Ginger’s benefits go deep!

You are doubtlessly already familiar with what ginger is, so let’s skip right into the science.

The most relevant active compound in the ginger root is called gingerol, and people enjoy it not just for its taste, but also a stack of health reasons, such as:

• For weight loss
• Against nausea
• Against inflammation
• For cardiovascular health
• Against neurodegeneration

Quite a collection! So, what does the science say?

For weight loss

This one’s quite straightforward. It not only helps overall weight loss, but also specifically improves waist-hip ratio, which is a much more important indicator of health than BMI.

Read: The effects of ginger intake on weight loss and metabolic profiles among overweight and obese subjects: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Against nausea & pain

Ginger has proven its effectiveness in many high quality clinical trials, against general nausea, post-surgery nausea, chemotherapy-induced nausea, and pregnancy-related nausea.

Source: Ginger on Human Health: A Comprehensive Systematic Review of 109 Randomized Controlled Trials

However! While it very clearly has been shown to be beneficial in the majority of cases, there are some small studies that suggest it may not be safe to take close to the time of giving birth, or in people with a history of pregnancy loss, or unusual vaginal bleeding, or clotting disorders.

See specifically: Ginger for nausea and vomiting of pregnancy

As a side note on the topic of “trouble down there”, ginger has also been found to be as effective as Novafen (a combination drug of acetaminophen (Tylenol), caffeine, and ibuprofen), in the task of relieving menstrual pain:

See: Effect of Ginger and Novafen on menstrual pain: A cross-over trial

Against inflammation & pain

Ginger has well-established anti-inflammatory (and, incidentally, which affects many of the same systems, antioxidant) effects. Let’s take a look at that first:

Read: Effect of Ginger on Inflammatory Diseases

Attentive readers will note that this means that ginger is not merely some nebulous anti-inflammatory agent. Rather, it also specifically helps alleviate delineable inflammatory diseases, ranging from colitis to Crohn’s, arthritis to lupus.

We’ll be honest (we always are!), the benefits in this case are not necessarily life-changing, but they are a statistically significant improvement, and if you are living with one of those conditions, chances are you’ll be glad of even things described in scientific literature as “modestly efficacious”.

What does “modestly efficacious” look like? Here are the numbers from a review of 593 patients’ results in clinical trials (against placebo):

❝Following ginger intake, a statistically significant pain reduction SMD = −0.30 ([95% CI: [(−0.50, −0.09)], P = 0.005]) with a low degree of inconsistency among trials (I2 = 27%), and a statistically significant reduction in disability SMD = −0.22 ([95% CI: ([−0.39, −0.04)]; P = 0.01; I2 = 0%]) were seen, both in favor of ginger.❞

~ Bartels et al.

To de-mathify that:

• Ginger reduced pain by 30%
• Ginger reduced disability by 22%

Read the source: Efficacy and safety of ginger in osteoarthritis patients: a meta-analysis of randomized placebo-controlled trials

Because (in part) of the same signalling pathways, it also has benefits against cancer (and you’ll remember, it also reduces the symptoms of chemotherapy).

See for example: Ginger’s Role in Prevention and Treatment of Gastrointestinal Cancer

For cardiovascular health

In this case, its benefits are mostly twofold:

• It significantly reduces triglycerides and LDL cholesterol, while increasing HDL cholesterol
• It significantly reduces fasting blood sugar levels and HbA1c levels (both risk factors for CVD)

Against neurodegeneration

This is in large part because it reduces inflammation, which we discussed earlier.

But, not everything passes the blood-brain barrier, so it’s worth noting when something (like gingerol) does also have an effect on brain health as well as the rest of the body.

You do not want inflammation in your brain; that is Bad™ and strongly associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

As well as reducing neuroinflammation, ginger has other relevant mechanisms too:

❝Its bioactive compounds may improve neurological symptoms and pathological conditions by modulating cell death or cell survival signaling molecules.

The cognitive enhancing effects of ginger might be partly explained via alteration of both the monoamine and the cholinergic systems in various brain areas.

Moreover, ginger decreases the production of inflammatory related factors❞

~ Arcusa et al.

Check it out in full, as this is quite interesting:

Role of Ginger in the Prevention of Neurodegenerative Diseases

How much to take?

In most studies, doses of 1–3 grams/day were used.

Where to get it?

Your local supermarket, as a first port-of-call. Especially given the dose you want, it may be nicer for you to have a touch of sliced ginger root in your cooking, rather than taking 2–6 capsules per day to get the same dose.

Obviously, this depends on your culinary preferences, and ginger certainly doesn’t go with everything!

