Potential Boost

What the hell is an adaptogen energy drink? Does it have what plants crave? Is it loaded with ingredaments like nutrimites, vitaminos, and health acids?

Okay, let’s separate out the phrases here. You all know what an energy drink is, right? It’s a drink… to give you energy. This Gym Weed, for example, packs 200mg of green tea caffeine, and 100mg of L-Theanine, so that you don’t get the jitters. Cool, gotcha.

The real question, though, is what are adaptogens? According to Gym Weed:

Adaptogens are herbs, roots, mushrooms and other plant substances that help our bodies restore balance and promote calmness.

The Cleveland Clinic says pretty much the same thing, but with a bit more detail:

Adaptogens are active ingredients in certain plants and mushrooms that may impact how your body deals with stress, anxiety and fatigue. Plants and mushrooms provide adaptogenic actions. When consumed, these plants target specific stressors in your body.

Sounds great, right?

But Cheryl Wischhover, writing for Vox in 2018, defines them in a different way:

Adaptogens are actually the cryptocurrency of the wellness world.

Elaborating on this, the author says:

The bottom line is that you can’t really broadly apply the promise of vague benefits across an entire class of substances without real evidence. But the wellness industry capitalizes on the existence of a gray area and is adept at claiming things without actually claiming anything.

Basically, since the FDA doesn’t regulate supplements such as adaptogens, the only people who would study them are the companies that put them out who actually benefit from the lack of concrete evidence either way.

Or, as Dr. Rashmi Mullur of UCLA puts it Wischhover:

"They can just say it works… They can sell it or they can spend a bunch of money to study it and potentially find that it has no benefit. There’s too much risk.”

With all this being said, our entirely uneducated opinion is as follows. Adaptogens might not provide the health benefits they claim, but, in terms of health risks, the TWO-HUNDRED MILLIGRAMS OF CAFFEINE seem a lot more dangerous than some lion’s mane.

In conclusion: these things might not help you focus or boost your brain activity, but they’ll definitely help you stay awake. So get them if you want that.