Episode Transcript

Trevor: Kirk we're back. We're back. Part two.

Kirk: Hey, Trevor. How are you doing?

Trevor: Off camera, you're asking about my dog. Because you know, everybody everyone wants a Rosie update.

Kirk: Well, I was just saying that in the last, in Part One. Welcome to Part Two of BioSource Botanicals discussion. Well, we talked to three experts from Part One. So if you haven't if you haven't heard Part one yet, go back to Part One. And if you had heard Part One, you'll recognize that Trevor forgot to give us the dog story update. So let's give us the dog story update.

Trevor: So our our little dog, Rosie, went into heat that was exciting, leaving little red spots all over the place and then was trying to put a diaper on her and that kind of thing.

Kirk: It's a little dog man, That's a small diaper.

Trevor: It was a small dog, small diaper, much chasing. And, you know, after we got that sort of kind of worked itself out, Rosie has now gone to be spayed. And that happened Thursday. So then she had to go through the cone, which every dog loves. And then we try to put a little like picture of an infant onesie on her so she wouldn't have to wear the cone and didn't love that. So, yeah, I've been chasing around a dog trying to either put a cone on her head or an infant onesie on her body. So, you know, but but but the minor surgery went well and Rosie's recovered and still wondering why we're trying to put things costumes on her when it's not Halloween. So, you know, there we go. There's the Rosie update.

Kirk: I wonder why the pet industry is $1 billion industry.

Trevor: Well, at least with her being spayed, we won't create any more extra pets.

Kirk: All right.

Trevor: Out there.

Kirk: Thank you for that. So Part Two.

Trevor: Prt Two, all right. You mentioned. But I'm just going to say their names cause, you know, so Daniel Gana is our medical or pharmaceutical microbiologist. Dr. Abe Benavidez is our M.D. and Brett Ristow is a lawyer with a Ph.D. in biochemistry. So those are the voices. You're going to be hearing this again.

Kirk: On three different continents

Trevor: On three different continents. Yes. Daniel in Nigeria, Abe in Costa Rica and Brent in the continent of Minnesota.

Kirk: And the continent in Minnesota. Yes. And I want to remind people that if you go to our Web page or a YouTube channel, you can watch the entire conversation on a video with no edits and no interruptions from us. So these are very bright men. I really enjoyed the conversation. I had to go back. I mean, I've transcribed the conversation.  There's still parts of the conversation that I need you to explain to me after we come out, but what are the highlights we're going into this in this conversation. Part Two

Trevor: Well, we do spend some time on things like mitochondria still and whole plant extracts. But I think we, it's all exciting, but we spend more time with the BioSource Botanical actual products, some topical, some something you ingest. They'll go through that. But yeah, let's listen for that. And also I was impressed. I hope you will be to about basically the amount of care they're taking. You know, they're making sure everything is analyzed. They're trying to get some scientific research published. They  have a really good website that's telling you what they do and why they do. So, yeah, I, I think they're putting a lot of care into trying to help people understand cannabis, use cannabis properly and making some good products to help people.

Kirk: Yeah, yeah. Let's get into the conversation.

Kirk: Gentlemen, I'm very quickly looking at your web page. So right now, BioSource Botanicals has three products Active Spectrum Cold Sore Rescue, Active spectrum rest and relax tincture and Active Spectrum Relief Balm. So that's is that topical. Two products that are topical and one product is sublingual. So I guess I. How does cannabis absorbs through the skin? Like, does it absorb differently than if you put it under the tongue?

Daniel Gana Thinking about absorption, they tend to have different rates of absorption. I'm yet to do the research or read the research about that but, the most important thing, these receptors of this particular place. So it depends on the end product. What are you trying to treat? For example, we looking our product. We discovered that full spectrum, full plant botanicals tend to have better effects. So we're trying to formulate a compound or a product which can be applied skin to help get rid of blisters cold sores. Talking about systemic therapy. We are still waiting on more research to find the possible application for that and then explain what really happens when you take our products on its own and how it acts on these particular cells, but we are very short.  The absorption on the skin tends to be different. And then I can't really tell you the numbers of them by different form.

