Detox your World Organic  Maca 100 grams

Maca is a root from Peru. It looks like a little turnip or radish, and is a traditional staple food in Peru. Its Latin name is Lepidium Peruvianum Chacon, but you don't have to remember that! It's also known as Peruvian ginseng, or Amazonian ginseng, but isn't related to gin-seng at all.

Our Maca comes dried and ground into a powder, is certified organic and is not cooked. It is non-toxic and contains no dangerous side-effects or withdrawal symptoms.

What's so special about maca?
Maca comes under the herbal classification of being adaptogenic. Adaptogens, are herbs such as ginseng that are traditionally thought to help the body to adapt to increased or ambiguous stressors. Traditional texts claim that these types of herb have a generalised regulatory action upon homeostatic mechanisms throughout the body (Lopez-Fandon et al, 2004:471).

Maca is a very densely nutritious food that contains high amounts of vitamins, minerals, enzymes and all the essential amino acids (so often hard to obtain from a single non-flesh food). The amino acid content of this plant gives it an average bioavailable protein content of around 14% of the entire weight of the plant. Maca certainly has an impressive array of minerals, with notably high levels of bioavailable calcium. If you think you need remineralising (and believe us, you probably do!), then maca will help you do this naturally. The vast majority of people today eat food that is lower in minerals than our wild foods of yesteryear. Maca's high-mineral content can help top up your mineral stores in a tasty enjoyable way. On top of that, maca also contains trace amounts of the hard-to-find vitamin B12 (though not enough to rely on).

There is also a massive array of active phytochemicals (plant chemicals) present within maca, including the legendary macamides and macaenes, who’s supposed activity have been the topic of much research, especially amongst traditional diets of indigenous peoples of Peru. We actively encourage you to undertake your own research on these com-pounds and draw your own conclusions here.

How do I use maca?
Maca is so tasty! Shazzie eats the powder right out of her hand (often affording her some strange glances from onlookers), but you can mix it up into other foods if you like!

Maca tastes malted, like Horlicks! Try adding it to smoothies, nut milks, water, or energy balls.

What doctors have said about maca
(Please note that the following material is for informational purposes only. It is not in any way intended to replace medical advice given from a suitably qualified professional in a one to one consultation)

As maca has become increasingly popular, its use has spread to conventional medical practices in some parts of the world. In the November, 1988 Townsend Letter for Doctors, physicians commented on the therapeutic uses of maca that they have observed. Hugo Malaspina, MD, a cardiologist practicing complementary medicine in Lima, Peru, has been using maca in his practice for ten years. He commonly recommends maca to women experiencing premenstrual discomfort or menopausal symptoms. "There are different medicinal plants that work on the ovaries by stimulating them," he says. "With maca though, we should say that it regulates the ovarian function." Dr Malaspina further notes that "maca appears to regulate the organs of internal secretion, such as the pituitary, the adrenal glands, and the pancreas. I have had perhaps two hundred female patients whose perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms have been greatly helped by taking maca."

Dr. Malaspina first found out about maca through a group of sexually active older men who were taking the herb with good results. "One of this group started taking maca and found he was able to perform satisfactorily in a sexual relationship with a lady friend. Soon everyone in the group began drinking the powdered maca as a beverage and enjoying the boost that the root was giving their hormonal functions. I have several of these men as patients, and their improvement prompted me to find out more about maca and begin recommending it to my other patients."

Aguila Calderon, MD, is the former Dean of the Faculty of Human Medicine at the National University of Federico Villarreal in Lima. He says, "Maca has a lot of easily absorbable calcium, plus magnesium and a fair amount of silica. We are finding it very useful in treat-ing the decalcification of bones in children and adults." In his practice, Dr. Calderon has used maca for male impotence, erectile dysfunction, menopausal symptoms, and general fatigue."

Chicago physician Gary F Gordon, former President of the American College for Ad-vancement in Medicine, is also a maca supporter. "We all hear rumours about various products like maca," he says. "But using this Peruvian root myself, I personally experi-enced a significant improvement in erectile tissue response. What I see in maca is a means of normalizing our steroid hormones like testosterone, progesterone, and estrogen. Therefore it has the facility to forestall the hormonal changes of aging. It acts on men to restore them to a healthy functional status in which they experience a more active libido."

Urology, a major peer-reviewed medical journal that first published the Viagra study, is due to publish a study confirming the sex-enhancing effects of an extract of Maca. "This is a significant development in maca research, and a breakthrough for the herbal industry," says Dr David Forrester. "This is a very unusual development for a major medical journal to publish findings on a sex-enhancing herb. Since the release of the drug Viagra, a pleth-ora of supplement companies have marketed herbal products purported to enhance libido and sexual function. But these products have lacked clinical validation. In the study which will appear in the April 2000 issue of Urology, mice fed Maca Root extract exhibited a sig-nificant increase in sexual activity when compared to the control group. ...To ensure prod-uct safety, a cultivator donated an industry brand extract for oral toxicity testing. The re-sults revealed no toxicity and an absence of adverse pharmacalogic effects. Further in vivo studies showed that the maca extract promotes libido, sexual potency and energy. Ani-mals fed the extract greatly increased their sexual activity, engaging in sex far more frequently than usual."

References
A. López-Fando, M. P. Gómez-Serranillos, I. Iglesias, O. Lock, U. P. Upamayta, M. E. Car-retero. Lepidium peruvianum chacon restores homeostasis impaired by restraint stress. Phytotherapy Research. Jul 2004 (18,6). 471-474