If you do want it as a supplement, here is an example product on Amazon, for your convenience.

Enjoy!

PS, we love you. With good reason!

There are nearly 20,000 studies on PS listed on PubMed alone, and its established benefits include:

• significantly improving memory
• potential reversal (!) of neurodegeneration
• reduction of stress activation
• improvement in exercise capacity
• it even helps avoid rejection of medical implants

We’ll explore some of these studies and give an overview of how PS does what it does. Just like the (otherwise unrelated) l-theanine we talked about a couple of weeks ago, it does do a lot of things.

PS = Cow Brain?!

Let’s first address a concern. You may have heard something along the lines of “hey, isn’t PS made from cow brain, and isn’t that Very Bad™ for humans, mad cow disease and all?”. The short answer is:

Firstly: ingesting cow brain tissue is indeed generally considered Very Bad™ for humans, on account of the potential for transmission of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) resulting in its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (CJD), whose unpleasantries are beyond the scope of this newsletter.

Secondly (and more pleasantly): whilst PS can be derived from bovine brain tissue, most PS supplements these days derive from soy—or sometimes sunflower lecithin. Check labels if unsure.

Using PS to Improve Other Treatments

In the human body, the question of tolerance brings us a paradox (not the tolerance paradox, important as that may also be): we must build and maintain a strong immune system capable of quickly adapting to new things, and then when we need medicines (or even supplements), we need our body to not build tolerance of them, for them to continue having an effect.

So, we’re going to look at a very hot-off-the-press study (Feb 2023), that found PS to “mediate oral tolerance”, which means that it helps things (medications, supplements etc.) that we take orally and want to keep working, keep working.

In the scientists’ own words (we love scientists’ own words because they haven’t been distorted by the popular press)…

❝This immunotherapy has been shown to prevent/reduce immune response against life-saving protein-based therapies, food allergens, autoantigens, and the antigenic viral capsid peptide commonly used in gene therapy, suggesting a broad spectrum of potential clinical applications. Given the good safety profile of PS together with the ease of administration, oral tolerance achieved with PS-based nanoparticles has a very promising therapeutic impact.❞

Nguyen et al, Feb 2023

In other words, to parse those two very long sentences into two shorter bullet points:

• It allows a lot of important treatments to continue working—treatments that the body would otherwise counteract
• It is very safe—and won’t harm the normal function of your immune system at large

This is also very consistent with one of the benefits we mentioned up top—PS helps avoid rejection of implants, something that can be a huge difference to health-related quality of life (HRQoL), never mind sometimes life itself!

What is PS Anyways, and How Does It Work?

Phosphatidylserine is a phospholipid, a kind of lipid, found in cell membranes. More importantly:

It’s a signalling agent, mainly for apoptosis, which in lay terms means: it tells cells when it’s time to die.

Cellular death sounds like a bad thing, but prompt and efficient cellular apoptosis (death) and resultant prompt and efficient autophagy (recycling) reduce the risk of your body making mistakes when creating new cells from old cells.

Think about photocopying:

• Situation A: You have a document, and you want to copy it. If you copy it before it gets messed up, your copy will look almost, if not exactly, like the original. It’ll be super easy to read.
• Situation B: You have a document, and you want to copy it, but you delay doing so for so long that the original is all scuffed and creased and has a coffee stain on it. These unwanted changes will get copied onto the new document, and any copy made of that copy will keep the problems too. It gets worse and worse each time.

So, using this over-simplifier analogy, the speed of ‘copying’ is a major factor in cellular aging. The sooner cells are copied, before something gets damaged, the better the copy will be.

So you really, really want to have enough PS (our bodies make it too, by the way) to signal promptly to a cell when its time is up.

You do not want cells soldiering on until they’re the biological equivalent of that crumpled up, coffee-stained sheet of paper.

Little wonder, then, that PS’ most commonly-sought benefit when it comes to supplementation is to help avoid age-related neurodegeneration (most notably, memory loss)!

Keeping the cells young means keeping the brain young!

PS’s role as a signalling agent doesn’t end there—it also has a lot to say to a wide variety of the body’s immunological cells, helping them know what needs to happen to what. Some things should be immediately eaten and recycled; other things need more extreme measures applied to them first, and yet other things need to be ignored, and so forth.

You can read more about that in Elsevier’s publication if you’re curious 🙂

Wow, what a ride today’s newsletter has been! We started at paracetamoxyfrusebendroneomycin, and got down to the nitty gritty with a bunch of hopefully digestible science!

We love feedback, so please let us know if we’re striking the balance right, and/or if you’d like to see more or less of something—there’s a feedback widget at the bottom of this email!