Dr. Abe Benavides: I can fill in some. I can chime in. So when I when I work on my patients and I told them about topicals, I told them they're really good at being locally absorbed, but pretty much very superficial local absorption. So what you're trying to target, there are more superficial type nerves, pains, wounds, blisters, infections kind of thing that you can apply to, but not really the. And if you put THC on, it's not going to get you high because it's not going to get absorbed well enough through into the bloodstream to make it and then be, you know, have cause psychoactive effects. And so and the thing I tell people about tinctures and tinctures are definitely the number one form of of cannabis product I recommend for bioavailability and also avoiding airway effect. So because when we when we and I do so I'll just give you the spiel I give my patients when we eat cannabis or cannabis products, we really only getting 6 to 19% at best of the cannabinoids absorbed through the gut because we are subjecting it to a very harsh digestive process. The stomach acid start breaking up all of this nice delicate acids, terpenes, things like that. And so you're left with very little to be absorbed through the rest of the body. So I never really use. I never recommend edibles are basically edibles are candy. I don't recommended candy either. And so with tinctures you're also avoiding the airway effect. So the absorption on inhaled products is like 30 to 40% bioavailability. With tincture, you're getting somewhere between the edible form and the inhaled form. So tinctures are the second fastest absorbed and second best absorbed as well. You'll get somewhere between 20 and 30 or 40% of the cannabinoids. And the way that you apply it also makes a difference. So I tell patients you're not just supposed to like put it in your drink or just swallow it right away. It's sublingual. So the idea is that you're going to shake the bottle, you're going to measure the amount. I'm going to tell you week by week, and then you're going to drop it under your tongue and you're going to hold it there for at least 1 or 2 minutes. It doesn't have to be longer, but the idea is that you're giving some time for the cannabinoids to be absorbed through those very thin membranes in the mouth. And then I'm struck the patient to when that's when after like two minutes, you're going to want to swish and swallow because the more contact you make with the inside of the mouth, the more that's also going to stay there, be absorbed, etc. And then so very little you're going to end up swallowing and getting that tiny bit left. But most of it we want to get absorbed through the mouth. You will have, you know, you'll have 30, you'll have 20 to 30% of the cannabinoids absorbed and distributing with within the first 15 minutes versus if you were to eat the cannabis edible, you will have to wait, you know, at least 60 to 90 minutes at best 30 if you had a nanoparticle formulation. But the tincture is going to be the best absorb. I also tell people to take it with food. It's easiest to take with breakfast, like right after breakfast and right after dinner is what I tell patients, because we want the your body's already being primed for absorption, including absorption of fats. And so essentially what we want is we want the cannabinoids to hitch a ride on the fat and then into the body. And so the studies, the pharmacokinetic studies show that when you eat or when you in just cannabis on a full stomach versus an empty stomach, you get 3 to 5 times the bioavailability out of it. And so what I so this is part of the education process where I tell people about why bioavailability is important and then why we are choosing these certain routes and why that edible what that dose is not going to work for you and why we need to switch to to tincture.

Kirk: Brent, you had something to add.

Brent Ristow: Yeah. Sorry. I just. Just commenting on the products. Yeah. The Active Spectrum Cold Sore Rescue. That's the herpes rescue. It works on contact. It neutralizes the virus.  Accelerates healing. The other Active Spectrum Relief Balm that is more for pain relief for pain relief. But these products just coming on the market we do have obviously anecdotal evidence with people using them with great success. Abe's had some experience using them with some patients with great success. We're just trying to also, you know, go through the rigorous process of providing some scientific evidence to back up everything that we're saying and hopefully kind of provide some direction for the industry in really maintaining quality of the products. Because right now it is so unregulated. Here in Minnesota, it's just absolute chaos currently. And hopefully they'll get that straightened out. But we're going through the rigorous scientific process of demonstrating the quality and effectiveness of these products, and hopefully the industry will see that and follow suit. That's hopefully the direction that it's going to move. I mean people, not to talk about an industry that might not be totally relevant, but cigarettes are tested to match. Right? Pharmaceuticals, medical devices obviously are. Even cigarettes are tested before they go out into the marketplace. Just having some kind of availability for the cannabis industry to be able to test the quality of these on a regular basis would be, I think, an ideal direction for the industry to move in regards to self-regulation.  And that's one thing I really like about working with BioSource Botanicals is that that is their entire mindset. They want to deliver the highest quality, highest effectiveness products into the market.

