The road to good health is a lot like driving on a busy city street. There might be a straight path to your destination, but frequently, you’ll hit traffic, or construction, or even a dead-end. However, there are a lot of side roads you can take to get where you’re going.
This is also how plant-based medicine works, as well. It helps to open up the side roads to healing. “Most biological prophesies are not a straight shot,” says Hardip Kalsi, a biochemist, and Chief Formulator at Trilogía. She uses the example of sleep – or lack thereof – given that insomnia affects one in four Americans every year.
“With insomnia, your body could be telling you that inside your brain, you aren’t getting enough serotonin. This is often what has lead to poor sleep, and depression, or lower productivity.
“Often, we then take a sleep aid or antidepressant to treat those symptoms. But the fact is, a lot of people’s serotonin levels decline with time, or they never had much, to begin with. Modern pharmaceuticals don’t address this root problem. Instead, they put a bandaid over the symptoms to mask them. But there are compounds in nature that can help to upregulate serotonin – to help your body make more. There are natural herbal supplements for serotonin. And there are lifestyle changes you can make for more holistic healing. It’s about working with your body’s natural mechanisms to restore balance. Nature has the answers to these questions – to help you generate equilibrium from within.”
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This concept of balance or equilibrium has been around in Ayurveda for more than 5000 years. Historically, it wasn’t understood why the internal balance was necessary or why traditional medicine worked. However, modern science has given us a lot of answers in recent years.
“Just like other organisms on this planet, research shows us there’s very rarely just one pathway to healing. That’s why Ayurveda is not about medicine; it’s about lifestyle. Western medicine alone draws a blank here. And for this reason, the general public now realizes that you can’t just pop a pill to make yourself better.
“The idea is to become one with nature. Not create a problem and mask the symptoms with drugs, but to try to get rid of the problem in its entirety. Use plant-based remedies and go for a walk in the woods. That’s real medicine.”
This intersection of healing compounds and how they interface with the human body at a molecular level is what drives Kalsi’s innovations as a formulator. She’s not interested in fixing symptoms or creating one-size-fits-all formulations. She’s interested in helping people harness the systems in their body to heal themselves – and in creating products to help them do that.
“Take, for example, menopause. A lot of people have terrible symptoms when their estrogen begins to drop – hot flashes, lack of impulse control, chills, sleep problems, and more. They rush to the doctor to treat those symptoms – with hormone replacement therapy and other symptom-based drug treatments. What’s really happening is that your body has to figure out how to tow the road efficiently – to follow its biochemical prophesies – without the presence of estrogen. There is no one pathway to control this imbalance. But you can train your body to fill the gaps. You can continue to boost other organ functions in the body – including brain function and liver function – to augment the loss of estrogen. We aren’t meant to live forever, but plant-based medicine, coupled with other lifestyle changes, can make the transitions of aging as comfortable as possible.”
In short, plant-based medicine and Kalsi’s formulations for Trilogía are not intended to put a lid on the effects of aging, stress, sleep, and pain. They’re designed to help you kickstart your organ functions, create new pathways in your body, and help you clear the roadblocks and enliven your body’s natural systems for a healthier, more harmonious you.
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