know, for me, I learned this during my process, you know, that a lot of, you know, mental illness, psychological illness is in many ways a purpose and meaning deficiency. And, you know, once you have that and you’re sort of aligned with something that’s bigger than yourself, then your life starts to transform in many ways, no matter how small you start. It doesn’t necessarily matter. But whenever everybody does that, we definitely have a better macro environment.

And all these principles that we’re talking about, food, nutrition, they’re entry points, just being good to yourself, to getting yourself to a state in which you can grow as a person more, feed into the process of life and contribute it outwards too, you know? So that’s usually what I would get into when we talk about like what all this stuff means, you know, because at the beginning, you know, at the end of the day, everything that we’re trying to do here on improving our physical health, it’s just trying to improve our ability to function in the world and investing in ourselves, just like a farmer would invest in their tractor. You know, we’re going to produce more, we’re going to be better. We’re going to show up better as a husband, wife, father, mother, brother, sister, you know, to the people, things that matter most to us.

And in this conversation that’s central, we’re talking about human connection and kava as one tool, you know, those are the things that matter most in our lives. And, you know, we have more of that whenever we have a, you know, a better world. So, you know, getting into all this stuff, it’s just, it’s worth it. It just is. It’s one of the most interesting places we could like spend our time just trying to figure out how to overcome some of the things that are epidemic in today’s world and, you know, overcome it and be better on the other side. So.

Katie: I love it. Perfect place to wrap up for today. Cameron, I’m so grateful for your time and for you sharing all your wisdom today. Thank you so much for being here.

Cameron: Oh, thanks, Katie. Anytime.

Katie: And thanks as always to all of you for listening. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.