Kirk: Wonderful. I've sort of ticked off my boxes of questions. Sort of moving to the end here. Is there any questions we did not ask you that you expected from us? Is there any knowledge you want to share that we didn't touch on?

Dr. Abe Benavides: I guess one of the thing is that we're talking about the mitochondrial thing. And this is kind of this is a new idea of mitochondrial dysfunction. And how that is essential to, well, it is a forming theory about how that's essential to chronic and neurodegenerative diseases. So the I guess our idea is that by having as many natural cannabinoids and terpenoids and flavonoid components as possible, along with the other good stuff that's in there, we can target mitochondria better and hopefully take on more of a preventative role than treat, just treat the sick people role. So hopefully it can be part of people's overall wellness and you know, with projections of like dementia being like a risk of like two and five now after age 55, the demand and need for addressing that concern is going to be is already quite strong. It's going to only get stronger. And so I'm really excited to see how the science goes with these.

Brent Ristow: I'll just that I guess the one thing that I was curious about was your guy's perception or perspective on market regulation, self regulation, government regulation, anything like that. Just to ensure quality and consistent. I want the consumer to be able to purchase whatever the consumer wants to purchase, whether it's scientific or recreational. It doesn't really matter to me. But just having some thought about quality in the marketplace, I was curious about your guy’s perception on that.

Kirk: Well, I mean, we're health care professionals. I mean, we're exploring a medicine that is so foreign to our own intuition of knowledge. I mean, we were Trevor and I were taught that medicines, you know, he often says one substance, one element, and cannabis is this huge thing. So quality, of course, I mean, I as a nurse, I look at the social science, so I'm really curious and how people use cannabis medicinally recreationally and also the stigma of it. So yeah, to answer your question in a roundabout way, of course we're interested in quality. It's good that we have a legal marketplace in Canada so people can buy legal weed knowing what's in it as opposed to the silver gray market that's been around forever. People buying weed from people that, you know, you've known forever and you know that they're doing a good product. But from a consumer's basis, we don't know what's in that product. So I guess as a nurse, I'm about the quality and I'm interested in BioSource Botanicals because you guys are you guys are taking a little different than you're really focusing on the acid form and mitochondrial health, that that's what sparked my interest. But of course, you know, understanding weed deep enough to know that your consumption isn't going to harm you, so enjoy your consumption, but try to do it respectfully and try to do it responsibly. I don't know if I answered your question Brent, but that's sort of our premise is that we're looking at cannabis as health professionals. We do have masters as, as Dr. Abe has discovered. Sometimes the masters come up, go, what are you doing? So, so we have to be able to demonstrate that I'm applying nursing practice to my research of cannabis. So I hope I answered your question.

Brent Ristow: Yeah, yeah, you did. And that's kind of what I was thinking. Like, there's kind of two perceptions of the cannabis industry. One is of treating it just like the pharmaceutical industry where you're chopping up the plant and these individual chemicals and then going on to synthesize them and industrial scale or farming and isolating at an industrial scale, but then isolate, processing them, isolating them and then mixing them up individually, that that's the classic pharmaceutical model of drug development and discovery. And in that sense, then you have labs doing quality, you know, residual solvents and purities degradation, and you're doing long term storage studies to determine degradation of that kind of to determine quality of that. That's the classic pharmaceutical model of it. And eventually, in my mind, the United States is going to move towards kind of like in Minnesota, you might have a lab that does testing. You send your product there, it's tested, you get some certification and you're allowed to then continue into the market. But I would prefer like the other idea of it instead of the old pharmaceutical model is the botanical model. The natural model where you extract from the plants, you formulate your products, you're doing it in a controlled environment. You're you're meeting certain quality standards in that sense. So you're mirroring the pharmaceutical industry in that sense. But then you send your products for testing and then you release. I mean, these are food products, these are natural compounds. That's what I would like to see. But myself, I wouldn't buy anything from a marketer of a CBD or cannabis product that didn't have a CofA, or wasn't just openly disclosing their processes and methodologies. And that's why I really like what Bob has set up at BioSource Botanicals is just fully open, disclosing all of that and really trying to be rigorous with the quality and research. But that's what I would like to see people do in the industry. But, you know, the market will drive itself there eventually, I think.

