A Brief Introduction to the World of Natural Healthcare for Health & Longevity

Plants and People Evolving Together

What we put into our mouth matters, yet globally there remains a general lack of understanding about the relationship between what we eat, our health, and our longevity. So for those of you who are wanting to live longer and avoid pharmaceuticals for as long as possible, we at AKESO Health Sciences want to briefly share our perspective about how human life has evolved with plants as both food and medicine, and why supplementing is so important in today’s world.

Ecology (the relationship between living things and the environment), and biology (the study of all forms of life) are the systems that represent the diversity and interactions of plants, animals, water, land and air (and temperature), including the biological relationship of plants and humans.

In the very real sense of the word, the human body is miraculous. The biological complexity of our bodies allows us to experience all that exists through our 5 senses; through consciousness thinking; through the digesting of food for energy; a physical structure that allows us to move around at will; the ability to design and build the smallest and largest objects; to be athletic; to fly airplanes; and literally every other possible thing. Add to that, we have the ability to expand our awareness and understanding beyond what is already known, to achieve wisdom through experience, to be creative, and to experience a full spectrum of emotions. With all of this integrated possibility going on, we each get to make decisions about how we want to spend our time in life, explore the planet, create families, and evolve as humans.

The first thing that went right in this planet’s evolutionary journey toward building our human body, happened when the initial bacteria that inhabited the planet split into two groups. The new group, called eukaryotes, became the beginning of all plants, hominids, animals, fungi, and protozoans. The eukaryotes were much larger in size and had more genes in the DNA than the original bacteria and were uniquely able to switch on or off certain gene segments, thus editing themselves.

Now, as a result nearly 2 billion years later, there are over 500,000 plant species and, interestingly, only one human species. What caused plant-life to leap into such biodiversity is not scientifically clear, and it is still baffling how flowers evolved so spectacularly, but plants have become an extraordinary success on Earth for both our ecology and the survival of human life.

Today, it is not hard to see that what we get from plants—and how destroying or over using anything in our environment is also destructive to ourselves. Over 50 nutrients (vitamins and minerals) are needed to sustain human life. Those classified as “non-essential” nutrients are those made by the body, which means we don’t have to ingest them from an outside source. However, “essential nutrients” are those that are essential for us to consume in order to sustain live and a healthy functioning body. There are about 30 vitamins, minerals, and other dietary nutrients that are essential, in fact, critical, for us to take in everyday—like essential fatty acids (EFAs) and vitamin C for example—for our ongoing health. The list of important jobs performed by essential nutrients literally includes every bodily function, from the renewal of skin, the production of blood cells, muscle and bone, our vision, the ability of oxygen to move through us, the healing of wounds and our ability to fight illness, digest food and assimilate other nutrients, and carry messages along thousands of miles of nerve pathways so that different parts of the body can communicate with each other, to so much more.

In contrast, plants are autotrophic, which means they have the ability to obtain the basic elements they need from land, sun, and water, which means they have the ability to synthesize the full spectrum of organic molecules required to support their life and propagation. And what plants have is what we need to consume. Having the knowledge that plants are our source for most of the nutrients we need to keep us healthy, it becomes our individual responsibility to make sure plants (vegetables, fruits, and herbs) have a strong presence in our diet.

Now for our favorite topic—plants as medicine. If plants supply the nutrients that we need to be alive and healthy, then it makes sense that plants can also play a major role in healing. There is archeological evidence that shows the practice of botanical medicine dating back thousands of years. Looking at the past 5,000 years of recorded history, we can learn about the oldest known medicine practices by studying “Ayurveda” [“life knowledge”]. Traditional medicine practices have had an understanding of the specific benefits that each plant provides and is today widely accepted by science. For example, there is a small group of plants that are identified as “adaptogens”. Adaptogenic plants have been scientifically well-studied to help the body resist stressors of all kinds (physical, chemical or biological) by keeping our body systems in balance while focusing on specific needs the body may have. And on top of that, adaptogenic plants can only be classified as adaptogens when they are known to have no side-effects. The deep and precious understanding of traditional plant medicine has been carried forward and has been true and unchanged from age to age.

Our intimate relationship with the plants that feed, heal, and otherwise sustain us and our environment, was a smart move by mother nature because it requires that we humans make choices to protect the Earth’s ecosystems for our own survival. Unfortunately, we are not experiencing a very wise time in our evolution. We began taking the functioning of our bodies for granted when food began became a comfort or a fun night out, and when we began to commercialize food and spraying toxic chemicals on our plant foods—and when we felt we could rely on toxic man-made pharmaceuticals to heal us, so we didn’t really need to take care of ourselves. In the process, we stopped respecting the plant kingdom and entire ecology of the planet itself as that which is sustaining us—a spectacular mistake on our part.

Akeso Health Sciences formulates vitamins, nutrients, and plant medicines, based on the intelligence of the human body and what is found in nature that directly supports the health, balancing, and healing of the human body. Both of our MigreLief and Condition Specific lines of expertly formulated products provide the effective support of plant adaptogens, targeted plant constituents, and the vitamins and minerals that work in harmony with each other in the human body. Further, we formulate utilizing clinically studied daily amounts of each so that you can respond effectively to the health issues that concern you.