“Adaptogens”... a trendy new name synonymous with health, well-being and modernity.
In order to get a good idea of what it is, let's start by understanding what it is not.
Adaptogens are not medicine because they have no curative purpose.
Adaptogens are plants or fungi (most of the time) that thrive in extreme climates, which gives them an extraordinary adaptability. This is the point of these foods. They transmit this adaptability and their benefits to the human body.
If the ancient Chinese pharmacopoeia already called them "superior tonics", the technical definition of Adaptogens arrives in the 1960s from the USSR. The Soviets had been working for twenty years on food to boost human performance and adaptogens caught their attention. They have three basic properties:
- Strengthen the body's defenses against external aggressions,
- Normalize and stabilize physiological states and therefore achieve homeostasis
- Preserve the functioning of organisms while ensuring the absence of toxicity
In short, the miracle of adaptogens is to bring appeasement when you feel stressed, energy when you experience fatigue and cognitive enhancement when your mind is troubled.
They are real little treasures of nature.
Their democratization is more and more widespread in a society which is more and more subject to emotional lifts, peaks of stress and fatigue at a sometimes overwhelming pace.