Kirk: No, I agree with that. And we have interviewed Big Pharma and it is fascinating to get deep down in how big pharma views cannabis, because think about it. I mean, think about the poor doctor sitting there. And if you know a little bit about cannabis or you know a lot about. You got a medicine, a raw form of a flower, depending on where you pick the flower on the plant, depending on the soil the plant was built in, depending on the, you know, the cultivar of the plant, you'll get these cannabinoids. Now, depending on when you harvest the plant, did you harvest the plant young? Did you harvest the plant old? So I can see how Western medicine goes what are we doing with this plant medicine. Right.

Brent Ristow: Because yeah, it's. But it makes sense. Anybody who's ever drink a glass of wine knows that wine cultivated in different elevations and areas and soils have different things that taste different. You know, that's just what is expected.

Kirk: Just think about water tasting water in Victoria versus tasting water in Dauphin. The water we drink taste differently. And I can remember being a young man growing up on the west coast of British Columbia with some of the best water in the world, apparently. Right. And drinking it and learning that water tastes differently. Going well, how does water taste differently? And of course, you just have to travel the world to figure out the water tastes differently. So, no, it's a fascinating plant. And I, too, like the fact that you go onto the BioSource Botanical web page and all your research is there. You're transparent in what you're providing. And, you know, that's why we're going to move people that way, are our listeners, you know. So, yeah, I appreciate your question about our view of it, but also we're also asking recreational cannabis users, what do they get from cannabis? So it's a fascinating plant. It truly is.

Brent Ristow: Yes, absolutely. And they're working with BioSource Botanicals is honestly, like I said, I spent some time about a decade in the pharmaceutical industry and I was a graduate professor, a graduate researcher at UW Stout, just a graduate faculty member. And that was always my mentality that you can take these small molecules and, you know, chop up the plant and isolate a molecule, deliver it into the system and get an effect. But when you the pharmaceutical industry, you watch TV at night, you see all the disclaimers. You stick a small molecules into a complex. The human body has trillions and trillions and trillions of chemical reactions taking place right now. That's an incredibly complex system. And you dump one single molecule into that system that is not native to it and you will imbalance that system. And bad things happen. And they're just they just want you to just be right above the threshold of acceptance of the bad stuff. And that's what they think of you out there in the pharmaceutical world, its tragic.

Kirk: I always say doctors practice medicine, and if I have a slightly elevated blood pressure, I'll be put on to a pharmaceutical to control the blood pressure. But then clients don't realize that that pill comes with its own side effects. So you may be controlling blood pressure, but you might be affecting your ability to climb a mountain, you know? So, yeah, so it's the pharmaceutical industry. I mean, it saved my life with antibiotics. Thank you very much. But there are there are medicines out there, medicines out there that. I don't know. I mean, I think I've come to understand that cannabis. I think cannabis should be moved into a class 1 or 2 when it comes to pain management. I've seen and felt cannabis helping with pain. So but the pharmaceutical company is not going to move forward until companies like yourselves come out with the research and evidence that it's working.

Brent Ristow: Yeah, that's what's so difficult is, you know, getting the funding for the research and getting the research done. It's incredibly difficult because it's almost like the snake oil salesman in the Old West movies and the back of the wagon, that's kind of the industry right now. People are just chopping stuff up. Not that there's not good operators out there I don't want to disparage an entire industry. There's obviously good operators, but you see a lot of the madness out there where people are just cobbling stuff together in the back of their wagon and trying to get you to ingest it. And it's that's dangerous. So that's what I like about BioSource is exactly what you said there. That's not their mentality. They're spending a lot of time and effort to build a high quality team to get this research done and, you know, help drive these health products forward.

Dr. Abe Benavides: I've been on board the whole plant extracts well before I met Bob and the rest of the team. As I was doing all of my research, writing and my medical reviewing. The chemicals and Oracle, I had found that the whole plant extract is the way to go. Isolates have such a little activity and so I started using that with my patients and just got much better results than when they try that horrible gas station CBD or this isolate or this other stuff. And sometimes people just, it's lack of education people take it once, think it's supposed to give them immediate effects. And I tell them no, really got to do twice daily for a couple reasons. Got to keep up with it. Support your endocannabinoid system, change these receptors that are really resistant, really stubborn to change.  Just have the CBD and the other cannabinoids build up in your system so that over time you'll just feel better. And so it's a long term thing. Some people ask me if I'm going to be on this forever, you know, and that I'm like, Well, it depends on the condition you have. If you have a chronic condition, then it's probably going to be maintenance. If it was that you broke your arm and you just need a little more THC for a while, that's a totally different story. But, you know, it depends. You really got to understand where people are coming from and their preferences. And that's that's part of the beauty of my work.

Kirk:  Daniel

Daniel Gana Yeah, well, I don't have any questions for you. I just want the people to know that we are producing more and more information on educational content every week. We want them to go to our website and see what we are on to every week.  See what's new information have for them. One good thing about whole plant botanicals is the fact that we we believe the hemp plant has an energy. The hemp plant is coming with an energy. We don't really want to break off that energy. We want to transfer that energy to the receptors and then just get those energies to our cells and then make sure everything works appropriately in our bodies. That's where we are promoting the acidic cannabinoids. They are faster. They are more natural. And then it's almost impossible to have these manufactured in the laboratory. It is almost impossible to have the entirety, the unique combination of this plant to have them manufactured. Obviously, we don't want to play God with this plant. We want to use it the way nature intended. We want to make sure we have every molecule that it exists in the plant and then transport it to our bottles and from our bottles down to your mouth or to the skin and then from there to the receptors so we can have the maximum benefits of these plants. I look forward to see more people asking us questions about our work. Ask questions about what we do and then within our website to see what we're on to. And we are very transparent and we will love to see people interested in trying out our products in terms of clinical trials. In terms of lot of things we are open to seeing people trying it out. To see these claims that we have. Not just coming in because we want to sell a product, because we want to see people, because we tell them. We want to see people who have got mitochondria activated. We want to see people have their health back on us. Thank you.

Kirk: Thank you very much, gentlemen.  I appreciate meeting you all and I hope to meet you in the future.

Brent Ristow: Thank you, guys. Thank you. Kirk and Trevor for having us

Trevor: Kirk.

Kirk: Hey,.

Trevor: Acid forms of cannabis getting absorbed and or changed into other stuff.

Kirk: Yeah, that's still. That still is a mystery to me. My little nursing brain and pathophysiology. I get the mitochondria. I understand. I understand more about the mitochondria than I ever have since learning from BioSource and other guests we've had on the podcast and calcium channels. Oh my God man! Calcium. And then there are different types of calcium channels. And honest to God, it's deep, rich stuff and it's fascinating. But I still having difficulty understanding the raw cannabis. And maybe I just answer my question. Does it have to do with the CB one receptor cells versus how the mitochondria accepts raw cannabis over decarboxylated cannabis?

Trevor: Well, and Daniel does talk about it and they, they had a whole paper about it that, that Electric High paper that we talked about the last time we talked to some from BioSsource, which is Bob Hill episode number. I don't know if of my head Kirk might find that while I'm talking but yeah so the the the carboxylic group is a tail on the end of this really fatty cannabinoid so it makes it more water soluble, so easier to move around. Everything in the body is water. So moving around through water makes that easier. But as Daniel talks about, also makes it fit into the CB1 receptor differently. So he talks about. So in pharmacy school we talk about there being a receptor on some cell that you want. You know, let's go back to insulin like an insulin receptor. You know, insulin fits into the insulin receptor and we let sugar out of bloodstream into the cells. So lock and key, literally the insulin key goes and the receptor lock opens the door, let sugar in. So Daniel saying and probably not surprisingly, it's a little more nuanced than that. Not only do you want something to fit into the receptor, but how it fits in the receptor how and he called the pockets, how it fits into the pockets affects how they work. And Daniel is saying the acid group being still hooked on to the cannabinoid changes how it fits in changes, how it interacts with those pockets and so changes the effect you get at the end.

Kirk: Episode 123 Bob Hell in the Electric High. But also going back to the raw cannabis and Dr. Abe talked about how by prescribing raw cannabis, acid forms of cannabis with the flavonoids and the Terpenes all in there that the full spectrum raw plant is at the efficacy of the plant is better.

Trevor: Yeah. He was saying.

Kirk: Of the medicine.

Trevor: Yes. He was saying that you know people come to him with you know are there on hundreds of milligrams of CBD let's say and it's not working. And you know, not everybody, not all the time, but then some of them, he'll switch them to a full plant extract. So like you said, it's got some Terpenes, got some flavonoids and some acidic cannabinoids in them. And now he is down to, you know, 10mg or 20mg. And the patient are why you're decreasing my dose that much. Well, just trust me. Try it. Let's you know like everything else in medicine that start low or go slow and he finds when the CBD is part of the Entourage Effect of everything else, he gets more effect with a way lower dose.

Kirk: So fascinating stuff. Kind of changes the whole kind of changes, the whole way of looking at cannabinoid medicine in the sense of how the industry has tinctures out there that are made different ways. It's it's all rather interesting. It's all fascinating. Some of the products, I guess, you know, we should look at some of their products here in the sense of when you go to their web page Biosourcebotanicals.com. It's a very transparent page. You can meet the team. They have their lab results up there. They call it shopping wellness. And currently they have three products up. They have and we talk about this, the active spectrum extract Cold Sore Rescue, the active spectrum Relief Bomb and the active spectrum Rest and Relax tincture. And if I if I if I heard the story correctly, what I like about what they're doing is that. All of these products have the C of A's attached, and now they're doing the research on on what they believe these products can do. They're actually tracking as they as people buy this stuff.

Trevor: Yeah. And just to highlight one of them, the Cold Sore Rescued, did I name that right? You know, who doesn't either have cold sores or know someone with cold sores? They are a common affliction across the world. So if they've got a product that literally makes you have a cold sore less or less often or go away faster. That's huge. That's something. You know, it's not you know, it's not, you know, saving life and limb. Maybe not, but, you know, having a gooly on your lip is not a whole lot of fun. So if we can make that go away faster or not show up at all, that really helps people's quality of life.

Kirk: Yeah. On the web page, they also and in the conversation, we also talked a lot about CBG, CBGA and again, it's interesting, we've had other people and one of our favorite quotes that we've heard is that CBG is the bubble bubble wrap for my brain. And here are some experts that are actually studying and going, Yeah, CBGA is amazing stuff. If you go to their web page, you can go to our web page, it'll be link there. They have blogs. Are they keep you as a customer of theirs or even just as a cannabis enthusiast. They keep you up to date with the research they're doing with their blogs. So it's it's a look, it's an ethical company working in a plant medicine world and trying to do it, following all the best, best. What's the word?

Trevor: Practices?

Kirk: Guidelines I guess.

Trevor: Yeah no I agree.

Kirk: Yeah. Was a cool exercise. I'm so glad we got to meet these people and I hope we go forward with them and have keep up to date with what the research they're doing.

Trevor: Absolutely.

Kirk: So thank you very much. Thanks for the guys for having the patience to talk to us. And we're Reefer Medness - The Podcast. I'm Kirk Nyquist I am the registered nurse.

Trevor: I'm Trevor Shewfelt. I'm the pharmacist. It was great to talk to you. The guys from BioSource, like you mentioned last time, we've mentioned before, they were literally on three different continents. You know, isn't Zoom amazing? It really is. Like, you know, how else would you do this pre zoom?

Kirk: Yeah, yeah.

Trevor: We'd have to have a private plane. Maybe we should still get a private plane. But anyway, that was that was a great chat. I learned a lot. Yeah. I hope they they keep us up to date on what they're doing down the road.

Kirk: Go to our web page. Our web page is growing. We're putting a whole bunch of new educational stuff up in there. We call it CannaBits Cannabites. They're small little tidbits of information about cannabis that you can you can get without spending a whole lot of time. You can grab the information and go away and come back and grab the information and go away and it's real quick. So yeah, check that web page out there and tell a friend.

Trevor: Another good one everybody make sure you come back.